After finally finishing the earrings and coasters I made out of marquetry, I had to start a new project. I decided to do another marquetry piece, but make it more complicated this time.

My plan was to have a square surrounded by triangles. I originally hoped it would be a slightly different design, but after finding the wood for it, I changed my mind.

My first step was cutting the pieces to the right size. I trimmed the darker/ redder wood down a bit, using the table saw. Then I traced out where the triangles would be on the other strip of wood.

 

Then it was time to cut the triangles. Mr. Chapman cut them on the table saw, and tilted the angle of the blade to do so. I ended up with four triangles, but one of them was a little messed up. Luckily, after checking the length of the redder wood, I saw that it would work out okay.

 

The problem I had was that one of the triangle broke in half. I hope that when I glue it to the inner square, it will fix itself/stay in place.

Then I had to sand some pieces down, especially the redder wood. This took a while, just because a bunch of people were trying to use the sander at once.

And finally, the gluing. I started with just two of the four triangles so they would glue better. I wrapped the bike tier around and clamped it.

 

The most frustrating part of the process for me was waiting to sand the pieces I needed. It took a while, and I didn’t even end up where I had hoped to be. The best part was seeing how the pieces fit together right before I glued them. I thought they looked really nice, and honestly fit really well. I am excited for how they turn out next week.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a blog. I’ve been working on very repetitive things and I finally finished enough to write about what I’ve been doing.

Teagan and I finished our carnival game, “Plinko”. Our final step was writing the name on the board, which was mostly so it looked clean. I personally think it could have been written better, which is my fault.

After that, I got started on my marquetry earrings again. As I had recently finished a sanded and oiled set of squares, with holes already drilled, the next step was making them wearable. To do this, I started with wire.

 

I took very thin individual strands of this copper-looking wire, about ten strands, and twisted them into one thicker wire. Then I fed that through the hole in the earring, leaving a even amount on either side.

 

After that, I twisted the two sides together, into another wire. On that, I stuck a hook so the earring could hang.

 

To secure that in place, I pulled it halfway down the wire and bent the wire over. I twisted that, yet again, into a thicker wire, kind of looping the hook in so it couldn’t fall out.

There! My first earring was finished. I then repeated the process on it’s match, and the rest of the earrings I made.

 

At one point, I tried a different wire for attaching the hook to the square. It was one thick piece, so I didn’t have to start with twisting ten together. The problem was that this made it very hard to smooth out while twisting. No matter what I did, it seemed to look bad and be poking out.

 

The hardest part for me was most things with twisting the wire. It always bothered me, no matter which step it was, but the thicker wire was much worse. The easiest part of the entire earring process was probably the oil. It was a very simple task, and was honestly kind of fun. It was very rewarding because, after finishing that step, the square really looked finished. The process felt done.

The other thing I worked on was the coasters I made with marquetry. I finally cut off the access wood and sanded them down. Then I used mineral oil for a nice finish, and was done.

In the past two weeks, I worked on a carnival game with Teagan. It was kind of stressful- because we had to finish by the Halloween dance- and we made some mistakes, but overall it was pretty fun.

First, Teagan and I made the decision to make a game called Plinko, where you drop a disk down a board covered in pegs and it lands in a certain number of points.

Then, we found a big slab of wood, over 3×2 feet, and got it cut to the right dimensions on the table saw. The piece we found was about two feet wide already, so all we had to do was cut a couple feet off the height. I can’t remember the original length, but we cut it to about three feet.

 

 

Next, Teagan and I cut sides for the game, so the disk wouldn’t just fall away. We found a strip of wood that was just a little longer than three feet, and about 2×2 inches in width. We got it cut in down the middle so we’d have enough for both of the sides of the game. We also cut divots in the strips, so it would fit in with the big board. After cutting them to the right length on the chop saw, we glued the strips to the sides of the board, and taped them in.

After that, we wanted to paint the board, but couldn’t, so Teagan thought it would be a good idea to glue paper to it. This was by far our worst mistake of the week. We took about half of class to glue pieces of paper to the game, then, seeing how bad it looked, we started peeling them off, which just made the problem worse.

 

After that catastrophe, we realized we could just flip the board. We peeled the strips off the sides of the board and glued them on the other way. We also nailed them this time, so they would stick better. The fiasco basically wasted a day, and then set us back another one.

Our next step was putting in the pieces to knock the disk around. Teagan brought in some push pins and we measured the right spots before sticking them in the board. This worked well, and looked nice.

 

The last part of the construction was making the game safe. The push pins stuck out the back of the board, so we had to find a way to cover them up. We decided to glue two more pieces of wood onto the back of the board to do so. This step was challenging because we had to stick the new pieces onto the pins and glue them to the other board too. In the end, we used tape too because they weren’t sticking well enough.

