The applications to the shows have been submitted!
We know for sure that we will be in Chicago at the spring One of a Kind Show. The dates are April 28th - 30th. We will be in booth 2048, just like last year.
We will be back at the Big E in the Maine building. The dates are September 15th - Oct 1st and the Maine building is open from 10am - 9pm each day.
We will be in Chicago again for the One of a Kind Holiday Show. The dates are December 7th - 10th. We will be in booth 2048.
We hope that you will come see us at one or all of the shows listed above.
This recipe is a family favorite and people cannot tell that there is zucchini in the cake.
Marilyn's Chocolate Zucchini Cake Recipe
1 stick of margarine
1/2 cup of oil
2 eggs
1 3/4 cups of sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup of buttermilk
2 1/2 cups of flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
4 heaping tablespoons cocoa
2 cups of shredded zucchini
1/2 cup of chocolate bits
1/2 cup of nuts (optional)
Combine margarine, oil, eggs and sugar. Add vanilla and buttermilk.
Combine flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and cocoa in a sifter.
Sift dry ingredients into wet ingredients. Lastly add zucchini, chocolate bits and nuts to mixture.
Using a 9x13 inch pan, make sure that the pan is well greased and add batter to the pan. Bake at 350 degrees for approximately 45 minutes.
Once the cake is cool, ice with your favorite frosting. In our pictures we added peanut butter frosting.
]]>My aunt first made these for me more than forty years ago. This recipe is one of my favorites.
Aunt Ruby's Brownies
Brownie batter
Topping mixture
Making the brownies
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cream together 1/2 cup butter and 1 cup sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs and 1 teaspoon vanilla. Blend well. Stir in chocolate syrup. In a bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder and salt. Stir sifted ingredients into the chocolate mixture. If desired, add walnuts. Pour into a well greased 15 1/2" x 10 1/2" x 1" pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 22 minutes. Check with a toothpick to make sure the center is done. Cool in pan on wire rack.
Making the topping
Combine 6 tablespoons butter, milk, and 1 cup sugar in saucepan. Bring to boil. Boil for 30 seconds. Remove from heat, add chocolate bits and 1 teaspoon of vanilla. Stir thoroughly. Allow the mixture to cool some. You want to still be able to pour it and spread it but if you do it while it's too hot it will only sink into the brownie and not stay on the upper part of the brownie. Spread over brownies. Cut.
Enjoy!
]]>As I get older I realize that I need more light to see what I’m working on. I’ve been looking around for a light that was more than just a spot light to better help me see my work on the lathe.
Laguna Lathe Lamp mounted in ceiling and situated over my lathe. Sorry for the light glare in the upper left corner. It’s coming from my 4 foot shop light.
Last fall when I was teaching bowl turning classes in S. Portland, Maine we were using new Laguna 1216 lathes for the two students in each class. On those lathes were new Laguna lathe lamps. They were longer LED lights and not the spot lights that Laguna previously had for their lathes or bandsaws. Don’t get me wrong the spot lights are fine but I already have one, from another company, that has a magnetic base to hold it securely to my lathe. I was hoping to find something with an articulating arm and that I could mount above my lathe and move into whatever place I wanted. It’s important to me that I could move it because I want extra light while I’m working on my pieces. Then I can move the light around the piece and look at the piece from various angles to make sure that I haven’t missed any scratch marks before I apply the finish. There are other LED light bars on the market but this is the only one, that I know of, that I can adjust the amount and kind of light on. By adjusting the coolness (color) and brightness of the light it helps me see the scratch marks better.
By mounting it in the ceiling and because it pivots almost 360 degrees, I can also rotate it around to put light on my router table too. There is a pin that stops the light from going a full 360 degrees probably so that a person can’t continually go around and around and damage the wires on the inside.
There are adjustments on the light near the base that allow me to control the amount of light. I can also move the light on pivot points along the arm to get the light exactly where I want it to be.
I’ve been working with the light for a few weeks now and so far I’m liking it. Time will tell if I like it better than a spot light and also the longevity of the LED bulbs.
The only thing that I would like to see changed on the light is where the knobs are located. I would like to see them near the light itself and not near the base but I also realize that I’m not using the light the way that Laguna intended for them to be used. If I had the light mounted on my lathe like they intended, the adjustment knobs would be near at hand and not near the ceiling like I have them.
I feel that I should also mention that I work at Rockler as a turning instructor. However I am not sponsored, nor did I receive any special discounts or compensation for this critique from them or from Laguna. I ordered this light from Rockler’s website on November 30th because of a Black Friday Cyber Monday special that Laguna was running at the time and had to wait weeks (because of COVID) for the light to show up, just like everyone else at the time.
