Jun 19

Carved Octopus Bowl

Octopus bowl hand-carved from cherry firewood

This thing started out just as an excuse to 1) finally use my Xmas gifts from @tamarynart (an @arbortechie minicarver and bowl gouge) and 2) just carve something random outside from a chunk of cherry firewood I had lying around. I also used pretty much all of my @saburrtooth rotary burrs on this thing. It’s not the best thing I’ve carved – pretty lousy anatomical accuracy and the suckers aren’t nearly as detailed as I would have liked. But I just sort of sketched it as I went. After putting a couple weeks into it, I was ready to call it done. Overall, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out for a one-off bowl to hold the TV remotes in our “Lair”. 😂

Jun 04

Flower jewelry bowl from walnut

Flower jewelry bowl from walnut

I carved this little jewelry bowl from a walnut cookie I cut from a piece of firewood (found on the side of the road in my neighborhood). I made this on a whim just to have a little something to carve on while enjoying the weather. It’s intended as a temporary bowl for when @tamarynart takes off her earrings in the living room. Which is often.
Carved with a handful of chisels, gouges, and at least 6 different @saburrtooth burrs. I also did a fair bit of pyrography on it, but you can really only see it when you look closely. Finished with @odiesoil.

Jun 01

Power-Carved Walnut Bowl – Daniel D. Brown, 2018

For the final day of my “staycation” I decided to make a little bowl to go with table/book shelf I built this week. I had this hunk of walnut from a neighborhood tree (from which @tam_a_ryn also requested I make the drawer pull), that kept screaming at me to make into a bowl a la @dlwoodworking (his work blows me away, and is an order of magnitude finer and more complex. Go check him out). I power-carved it out with a @kutzall carving wheel on my @makitatools angle grinder and random orbital sander. Just a quick, fun, dirty, and utilitarian little project. Click on the instagram post below to see video on how it was made.

 

 

Mar 01

Locust Bowl – Daniel D. Brown, 2018

I really wanted to make something when I got home so I decided to finally make a shallow bowl I’ve been planning. We have a tiny basement bathroom & shower where I clean up after being covered in sawdust and grime. Every time I take everything out of my pockets to switch into/out of my shop clothes, I wish I had a bowl to put it all in. So this is a utilitarian bowl for above the toilet.
I acquired a bunch of free locust logs from a tree cut down in Squirrel Hill last summer, so I carved out the shallow bowl with an angle grinder and @kutzall shaping wheel, crudely hacked it from the log with my cheap chainsaw, ground the bottom shape, sanded until I couldn’t see through the air, used a router and my flattening jig to flatten the bottom, branded the bottom, and finished it with some @generalfinishes Arm-R-Seal. It would look a lot fancier if I had a lathe. But I’m pretty happy with it for a couple hours of just playing with tools.
I fully anticipate that it will eventually crack. It was a big log and it’s only been drying in my basement for like 9 months. It seemed pretty dry inside, but I know it hasn’t been long enough for that thickness. When it does I’ll just make a better one.