Wood turning with intent ... ...

Normally when I turn wood I don't set out to make a specific thing, I tend to just see what happens, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't and sometimes I end up with a mess, or at least what looks like a mess at first glance.

One such occasion I wrote about in this post - potenstein (opens in new window) in the end things turned out okay.

This is what potenstein ended up looking like -

Metal and wood working together.

So I decided this time to actually try and make a piece that incorporated wood and another material, in this case some leather, now the last time I experimented it was because the pot I made started to crack and I thought I'd try and salvage it, this time however I set out to actually force the wood to do what I wanted, which in theory sounds easy, but not so, as I've come to discover every bit of wood behaves differently, even pieces cut from the same section will vary in the way they respond to being turned.

I decided to pick a piece of cypress for my experiment, mainly because it is the most predictable of the woods I have, even then it still has a mind of it's own, some bits crack others don't and so on.

Designing a piece of wood with a specific outcome is not really something I've done all that much of, I prefer to let the wood tell me what shape it wants to be (sounds corny, but there you go) even so I had an idea and I did do a few (very rough) sketches of what I wanted to make, so I set about turning a rough shape.

This is how it did look -

Any clues as to what I was trying to do ?

Another reason I picked cypress is because it has a nice grain pattern that I thought would emphasise what I was trying to make, at this point I was kind of hoping it would crack, only it didn't do what I wanted, which is typical really, you can bet if I'd wanted it to stay like this it wouldn't have.

I've finished it now and hopefully you can see what I was trying to do, some parts were a little more complicated than I first though, but from the responses of the few people that have seen it I think I've pulled it off.

The finished piece -

Can you guess what it is yet ?

It took me a while to figure out the best way to lace it up, and as I discovered it wasn't that easy, but it had to be done like this other wise it wouldn't have looked right, I did experiment with various lacing styles, but this one seems to suit it better.
All in all I'm quite pleased with how it turned out, although there are things I'll do differently for the next time I make one and for some of the other ideas I have I will have to adapt the method.

Thanks for reading.