]]>Recently I made eight Katahdin ballpoint pens all from Oak. So what is so special about that, you ask. Well, six of them were made from barrel staves from whiskey barrels. And the other two? Those two were made from ancient bog oak from eastern Europe.
The bog oak wood was carbon dated to be approximately 5,600 years old. Can you imagine the changes that have taken place with our world since those trees sprouted from an acorn?
The other six pens were made from barrel staves that were used in the actual production of whiskey. Two were made from Jim Beam staves, two more were made from Makers Mark bourbon whiskey staves and the last two were made from Jack Daniels staves.
Each of the pens had their own unique smell when I was turning them.
Left to right in the picture above, the Katahdin pens are Jim Beam, Makers Mark, Jack Daniels and the last two are the ancient bog oak pens.
]]>I decided that a good secondary color would be yellow or gold. So Mary (my lovely wife and assistant) and I got to mixing up the Alumilite. I poured parts A & B and Mary stirred them together. I added orange coloring to the Alumilite and it turned red. Wait red? So I put in more orange coloring and it was still red. More coloring, still red. I added gold flakes to the other clear Alumilite that we had stirred up and that was gold. We were running out of time. We have seven minutes from the time that part A and B start being mixed together until the mixture has to be in the mold and under air pressure or else the urethane acrylic starts to harden and the air bubbles are too big and will leave voids in the acrylic. The air pressure makes the air bubbles so small that they aren’t a problem. I realize that seven minutes sounds like plenty of time but it can get intense especially if things don’t seem to be going quite as planned.
So we are at five and a half minutes and things aren’t looking good. Actually they are looking great but it’s red and not orange. We pour the colors into the mold and mix them together to get some swirls working for us. We just made it under the allotted time and the proof will be once they are turned.
The next day I took the block out from under pressure and, yup, it’s still red and gold. I cut the block up into the 4 blanks that I needed and the block is still showing red and gold but the shavings that were created during the cutting process are orange. Well all right, now things are looking up.
I start to turn the first handle and the handle looks like it’s red and gold but the shavings on the floor, the lathe and me are orange and gold. I get the handle done and polished up and it’s a beautiful red and gold but not orange, unlike my shop. These shavings are clinging to everything. You can see every place that I walked because I am leaving behind a trail of orange shavings.
We show the customer two of the openers to see what she thinks of them, and luckily for us, she loved them. They really are spectacular. The coloring has a lot of depth to it and if you rotate the handles in the light things seem to change and shift.
With all the dreariness going on in the world right now, I thought I would add some much needed color. Meet the limited edition 8 inch Haynes pepper mill made in May Flowers laminated Birch veneer. The colors are Natural, Pink, Turquoise and Yellow which repeat over and over. They remind me of colors that start to show up in abundance in the spring time.
Looking for something to brighten up your table or counter, this will do it. Click on this link to learn more about this mill.
A little bonus for reading this far. This is a natural edge Maple Burl bottle stopper. The stopper itself is food grade stainless steel with food grade o-rings.
The top was turned from Maple Burl and is showing some of the natural edge. Click on this link to learn more about this stopper.
Saturday began with a little more of the same from the other day. Jed cut up his bowl blank and then roughed it out on the lathe. Jed's time roughing out has improved from last time. He's getting more comfortable with the cuts that I want him to make and how I want him to position the gouges.
Jed roughing out a bowl blank
During the repetitive times I can shoot pictures and videos of the work in progress. I had shot a few videos and posted them to Instagram. I was messing around in my phone with iMovie, which I have used to create videos before, and saw that I could either create a movie or a trailer. I started playing around with creating a trailer. I was laughing at the answers that I was putting into the trailer information and, unfortunately, Jed thought I was laughing at something that he was doing. I had to show him what I was doing and you can also see what I created below.
I'm sure Jed thinks that I've lost my mind but it was fun to shoot and then put into the trailer.
After roughing out the salad bowl blank we turned it around and used my Oneway coring system. The Oneway coring system is a series of supported curved cutters that allow us to take smaller bowls from the center of the largest bowl. By doing this we are maximizing what we can get out of each log because we are not turning all of the wood in the center of the biggest bowl into shavings on the shop floor. On Saturday we were able to get three cores (bowl blanks) out of the center of our bowl.
Jed using the Oneway coring system for the first time.
Jed holding the largest bowl blank with the three
cores that he took out of the center of it.
]]>Day 1 was actually done while Jed had a cast on and watching me do the work. The first part of our CAP is to work on bowls so we got started on what to look for before we take the chainsaw to a log. We talked about what kind of bowl we could get and where it would come from on the log. We also talked about how the heart of the tree affects the growth rings that we can see in our bowls and how to manipulate the bowl blank for the designs that we are working on.
