Tag: Homemade Gifts

Making Little Stuff Around the House

/ Matt Talley / Leave a comment

I have been remiss in posting for the last couple of weeks – my J-O-B has been sort of nuts and I have been trying to stay on top of things and stay employed 🙂 I have been putting around in the shop here and there at night before and after dinner though.  Recently I have completed:

  1. A salt cellar for my wife made from scrap red and white oak because I was tired of seeing the IKEA glass dish on the table.
  2. A jar lid or two for the kitchen.
  3. There have been a couple of honey dippers for turned gifts.
  4. Specifically for my wife, I made rolling pins for fettuccine and ravioli pasta (or pie crust if my sweet bride happened to want to bake me a lattice top apple pie…)  We had a friend who is a food blogger come over that LOVED them and I think that I am going to do one or two for her as well.
  5. I added some wood-bling to a plunger handle – Why have mass-produced stuff sitting around like everyone else when 8 minutes of lathe time and a little oil/wax turns the mundane into the custom.
  6. A glass bottle cutter so I can take the pile of bottles we generate and make candle covers, tumblers, and glass funnels for my wife and for Christmas gifts.  It was a non-specific request from her that has won me brownie-points.
  7. A book shelf made from a small 1931 cast-iron lathe and a hunk of reclaimed barn/house beam from here in France.  I cleaned both the beam and lathe up a little, added a little stain to the wood, light sanding, and a coat of poly.  I mortised in a couple of reclaimed oak runners to serve as feet and the keep the ends of the beam from splitting.  The lathe was then bolted down and I added one of my bowls to give the books a proper purchase.  The tool rest is turned and mounted on the other side to keep the books upright.  I think it looks awesome and everyone who have come over in the last month has either asked where I got it of how I thought of it.  Make my ego swell a bit….

 

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Cutting trees down and making stuff

/ Matt Talley / 1 Comment

Shortly after we moved into La Maison du Talley, we cut 21 trees out of the backyard. There was only one serious tree – a 40′ cedar – and the rest were smaller Bay Laurels and Vine Maples that were blocking any possibility of sunlight reaching the ground. I kept some of the larger, straighter sections of the small trees and put them in the loft of the garage to dry and season, hoping that I would eventually make stuff out of them. That was three and a half years ago and while spring cleaning in the garage/shop this weekend I decided to take a little break and mess stuff up again 🙂 I pulled a couple of sections down and cut them to manageable size with the chop saw. I knew exactly what to do with pieces.

We have a neighbor who is crazy helpful and has a passion for dahlias. He grows and shares them with the whole street and has helped Stamps-With-Foot litter the edges of the yard and flower beds with them. She loaned him the bulb planter early this spring and he loved it. He had somehow gone through life as a gardener and just never tried one. I decided to make him his own with graduated depth gauge marks and a matching mallet to drive it into the odd patch of hard ground. The planter is made from a section of the vine maple and the mallet is turned from a hickory Little League baseball bat that I bought for $2.00 at Goodwill. The maple was super-dense and I counted 21 very tight growth rings on it. It grew in the shade under larger trees for all that time and that made it an especially hard and nice piece of wood to turn with sharp chisels – the wood shavings and tailings came off in long, thin, lace-like strips. An absolute pleasure to work with.

Since I was making sawdust already, I decided to keep going: The wife and I are planning to make some/most of our Christmas gifts this year. I have already started and added a few mallets for the woodworkers in my life (I am not spoiling the surprise – none of them read this blog…). I also turned a garden mallet for Stamp-With-Foot from a section of Laurel tree (her name-sake). I added the burned striped bands at her request after she saw her’s beside the others and got mallet-envy.

Just before my wife stomped out to the shop and MADE me come in for the night, I took a hunk of red oak that I have had for 10+ years and turned a couple of fancy door-stops. Since we live in a house built in 1928, the doors have a mind of their own and a well placed wedge keeps a person from walking into the edge of a door in the middle of the night. I will add some tung oil and a few coats of satin poly this week to finish them up.