Surprise

Hi all,
Christmas is well and truely behind us now, where the hell did those two weeks go? It only seems like a few minutes ago that I was beavering away trying to get some surprise presents turned for my wife.

So what did I make her? Well, her main present was a box with a surprise inside. Here is athe outside of the box which is turned from a 3 inch square of lime. I carved the heart and then textured around it with my pyrography iron using a stippling method. Here's the top view. I know I'm an old romantic, but what can I do.

Inside I wanted to give her a surprise, so here it is.

A bumble bee in a box. You don't see many of those about. The bee is turned and carved from lime. It has wire for legs and wings made from a plastic tomato box. He is resting on the centre portion, or seed head of the poppy and he is well and truely fixed with epoxy glue, so he won't be coming out in a hurry.

I think it is a reasonable try for my first attempt. I might do another and make the bee smaller and more refined, but that will have to wait until I have some time and the weather warms up a bit. At the moment my workshop is colder than a penguin's pecker so I'm not getting anything done.

By the way, I was worried that when my wife opened the box that she might get a shock and chuck the thing up in the air, but she didn't. In fact she was quite overcome at the efforts that I'd gone to for her and it bought a tear to her eyes.

I did also make a few bits of  wooden jewelry for her and I'll show you them in may next post because if the weather doesn't improve I won't have anything new to show you..

I leave you with another picture of the bee in a box.