Small Spalted Maple Canister

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Here is a small canister made with that nice spalted Maple wood I've been writing about. It's just under 3 inches tall and a little over 1.5 inches wide with a friction fit lid. This piece of wood looks like marble. Real stone marble. Nice that I can make stuff out of little pieces of this wood.

Larger Spalted Maple Bowl

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What an amazing looking piece of wood! I think this is my largest bowl so far. (I have what's called a "mini-lathe". The largest bowl I can turn is 10 inches.) This one's a little over 6 inches across and a little over 4 inches deep. I'm limited by the size of the blanks I can cut, which up 'til now weren't very big. I've been super-lucky that I got all this spalted Maple and it literally fell in my yard . . . free! So the "cost" of all the work I put into cutting it up and preparing it are well worth it. I mean, damn, look at that wood!

Another Spalted Maple Bowl

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Yes, yet another spalted Maple bowl. Sorry for the poor quality of the photos.
I have a big Silver Maple tree in my yard. A few years ago we had this tree trimmed away from the house, and that involved some pretty big branches. I saved a 3 foot long section of a nine inch thick log from that job. It sat under that tree until now . . . actually, a little too long. It was on the ground, which allowed the termites to get at it. This wood was actually sitting on a pile waiting to be burned. I thought it was a lost cause. On a whim, I took a saw to it just to see how bad the insect damage was. To my surprise, there was a lot more log untouched by the insects than I thought. The spalting inside was incredible! I had to save some of this wood. I ended up cutting that entire log up into bowl sized blocks with a hand saw! I couldn't get my chainsaw started. I ended up with about a half dozen bowl blanks and some other smaller pieces that might end up as canisters or boxes.
I made this bowl with my three new lathe tools that I made myself. A medium size and a small round carbide tipped gouge and also a medium square one. They work great. And I don't have to sharpen them!
The spalting in this wood is more extensive than the last batch I had (from the same kind of tree but the wood was way older and almost rotten). The wood was in better shape  than the last batch; not as punky (soft and crumbly, kind of spongey). The piece of wood I used to make this bowl had some minor insect damage in it, but it's barely noticeable. To me this looks like a cross between wood and marble. Even close up, it looks like some kind of stone.
Expect to see a few more items made with this cool looking wood.

Scrap Box Challenge: Sculpture

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This is an Art blog so I guess there should be something like art in it from time to time. So, here we go.
In my shop I have an overflowing box of small wood scraps. These are the small bits of cut-off that look interesting enough to save as use in art projects. Since that box is overflowing, I recon it's high time I made something from this stuff. Heck, that's what it's for!
So, that one big piece, which in the photo is that oddly shaped piece that is the neck and torso, got the idea going. A stylized horse? A psychedelic giraffe? You decide. It's made from seven pieces of wood with very few, or no, cuts or modifications to any of the pieces. Some of the wood was already partially painted. I added a few shots of spray paint. Threw on a padded drawer liner for a stencil (for that checkered effect) and gave it a couple more shots of spray paint, and we're done. This thing is about 24 inches high, 12 inches long and about 3 inches wide.

Bandsaw Box #2

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Here is a band saw box made from plywood scraps. The box measures 5.25 inches high, 5 inches wide and 3.25 inches deep. I had a lot of small pieces of very nice plywood scraps, some with veneers, some Baltic Birch plywood, all of various thickness. I stacked six or seven pieces and glued them together. Then I cut out the drawers, then hollowed them. Then I glued the drawers back together and sanded everything. I turned a couple of Mahogany knobs for the drawer pulls, and added green flocking to the drawer interiors.

Small Douglas Fir Box

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The bottom part of this box was the very first bowl I turned, about six months ago. It's made of Douglas Fir; not a good choice for turning a small bowl. The tree rings are very hard and the space between the is pretty soft. It came out pretty clunky looking because, at the time, I didn't have a bowl gouge yet.
Anyway . . . I thought, now that I'm better at this craft, I should re-turn this bowl . . . smooth out the inside, make the walls a little thinner. I took another piece of Douglas Fir and made a lid to fit. The finial knob is mahogany. Green flocking on the inside of the bowl and the lid.