Fruit de la mare!

Sunday night of another four day weekend! And what a great weekend I'm having so far! My wife wanted to see that wedding and as determined as I was to get on with something useful, I found myself 'drawn in' to watching it, with the occasional mad dash into the garden to keep Dylan entertained!

After it was all over and a spot of lunch the family went out and I resumed my earlier plan of turning something! There have been a few marine based pieces on the wows lately and it reminded me of a shell form I had sketched a while ago. I also thought it would be a good item to use a similar texture effect to

the bowl posted below. The hardest part was going to be carving the four spiral twists which make up the shell, I have only tried this once before and it was a single spiral on a scrap piece

of wood which I did without having the best tools for the job, needless to say its not on display anywhere!! I didn't know how this one would turn out but I am always of the attitude 'if you don't try you'll never do it'. I started by hollowing out the form to a thickness of 3/4" , I did this very roughly as I was considering it an experiment and didn't really expect to get the finished carving right, I now wish I had of finished the inside better!

The turning and carving were all done Friday afternoon, the texturing took most of Saturday but at least was done sitting in the sunny garden! The texture is built up one dimple at a time with a pyrography unit, the pattern following the spirals as you find in many shells. This was then cleaned and dyed a red/orange colour and gold gilt cream sparingly applied with an oil finish.

After all that texturing today was spent as a family day, we had a nice five mile walk in the sun by the river and then chips in the car by the sea later!! Tomorrow we are invited to my brothers for a BBQ :)