From the Workbench: Woodspeak

From the Workbench...


I will always maintain that if you wait long enough, the wood will tell you what it wants to be. This strikes most as pure gibberish; but you know what they say: "If ya gotta ask, you just wouldn't understand..."

Every piece of wood, no matter how similar, is as unique as a fingerprint. Woodgrain is never repeated in nature, not once. For even the novice woodworker, we discover early on that there is an inherent beauty to each piece, be it the caramel striping one often finds in pine or how the grain achieves an effect, and often the very illusion, of running water.

For burning purposes, I've used a wide variety of species over the years and I do have my favorites. For the fairly high-detailed burns such as Marilyn and The Smith, I've come to favor a 1/4-inch birch laminate plywood. As you can see from especially the earlier pics, these provide a very clean surface, reducing almost any need to have to plan and work around surface defects. The birch also takes a burner nicely. It is also inexpensive, which I also find a bonus. Basswood, which I actually do prefer owing to its softer qualities, will run you quite a bit more. I've also found polar to be a very cooperative wood as well.

Hands down, most of my burnings have ended up on pine. Comparatively speaking, it's fairly inexpensive and can be found virtually anywhere. It tools very well with a burner, though (being pine) it frequently serves you up some challenges when it comes to layout and "letting the wood tell you" what will happen here.

These two pieces of stock are waiting in the work queue. The bottom piece measures 48" long and is roughly 22" wide. From a woodburner's perspective, it's ugly, like "he's so ugly it's like his face caught fire and they beat it out with a shovel." That kinda ugly. The big knots you see are one of 3 bands of those big bad boys that stripe this panel side-to-side. Further, it's rife with patches of pitch and a bluish mold I've heard referred to a "pasture pine." Personally, I've found "pasture pine" to be quite striking, but when it comes to burning it, it's helpful to remember that it burns darker (and more quickly) than the wood around it. In short, you're still likely to see it through the finished burn.

Were it not for the larger panel's edges, I'd be less pleased with the prospect of working it. As it is, I'm looking forward to it. It is, in fact, not a "panel" at all, but a single board with "live edge" sides, meaning the wood on both sides of this board had been on the outside of the tree. These boards can make stunning furniture, which is where this one is destined. Farmer Dave has plans to turn this one and its sister board into tables. Knowing full well just how talented a woodworker Dave is, and how mint this table will be when he's done with it, I have to come up with something that won't detract.

The smaller of the two boards pictured is a panel and presents some challenges of its own. The dark, heavy stripe comes from the heartwood of the tree and you will see it when whatever you burn over it is done. As it is too large to be ignored, it really has to be incorporated into the burning itself, along with that fairly pronounced knot next to it.

When I look at a panel with, especially a variety of knots and defects, I pretty much already know it's going to end up as a forest scene. As themes go, such scenes are as perfect as it gets to incorporate what nature won't let you escape. In this vertical orientation (my original thought), I was thinking a whitetail deer buck. The heartwood stripe could then be easily swallowed into the bark of a tree next to/slightly behind the deer. I have opted against this, since the rack of the buck's antlers would have to pass over the terminus of the heartwood and still have enough space to be represented beneath the top edge. Further, whether this piece ends up framed or incorporated into a table, I must keep mindful that it will lose app. 3/4 of an inch, where it fits beneath the frame. I'd rather not lose the tips of the antlers that way, and to make the deer smaller would be at the cost of the scale I wished to achieve.

So we look at it this way, in the horizontal orientation. The vertical dark pencil line is actually the future edge of this panel as it has been conceived as a companion piece for "Woodland Morn, #1," one of the "gallery" images riding the right margin. This also explains why I'm most interested in continuing the deer theme onto this piece. As this panel is slightly larger than its sister, I'll cut it to size just before its framed.

In the horizontal, that annoying heartwood is begging to become part of the bark contours for a fallen tree. The crescent pencil lines and arrows indicate a limb on this deadfall, with the crotch of where it joins the trunk at the topmost line. With the scene taking shape in this manner, I gotta say that the notch of this deadfall is just aching for a sleeping fawn.

In such ways, the wood whispers to us all...