Let me share a collection of small woodturning projects I enjoyed turning over the years. The pieces are about 2 inches (5 cm).
Avocado
This avocado is 2.5″ (6 cm) long. Turned from maple and finished with boiled linseed oil. I turned the avocado shape first, then rotated the project 90 degrees and turned a half away. It was hard to chuck the avocado shape; I carved a recess in an off-cut block that was easy to chuck and used double-sided adhesive tape to attach the avocado project. The tape had a relatively weak bond, but it was strong enough to turn and sand the seed part.
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 Wikipedia article helped me to understand how an igloo is constructed. According to the article, I carved the brick grooves as a spiral.
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 the 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.
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 a closed-grain wood, so it is easy to polish. I finished the bells with three coats of linseed oil.
I used silver wire to attach clappers. These wooden bells do produce sounds, though not as strongly as metal bells.
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