Leading into this past Christmas season, I received an unusual request from someone who contacted me on my Etsy shop. She wanted to send me the legs to a dining chair that was meaningful to the family, and then have me cut them up to create ornaments that she could give as gifts to members of the family. After confirming some details, like the fact that I don't have power tools and would only really be able to create cross-sections of the legs with a handsaw, we agreed on the transaction, and she mailed me the legs. I don't know what kind of wood the legs were made of, but it was harder than I had hoped, making it time-consuming to create the dozen pieces she requested. Compounding that difficulty was the fact that the legs were tapered on all sides, so I didn't have a good way to make sure my cuts were perpendicular to the axis of the chair. I ended up using a lot of my left hand to hold the legs in position as I sawed with my right. Here's a shot of the set-up I was using: You can see that I have a mitre box sitting loose on my desk, so I had a couple of bar clamps to hold it down. Unfortunately, with the leg sticking out the left side, I couldn't put a clamp on that side. You can also see that I'm cutting at a 45 degree angle here. She said that simple cross-sections was sufficient for most of the ornaments, but she wanted two of them to be more special. Since the outer finish on the wood was different from the inside, and the outside had the grooves on two sides, I determined that I couldn't readily embellish them on the outer surface, so it would have to be done on the face. The legs were fairly small, so, in order to give myself more working room on the face, I decided to cut these two at 45 degree angles. Here are the results of my basic cuts: You'll notice the holes in the tops of each. (Yes, a hand drill is the one piece of powered equipment I have.) Well, again, without a proper workshop and tools, I had to get more creative with this process too. This is what that looked like: Chip carving is obviously my specialty and what I'm comfortable with, so I attempted a practice piece with the wood to see if that would work for the embellishment. Between the wood being hard and carving into the end grain, chip carving was not working well. But I've also been working on learning kolrosing, which is more decorating wood by creating and filling in grooves with a knife rather than removing pieces. So I gave that a shot on the same practice piece. The result was a little fainter than I'd like, but I determined that it would work for my purposes. This shows the abandoned-chip-carving-turned-kolrosing: So then all that was left was to come up with a design, carve it, and apply a finish to the pieces. In order to alleviate the faint lines, I ended up running the knife through the cuts twice to get them deeper. The embellished carving is below. (Manz is the family name.) So it was definitely a new and interesting venture. I charged less than would otherwise be appropriate since I didn't really know what I was doing or how it would turn out, but that's how it goes when you start something new. My wife enjoyed laughing at me as I worked up a bit of a sweat sawing through all of these pieces with my mitre box clamped to my desk! And I was glad to be able to help create something meaningful for that lady and her family.
Oh, and if you're wondering about the "cinnamon" part of the title, that's what I used in the kolrosing to make the design dark.
1 Comment
1/6/2020 07:26:03 am
Your determination was clear, Damon! Way to go. I'm sure your customer was pleased and you were glad to finish this project.
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