To feed our wood stove, I’ve been gathering fallen limbs and trees from the forest and bucking them with a miter saw. It takes me about an hour to get enough wood to last us 2-3 days. Then I set a few logs–about enough to fill the stove twice–on top of the stove to dry out, with about another day’s worth stacked near the stove where it can get mostly dry. By the time I put it in, it’s as dry as it should be.
In doing this, I’ve accumulated several small pieces of spalted maple and black walnut. Yesterday, sitting in front of the fire, I started carving a bowl out of one of the chunks of spalted maple. That’s a picture of it up there. It’s not done. I just did some rough hacking with a hatchet and chisel while sitting in front of the fire. I still need to work a lot more on it with a curved knife (which I don’t yet have) and some sandpaper (which I also don’t have, come to think of it).
Other than bowls and knife handles. does anyone have any ideas for what I could make out of these pieces? They’re too pretty to just burn. Mayda is pushing me to do cutting boards, but I’d need a froe to split out planks for that, and I’d have to plane it by hand. I don’t have a planer, a bandsaw, a lathe, or a router, so that limits what I can do efficiently. I’d thought of spoons, but most of these pieces are such that I could only do flat ones or really short ones. Once I have a curved knife, I could probably do some little cups–basically just bowls of different proportions.
Any ideas?
