Piece of Cedar

Not having much else to blog about lately, I am electing to write about a little project that has really kept me fascinated recently. I find every piece of wood I work with to be interesting. Each one has something to be said for it--color, grain, burl, texture, whatever. One piece of wood has really captured my interest these past days, and it came from my own back yard!

A couple of years ago, I trimmed some trees in the back yard, including cleaning up some storm damage. We have a dozen or so scrub cedar trees along one border of our yard. These are of the type very commonly found growing wild in the countryside and in our ditches. I know my grandmother and step-grandfather used to cut small ones for use as their Christmas trees. They aren't always very eye-catching. Their needles can be kind of grey, and their shapes can be very random. When they are large enough, however, the wood can be quite interesting. Hence, the fascination for me.

While I was trimming the trees, I set aside a length of one of the cedar branches. It was about eight inches in diameter and about four feet long, so I thought that if it dried well without cracking too much, it might turn out to be a reasonable piece to turn on my lathe. Since then, I had pretty much forgotten about it. Then last week, I was doing a little straightening up in my garage and came upon it again. It seemed quite dry, so I took it down to my shop. I cut the log into two lengths, one of which you can see here. The tree has a bark that is quite stringy and which pulls off in strips.

The interior of the logs is always very red (really, almost pink) surrounded by a very, very white wood. They have that familiar cedar smell to them, especially when the wood has dried and is then cut. Branches that emanate from the trunk or a larger branch have their own red core, surrounded by white. So, where that occurs, you get the red color radiating outward. You can see this in the picture above, where a small branch was trimmed from this larger one.

I mounted one of the lengths of the saved log on my lathe, centering the turning points at the very middle of the red core on each end. After the initial roughing gouge work, I had the log reduced to an essentially cylindrical shape. Again, you can see one place where a small branch emanated from this larger one.

Continuing on, I knew that where I created thinner sections, I would expose the red core, and where I left it thicker, some of the white perimeter portion would show. I ended up using about 10" of the piece to make this little lamp. Later, I used the rest to make a couple of wine bottle stoppers.

Today, I bought the necessary parts for the harp (supports the shade), a shade, and the wiring. Here is what it looks like when lit.

I turned it off and took a flash picture also, so that you can see the colors of the wood in the base a little better.
And here is one of the wine bottle stoppers.