We didn’t actually make a disk, we just found a circle of wood floating around that we tested and ended up being the right size.

The most consistently challenging part of the project (besides the huge mistake of gluing paper) was the sides of the game. They just refused to stay attached to the board, no matter what we tried. Teagan and I glued them multiple times, then, when that didn’t work, we tried to nail them into the board. It was really hard to get them lined up, so this didn’t work well. In the end- after an excruciating amount of time and nails, we finally got them together. The easiest part was cutting the sides to the right length on the chop saw. Next week, I’ll get back to my marquetry projects.

This week, or two weeks, I continued to work on my marquetry. I tried to get as much done as possible, but most of the work was very meticulous and I didn’t cover as much area as I would have liked.

First, I continued to sand the coasters I was working on. I got the other two sanded pretty fine, and then decided I wanted to start working on some earrings, possibly to sell at the crafts fair.

 

To make the earrings, I took two sliced of my marquetry project. I then sanded them a lot, over the sides and edges, so they wouldn’t be poking or stabbing anyone’s ears. I used from 80 grit paper to 400 grit.

After the sanding, I moved on to the next step; coating the earrings in mineral oil so they looked nice. I used a rag to wipe the oil on, and left them to dry. I drilled a hole in the earrings to loop string or wire through. While doing this, one of my pieces kind of chipped away. I quickly got some wood glue and carefully put the piece back together.

 

 

Next, I drilled a hole in the earrings to loop string or wire through. While doing this, one of my pieces kind of chipped away. I quickly got some wood glue and carefully put the piece back together.

 

 

I’m definitely sad I didn’t get more accomplished this week, I feel like I should have been able to, but I guess not. The biggest challenge was probably gluing back the broken piece because it was so fragile. I kept thinking I was just gonna break it more. The easiest part was sanding because it was mostly kind of thoughtless. I didn’t have to focus that much, which gave me a good time to just chill and think of future projects. Next week, I want to finish my earrings and keep working on my coasters.

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Week 4

This week in STEAM I worked on marquetry and staining my box. I had hoped to get a little more done, but there was a lot of work which required help from another person, so between getting people to help me and helping others, I didn’t do quite as much as I wish I had.

My first step of the week was slicing my stick of marquetry into squares using the band saw. This step specifically required two people because one person had to cut the pieces, and the other had to carefully take them away from the blade. 

After cutting slices, I lay them onto a plank of plywood to glue them, but realized something was wrong. All of my pieces were more trapezoids instead of squares. That was because my strip of wood was slanted weirdly. To fix this, I used the electric sander to get all of the sides even.

 

(That was the part of my week that took way too long.)

The other thing I worked on this week was staining my box. We went outside with cans of stain and used cloth rags to rub it into the wood. I can’t say I’m happy with my final result; the stain kind of conceals the fractal burning, and I missed one of the sides.

Week 5

This week, I kept sanding my stick of marquetry until it was a good even square. Rowan and I also started planning a marquetry project together.

 

I sliced new pieces, ones that were even on all of the sides, and pieces them together. I decided to make small coasters that I could either sell or give as gifts.

 

These pictures are from after I sanded the first coaster. I started with eighty grit sandpaper, and moved on to hundred grit, getting smaller and finer. By the end, I used the three-hundred twenty grit and four or five-hundred grit. When I was done, the wood felt incredibly smooth and soft.

Next week, I will sand my other coasters and cut them out. I hope I am more productive then I was this week, but I just took a long time because everything was harrowing and tedious. The hardest part for me was getting the squares to be even, because something about how they were cut was wonky. It took a lot of sanding, and even then they weren’t perfect. The easiest part was gluing my pieces down.

This week in STEAM I started working on some marquetry. My design was a simple one with a four squares in two different color woods. It took a lot of designs to get the final product, but I hope it will turn out well.

The first image was my original plan and the second is what I decided on in the end. I liked the old one a lot, but I didn’t have the right wood to try it, so I think when I can I will. I do think the new one will be easier.

 

 

The first step (after getting a plan) was to get good pieces of wood for your shape. I found a pretty piece of reddish wood, and Rowan and I tore apart a wine box to get some thick pieces of plywood. We used mallets, screwdrivers, and pliers.

The next step was cutting the pieces of wood into strips. Because all of my pieces were the same size and shape, they didn’t take long to cut. Mr. Chapman cut them on the table saw and I ended up with two strips of plywood and two strips of the darker/redder wood. I later realized that I could cut one strip of the redder wood in half and would still have enough, so I gave the other piece away.

