Wooden Coasters!

I think it might be black walnut that's not mature?

 I found some beautiful wood at the side of the road a few weeks ago, out for garbage pickup from someone pruning their trees. It's pretty hard to find nice fresh wood that isn't yet riddled with bugs, and still in whole logs and not chopped up like firewood. So with some help I brought a few good-sized ones home. A few days ago I started sawing them into slices, and from one log, I got some good sized coasters! The only thing is I'm scared about them cracking. They're new wood and haven't shrunk yet, and I don't have access to a  drying kiln. Hopefully they wont shrink/crack that much. I also start wood shop in a few days!  I'll finally be able to find out what I should do to prevent cracking!

Crafts

My initial intention was to make this blog a gardening and crafts blog. I seem to have become overtly obsessed with my gardening lately so it kind of took over. So I shall now add some craft posts since craft content is severely lacking. And by severely lacking, I mean nonexistent.

Anyhoo,

Yay craft!

These are a pair of candlesticks I made a few months ago for my mother for her birthday. It's from the same piece of wood as this:

A project I did for a course last semester at OCAD.

It's structure I built for my Time Based Media class. It's made out of a oak tree branch I found at the side of road from pruning, cut into sections with plywood boxes I built in between each section.
In the plywood boxes I cut and glued together plexiglass to make more boxes boxes to fit into the wood ones. The top and bottom ones with bundles of wires going through them, to look as if the wires run through the tree. In the middle box, there is a robotic-thing I made that when you push the 'on' switch, it spins two slices of the maple pretty fast.

I got a lot of use from that oak branch. I also made this for another class around the same time.

Close up

This was a self portrait for another class. Basically on each slice of oak there is an image that I've transferred on from old family photos and other shtuff I like. Each piece is held together with a thin loop of wool.

More crafts to come including some jewelry I'm selling! Hopefully my Etsy page will be up and running really soon.