Jed using an electric chainsaw to cut bowl blank to length
Day 2 - the pins have been removed and Jed is out of the cast and able to work the wood and turn! We went back over the same basics but with Jed running everything. We added in the placement of the bowl gouge during roughing cuts and pulling and pushing cuts. We roughed out the outside of the bowl blank and got it ready to core out smaller bowls from the inside of the largest bowl blank.
Oneway Stronghold chuck with Oneway 3 inch chuck spur drive
Pictured above is the Oneway Stronghold chuck with #4 jaws on it and Oneway's 3 inch chuck spur drive. I use the spur drive so that I don't have to remove my chuck. I can insert the spur drive into the jaws of the chuck and hold my block of wood between centers. Once I've found the center on the block of wood I use a 1 1/6 inch spade bit in a hand drill to drill a hole about 1 inch deep. Often times when we mount these pieces of wood to the lathe they weigh somewhere between 75 to 150 pounds, depending upon the size of wood that we are about to rough out. This way I can slide the drilled out hole over the spur center and then bring up the tailstock to hold it in place. It may not be perfectly aligned in the hole but it's close enough for the rough turning that I'm about to do.
Roughed out bowl blank ready for coring
In the picture above you can see the roughed out Birdseye Maple bowl blank that is now ready for coring. Coring is the process of taking smaller bowl blanks out of the larger bowl blank. That way we don't turn all of the wood in the center of the largest bowl blank into shavings on the shop floor. Also notice in the picture that the bowl blank is not flat going across the face but rather has steps to it. Ideally the largest bowl blank would be on the outside and it would also be the deepest. However there was a crack going on the largest blank that doesn't seem to affect the inner bowl blanks as much. So we turned away the crack and this will yield us the same amount of bowl blanks but the inner blanks will be a little deeper than they would be if we turned the blank flat across the face.
]]>Back in December, Jed Malcore and I applied to become one of five teams for the Craft Apprentice Program. Each team consists of a master (me) and an apprentice (Jed) who have to work together for a minimum of 100 hours from the months of March through September. In our application and follow-up interview, we had to describe how we envisioned the apprenticeship working and our expectations for it. We had decided to concentrate on bowls and hollow forms for our apprenticeship.
We must have done well enough because we have been selected to be one of the teams. I'm excited to see where we end up and I'm also excited to see where the other four teams end up. I am positive that we are all going to learn a lot from this experience.
You can see our profile on the CAP website by clicking here and see all of the other teams and past participants by clicking here.
]]>
I can custom mix dyes and flecks into the resin to create a solid color or I can mix batches of dyes and flecks and then pour those separate batches together into a mold and create a multi-colored blank. Once I've poured the mixture into the mold, the whole thing has to go into a pressure pot and be put under air pressure. I use 58 pounds of pressure per square inch. By doing this it takes all of the air bubbles that normally form during the mixing process and makes them microscopic so that they won't mess up my finished product. From the time that I start to mix the polyurethane parts A and B together, I have seven minutes to get it under pressure in the pressure pot or I risk the resin hardening with large air bubbles being present.
By doing this process it allows me to now create my own custom colors and mixes. The pens are just the first step and I hope to be adding my own custom colors to more of my product lines. I'm already experimenting with doing the stabilized wood and custom acrylic colors together.
Stay tuned, this is going to be a fun ride!
If you would like to see how it is done, I made a video of my friend, Steven, and I going through the process. This is from a year ago and I think it was my first custom pour. You can see it below.
]]>
Instead of turning the inside of my bowls into wood chips on my shop floor I use curved cutters to core out the center of my bowls to produce more bowls . All six cores (three from each of these bigger bowls) came through just fine. So I will end up with 7 out of the 8 bowls in that group and I'm good with that.
]]>Stabilizing is a process where as much moisture is cooked out of the wood as possible and then the wood is put in to a vacuum chamber with resin. The vacuum pulls the air in the wood out of the wood and replaces it with the resin. If I want to add color to the wood I just mix the resin with a dye and then do the process of putting the wood into the vacuum chamber with the dyed resin. The wood is generally under vacuum for an hour or more and then left to soak in the resin (or resin and dye) for hours or sometimes a day or more. Once this part is done, I then take the wood out of the chamber and wrap the pieces in aluminum foil and put them in to the oven to cook the wood again. Don't worry, I have a separate toaster oven that I do this in and I don't use our kitchen oven for this process. After allowing the wood to cool sufficiently, I take off the foil and I'm ready to start the turning process with the stabilized wood.
