Centerpieces - (Spalted) Elm with Walnut Bowties

Photo Credit: Uttke Photography & Design

I was lucky enough to get married to the most wonderful person in the world. While this post is not really about how wonderful she is (answer: quite), it is about how she was able to pull these awesome centerpieces together. Between her and the florist, Milwaukee Flower Co., they came up with all of the awesome stuff you see above (as photographed by the indescribably spectacular TJ and Shannon Uttke. Go to their website, give them your money, have them photograph your things. You won't regret it).

My job was to take care of the wood part.

Pictures/discussion after the jump

To be entirely honest, I’m not sure where the idea for using disks of tree trunk as bases for the centerpieces came from. In any case, we’ve got saws, so operating from a place of “how hard could it be?” we set out to make our own.

Step one: find a tree. Luckily, our family friends, the Noes, had a few downed trees that they said they wouldn’t mind donating to the cause.

Step two: chainsaw that tree into smaller, more manageable chunks. My brother-in-law, Chris, took care of this with a chainsaw. Thanks Chris.

Step three: chop them into disks. In the interest of trying to get them to be as close to flat as possible, we took the tree chunks to someone with a portable saw mill and paid for him to cut them for us.

Step four: dry them out. Wood needs to dry before it becomes practical to use for anything. Each one of these disks had a moisture content far above the highest tolerable level, so we needed them to dry. We stacked them up on sticks so there was airflow to facilitate drying.

Step five: Moderate the pace of drying. There’s a problem with drying wood. If it air dries too quickly, the internal stresses and (in the case of drying disks of a tree) and physical contraction of the wood can and does cause cracking, or checking. We painted each disk with a waxy substance, Green Wood Sealer. The Green Wood Sealer is supposed to slow the drying process to reduce the checking and cracking. It's commonly used with drying out bowl blanks for wood turning.

Step six: Wait.

Step seven: Flatten and plane. The wood mill guy did a pretty good job of squaring up the pieces for us, but it wasn’t perfect and it wasn’t smooth. So we had to finish the job with the planer. We built a sled that would allow us to shim the base to square up one face, then we could flip it over a square up the other side.

Problem, however, that waxy wood sealer did not play well with the rollers in the planer that grab wood and pull it through the machine. They required cleaning over and over again. I cannot recommend using the green wood sealer and running that piece through your planer.

Step eight: Looks like they checked anyway, so we needed to put bowtie keys across each of the cracks to prevent them from propagating across the disk and ultimately breaking it apart. This step is covered in much more depth in the post about bowtie keys, but I've got the pictures so why not slot em' in here?

1. Rout out space for key
2. Chisel the corners square

3. Cut bowtie

4. Insert bowtie

5. Repeat

6. Plane flush

7. REPEAT SOME MORE!

8. Profit?

Step nine: Finish. We used a few coats of spray lacquer.

Mission accomplished.