Stained vase

Hi all, to make a change from pots and pens I thought I'd have ago at turning another vase. I would be using stains again like I did on my last vase, but instead of mixing the colours up, like in the vase below, I would keep them separate.

I would also change the shape to make it bottom heavy. And before you ask. no it isn't hollowed out because my skills don't run that far. I have drilled a token hole in the top to show willing but my take on hollowing is that only woodturners are bothered about hollowing. Most people just want to look at the shape and the pattern, they are just not bother about wall thickness and the like.

Anyway, I turned the vase from a spindle of 3inch square sycamore and sanded it down to 400 grit. Then I  cut some rings around it with the tip of a skew chisel and used a wire to burn lines into the grooves that I made. Once I knew exactly what the shape would be I did some sketches on paper to work out a pattern. These were then burnt into the wood with my pyrography iron. It is important when burning the lines to go deep enough to create a seal between areas of different colour. I used chestnut stains for the colour and these can seep quite deeply into the wood. If you don't burn deep enough you will soon find that the edges between two colours will mix, blue and yellow for instance, will soon turn green and that doesn't look very nice.

I did the colours in a random way trying to make sure that the same colour didn't finish up in adjacent areas. Once the staining was done, I brushed on a coat of cellulose sanding sealer, which wasn't 100% successful because it made one or two of the colours run slightly into each other. Next time, I will use a spray on type of sanding sealer so not to repeat the mistake. I then let the sanding seal dry before giving it a couple of coats of Chestnut melamine lacquer to give it a bit of a shine.

I hope you like it, any comments would be appreciated. Next week I will be giving away another free book so please come back for that.