Christmas Comes Early

While I’m certainly no Scrooge, I’m also not someone who gets into the Christmas spirit too early. Decorations are for December in my book, so it’s been an odd couple of weeks preparing for our next club exhibition at the end of October.

This time round I decided to play to my market, and I’ve been busy making Christmas trees for the last two weeks. I’ve tried a couple of designs this year, including a Nordic style for the first time, and I’ve also tried turning some exotic woods as trees.

The pleasant surprise was black palmyra. I actually thought I’d ordered a zebrano blank, but something wasn’t quite right - I’d accidentally picked the palmyra instead. It turned out to be a happy accident: the trees have finished beautifully with friction polish, and the pattern is really nice.

Another blank that didn’t show much promise was a piece of softwood. I’m still not 100% sure what it is, but larch is currently my best guess. It was obvious as I turned the first one that it was going to look great as a tree.

And the finished larch trees do look great.

Here’s the haul so far, and more should be on the way - I ordered another batch of spindle blanks from Dalmann yesterday, and I’m hoping they’ll be here tomorrow.