From left to right in the picture above
Dyed Green Box Elder Burl t-handle bottle stopper and corkscrew combination
Dyed Blue Box Elder Burl t-handle bottle stopper and corkscrew combination
Dyed Green Curly Maple handle on the pizza cutter
Stabilized Birdseye Maple t-handle bottle stopper and corkscrew combination
]]>If the color combinations are listed as limited edition and you like the way that they look then you shouldn't hesitate to order them. When they are gone they probably won't be back again, at least not before Labor Day. Some combinations I'm testing out and others simply won't be back.
]]>
Before
I uploaded a picture of an unfinished ash pepper mill to my facebook page the other day and I posed the question of should I leave it natural or airbrush it. In the end the answers that I received were split between the two choices. So I decided to airbrush the mill. Somebody suggested that I airbrush it purple and teal. So that's what I did, purple and teal diagonal stripes. What do you think? Is it a keeper and I should offer more of these purple and teal mills for sale or do you think it should just slowly slink away, never to be seen again?
After
]]>So now that I've told you why you haven't seen any posts or new products in the last few weeks my original intent of this post was to tell you of a couple shows/fairs that we will be doing this year.
The first one is the Maine Artisan Bread Fair that is being held on the 29th of July from 9 am to 3 pm on the Skowhegan Fair Grounds in Skowhegan Maine. We should be inside the big show building again.
The second one is the Common Ground Country Fair which is being held September 22nd, 23rd and 24th in Unity, Maine. We should be in Maine Marketplace East again.
We love doing both of these fairs. I'll be posting more about each one as we get closer to them.
]]>Probably one of my wife, Mary's, all time favorite characters is Winnie-the-Pooh. So I did what Pooh would do. I sat down, tapped my head repeatedly with my right hand and said, "Think, Think, Think". When that didn't work for me, I got up and walked around and again, repeatedly tapped my head with my right hand and said, "Think, Think, Think".
When the headache finally cleared, I came up with the idea of making honey dippers. I would start with wood that was 1 inch by 7 inches long and I would be able to use the skew for at least 90 percent of the project. A parting tool would be used for the rest. Perfect!
I turned the prototypes that you see in the picture above and then realized that I had another problem. Do they really work? See I don't use honey in much stuff, I'm already sweet enough. Don't ask my wife about that one though, I'm pretty sure she would just roll her eyes.
]]>I get to meet great people at shows and through on-line correspondence. The pieces that I make get to see parts of the world that I can only hope to see one day. I get to be a part of your lives and most of us have never met in person. You spend hours agonizing over getting someone the perfect gift for their wedding, maybe it's for Christmas or Hanukkah or maybe it's for that special someone's birthday and it turns out to be something that I get to share in too. I get to make that gift for your loved one.
Sometimes I even hear back from you or the loved one on the receiving end of your generosity. I get feedback from people like JS in Minnesota who shared this about a set of mini-grinders that she bought: "I bought these as a gift for my mom for Christmas. Not only was she thrilled with them, she let me know they were her favorite present of the year!".
JF from Pennsylvania wrote and told me this: "Kim, Words cannot express how much I love the grinders, your presentation and your craft! The pieces are so beautiful...true statement pieces on my counter top. Thank you for taking great care in shipping and just all of the finishing touches. I know what to order for future wedding gifts! Thanks again and keep on turning!!!!!"
That's pretty heady stuff for a guy working in his basement shop, deep in the woods of Maine. Thank you for sharing how the pieces that I've made affect you or the lucky recipients of your gift giving.
But most of all, thank you for taking a chance on me and please keep sharing your stories and photos.
]]>"Humpty after the fall"
Just like Humpty Dumpty I may have fallen down and hit my head. I have a new YouTube channel dedicated just to Dailey Woodworking. Over the next year, I hope to post videos that show the uniqueness of my products and some of those products being made. Right now I have two videos on the channel, one shows a variety of my products and the other is the turning of the inside of a bowl. You can check out the channel here. Please become a subscriber to the channel, as well.
]]>Our pizza cuttahs make great gifts for the pizza lover in your life. Click here to see the pizza cutters that we offer.
Stay tuned and in a few days, we will be announcing our December giveaway.
]]>This color combination starts out as 1/16 inch birch veneer that has been dyed and glued together. For these mini-grinders, there are two layers of blue and two layers of natural (white) repeating over and over.
The Ferris mini-grinders feature a ceramic grinding mechanism that will grind either salt or pepper and the size of the grind is adjusted by the knob on the top. Another great feature is the black and chrome tops that make it easier to tell them apart on your table or counter. The compact size makes them easy to take outside to your picnic table or to your tailgate party.
The blue and natural Ferris mini-grinder set will please even the most difficult to shop for people on your list (mother-in-laws) or maybe it's time to just reward yourself for all of your hard work that you've put in this year.
]]>