Bloodwood Pen

Bloodwood Pen

I got on the lathe a little while ago and turned a couple pens. This one is bloodwood with a titanium/gold trim hardware. I sanded it to 1500 grit and applied a CA finish. It's up for sale on Etsy, in case anyone's interested.

After the jump are a couple more pictures.

Bloodwood Nickel Pen

I've been turning a few pens recently. I'm doing it in no small part because it helps keep some rudimentary lathe skills sharp and also because unlike building complex furniture that takes days of labor, I can finish a pen in one work session. I had a small quantity of bloodwood leftover from my bed side stand, it's my all-time favorite wood to cut, and I thought, why not turn it into a pen. This is what I ended up with. More pictures after the jump.

Chessboard

I built this chessboard in 2007. The "black" squares are made of bloodwood, which has a naturally-occurring deep red color. The "white" squares are maple. The light border is also maple, and the dark wood framing the entire chessboard is walnut.

Bird's Eye Bedside Stand With Bloodwood Trim

This is a bedside stand  I made in 2009. I used bird's eye maple, unfigured maple, walnut, and bloodwood. I put six coats of finish on it. It took a silly amount of time to complete, but the end result is pretty striking.

This design is largely based off of the work of a famous woodworker named James Krenov. His style is elegant in its simplicity of form, but incorporates high levels of detail. In some sense, that's an oxymoron (a simple high level of detail), but if you take a moment to google image search his work, or look at examples on his website, you will immediately see what I mean. Wikipedia states it well:

"[Krenov] shun[ed] ostentatious and overly sculpted pieces, stains, sanded surfaces, and unbalanced or unproportional constructions. Krenov felt that details such as uniformly rounded edges, perfectly flat surfaces, and sharp corners remove the personal touch from a piece of furniture. His books extoll the virtues of clean lines, hand-planed surfaces, unfinished or lightly finished wood[...]."

The detail, to Krenov, is the wood itself. It is the grain pattern, the color, the contours.

Lots of pictures follow after the jump...