Each year I like to make Christmas gifts for my friends and family. I wanted to document these projects like I do my others. Some of the pieces were easier than others so I thought a combined page covering all the items would work out the best. I already published the elephant in the room, the puzzle table. That project took almost all my time and really put my feet to the fire to get the rest of the gifts made.
The Fancy Vase
Sometimes I find some pretty cool things when I go thrifting. In this case I found a cool looking porcelain vase at a thrift store with a carry out price of $25. I wish there was two of them. The problem with the vase is that there was some kind of yellow sticky residue all over the vase. I couldn’t figure out what it was but it seriously detracted from the beauty of this piece. I tried using acetone to remove the residue but that didn’t have any effect. I ended up using a razer blade and gently scrapped at the vase until the residue was gone. I probably spent about 2 hours scraping the four sides. The curved area around the throat and mouth of the vase were much harder to clean because each scrap barely covered any surface area. I bet it was about another hour to get that area done. The finished product is amazingly bright.
Blue Bird
I wanted to make a little something for a friend of ours and I took my inspiration from a hand carved blue bird I saw on Amazon. We have a community burn pile in the neighborhood and there is always a variety of material waiting for the next burn cycle. As you can imagine a lot of yard and tree debris is discarded via the burn pile. I cut off a section of a large oak branch as the base of the blue bird project. I don’t have a picture of that but the branch was about 3 to 4 inch diameter. I used my angle grinder with a sand paper pad to remove all the bark and to create the basic shape of the bird’s head, wing line and tail. After my rough sanding and carving. I transitioned to a Dremel tool using a rotary sanding bit. Using a Dremel tool saved my hands from cramping and allowed me to refine the overall shape so that it did actually resemble a bird. From there I cut out the beak, hand sanded and painted the bird. I think it turned out nicely.
The Sand Piper
This was one of my favorites out of the batch. I took my inspiration for this piece because our water level in the lake is down and when this happens we get a sort of sandy beach. Various types of shore birds start coming around when there is a beach. I wanted to capture that with this project. I started with a chunk of 2×4 board. I used my band saw to cut out the basic shape and then used my angle grinder with the sanding pad to refine the shape of the bird. At some point I reverted to hand sanding and spent several hours sanding into the final shape. At the end of the process I had produced a bird, but not the bird I wanted. I decided to chuck this version and start over. I also wanted to mention that earlier I had spotted a cool looking tree trunk in the burn pile and decided to cut segments from the rotten trunk for later projects. I’ll introduce it here because I’ll end up using it later.
The second bird pretty much started the same way, from a 2×4 section. I used a different inspiration picture. I just didn’t like the shape of the previous bird. It looks unnatural. I think using an actual photo of the bird resulted in a much better design. I used the same tools starting from band saw to get the basic shape, to the angle grinder for extremely fast standing, to hand sanding and painting. I used welding wire from Tractor Supply store to fabricate the legs and I used a piece from the raw tree sections to make the base.
Hydro Dipped Flask
The last project I completed was a hydro dipped flask I made for my wife to match the wine goblets I made for her a few years prior. The process is pretty simple and only requires a tub of water and spray paints. You can find instructional videos on YouTube covering how to hydro dip anything. I was really happy with my original project but the flask didn’t quite hit the mark. I’m not sure if I did something different or if I just used too much white or grey paint. Take a look at my original and the flask.
As you can see the flask has too much white and it also ended up having a rough surface. Like I said, I’m not sure why it came out that way but that’s how it goes sometimes with these kinds of projects. Enjoy the ones that work out and maybe try again on ones that don’t.