After cutting the pieces to similar lengths using the chop saw, it was time to glue them together. I put wood glue on all of the touching faces, stuck them together, and wrapped parchment paper around it with Arabella’s help. Then I wrapped a strip of bicycle tire around that (tightly) and clamped the whole thing.

 

 

That was as far as I got with the marquetry, and next week I will cut my full strip into tiles and glue them into a nice pattern. I think the hardest thing this week was finding the right wood, because we couldn’t actually find any lighter colored pieces in shapes even similar to what we needed. Hopefully the plywood will be okay, but it was an experiment. The easiest part was just the gluing before wrapping my project.

The other things I did this week were take the nails out of my box so I could put in screws, which I will also have to do next week. Plus, some of us roasted marshmallows with a blowtorch. Realistically, Jeff used the blowtorch and we help marshmallows on toothpicks near the flame.

This week, I finished my box. All I had to do left was make a top, but it took a little longer than I expected, because I didn’t work on much else this week.

The first step was to put a stop in my box so the lid wouldn’t fall through to the bottom. I did this by cutting to pieces of plywood the the right length (the shorter inside of the box), and gluing them together.

 

The other part of this was actually adding the stop to the rest of the box. I put glue on one face of the two attached pieces and clamped it on to the side of the box. I had trouble with this because I cut the pieces to the exact perfect length, so they were   hard to get into place. I used a hammer so I didn’t have to cut them down, which I couldn’t do with the glue still drying.

The second step was putting together the two main pieces of the top of the box. One piece was a plane of plywood a little smaller than the inside measurements of the box, and the other was a small strip of wood, probably less than 1×1 inches wide. I had to cut the the second to the right length; the the plane of plywood already fit. I glued the strip to the shorter side of the plane and clamped it.

 

Next, I wanted to decorate my box, so I used fractal burning to create a design. First, I painted a mixture of baking powder and water over the board to help conduct. Then, I hammered two nails into opposite corners and turned on the power. I did the same to the other corners. This made an awesome design, but also put some gouges in the wood, so I’ll have to fill those in at some point.

I had to clean my box after the fractal burning because there was char and debris on the lid. I used an acidic wood bleach and ran it under water a couple times while scrubbing to make sure it was really clean and looked good.

My lid looked nice now, but I wouldn’t be able to open the box after I put it together. I used the drill press to cut a circle in the top so I could open it.

 

Now that the lid itself was finished, I had to attach it to the rest of the box. I used a stand to hold the lid level to the top of the box, and drilled holes through the sides of the box and into the wood glued to the bottom of the lid. Then I hammered nails into place so they stayed. My box couldn’t open all the way because the lid was just a little too big, so I sanded it down a bit and it could open perfectly well. This was the final result:

For me, the hardest part was getting the stop inside the box because of the mistakes I made cutting. I ended up getting it in with a hammer but I was worried I’d have to re-cut the pieces. The easiest part was fractal burning because all I had to do was put some nails in the wood and wait until I thought it looked cool. Next week, I have to use something to fill the gauges in the lid so I can use my box as a clipboard in class. The most helpful tool for me this week was the stand for the lids of our boxes. It would have been near impossible to hold it up without the stop and the nails in without it.

This week we were assigned to make a box. We will use them throughout the year to keep any papers or any plans for our projects in.

The first step was to cut strips of plywood into four pieces. Two pieces with lengths of ten inches, and two with lengths of 14 inches. We used handsaws to cut the plywood and either clamps or vices to hold it.

Next was evening out the cuts. We used the chop saw (with supervision) to cut the pieces to nine inches and thirteen inches. This step was to make sure the pieces would fit together neatly and all be correct lengths.

The third step was connecting the pieces together to make the sides of the box. We used wood glue and nails to hold the pieces together. I used the right angle clamp to hold my pieces correctly when nailing them with the nail gun.

 

The fourth step, and the final step for me, was getting a bottom for the box. We were given pre-cut boards with 9×13 dimensions that we had to put glue on and nail to the sides of our box.

 

The next step, which I will be doing next week, is to make a top for the box. For me, the most challenging part of this projects so far was cutting the pieces of wood with handsaws, because handsaws take a while to use and are sometimes frustrating to work with. The easiest part was gluing and nailing the bottom onto the box. This was because it was very simple gluing and nailing that didn’t involve clamps or measuring or any other tools. The clamp that helped make right angles was the most helpful thing to me because I have made some boxes without it before, and the corners were disasters.

The other project I worked on this week was carving. I didn’t do a ton, and it wasn’t great quality, but it was pretty fun. I used carving tools and the wood pieces Mr. Chapman painted for us to use. These are the things I made:

 

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