18" Danggai Magnetic Knife Strip

Another knife strip out the door, this one to D.C. This is made from danggai (kingiodendron). I took a couple pictures to try to highlight the spectacular wavy, complex, grain in this rare wood.

I have a limited supply of danggai left, but knife strips are available for purchase on Etsy

Black Poisonwood Dice Tray with Green Felt

Note the continuing grain pattern

This is another dice tray, this time the standard 3" side, 6 1/4" diameter, octagonal dice tray. They're available on Etsy.

This is made from black poisonwood, which is also known as chechen or Caribbean rosewood, that is finished with Formby Tung Oil and given a dark green felt lining. A gentleman in Germany messaged me to request this, and I was happy to oblige. Working with the exotic woods is a lot of fun. I'm pleased with how this turned out as I was able to make the dice tray from one piece of material, so you can see the grain pattern continuing the entire way around the tray. The picture above shows how the grain follows around the sides of the tray.

19 mm dice

Magnetic Knife Strip Gallery

12" Danngai (Kingiodendron)

Over the few years I've been doing this I've scattered posts on knife strips all over this blog. I wanted to consolidate pictures in a central location, so they're after the jump:

Also, I currently have a couple for sale on Etsy, walnut, danggai, and purpleheart.

Dice Tray

Let your geek flag fly

The guy who I built this wine rack for commissioned me to build him a dice tray, which, I learned is a enclosure for containing rolled dice. It's used in tabletop gaming, and it turns out that there are lots of places that sell these things. This one is made of a tropical wood called black poisonwood, or chechen, and the bottom is lined in red felt. More info after the jump.

Black Poisonwood, or, Chechen

Finished with gloss polyurethane

This is a material called Chechen, but it also goes by Black Poisonwood, which is an order of magnitude more badass, so we're gonna go with that.

Brief post on the material after the jump with limited pictures. I plan to get a few better pictures to update the post with (when I do, then I'll delete this note).

Magnetic Knife Strips for Sale: 2.1 - Birdseye, Danggai, and Marblewood

Alongside Magnetic Knife Strip 2.0, I now have version 2.1, which is largely the same as 2.0, just made from different, more exotic materials. Also, I'm selling them on the etsy. Check out the storefront here.

Pics and descriptions of the materials after the jump.

Misc. Exotic Woods

I was at a woodworking store the other day and just perused the lumber area to snap a few pics to put up since I recently posted about how diverse wood colors and appearances can be. I haven't worked with most of these, and most are really expensive.

After the jump are a bunch of pics....

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...