Let me share my little wood turning projects that I enjoyed doing recently. The size of the pieces is about two inches (5 cm) or so.

Igloo

I turned this little igloo from basswood. I chose basswood because it is easy to carve. I used a V-tool to carve the “snow brick” pattern. This Wikipeida article helped me to understand how an igloo is constructed. According to the article I carved the brick grooves as a spiral.

Turning Igloo

When it was turned it looked like a sphere attached to a cylinder; I cut away some wood parallel to the turning axes to form the base and to achieve the igloo shape.

Painting igloo was a real challenge: painting snow is not easy. I used multiple coats of acrylic paint mostly white and some blue. I used some glitter to get sparkles but didn’t like the effect: you may see some dark dots on the picture — the glitter reflects light as expected but also causes dark dots on the light background.

Bells

These bells are turned from maple. The smaller bell is 2 inches (5 cm) high.

Turned Bells

I embellished the bells with the ornament using a small skew wood burner tip and acrylic paint.

I like turning maple because it is easy to turn. Maple is closed grain wood so it is easy polish. I finished the bells with with three coats of linseed oil.

I used silver wire to attached clappers. These wooden bells do produce sounds though not as strong as metal bells.