Contributed Ideas For Turned Pieces Generated By A Cliche
Here's a full dozen ideas for a piece inspired by Cliches as Seeds. This one is taken, with permission of the source, from a thread in the UseNet newsgroup rec.crafts.woodturning. I did the illustrations. Thanks for letting me use some of your ideas Arch. Much appreciated.
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'thinking outside the box'.
A semi-egg shaped turned “brain” - with a left and right hemishphere
and carved convolutions - turned from a white straight grained poplar
next to a turned lidded box (just to make it a little less obvious)
turned in a dark prominently grained wood. A small area of the “brain” in the
frontal lobe area could be gold leafed and a few rhinestones added to
represent a thought or two.
'the devil is in the details'
A turned table leg with lots of coves and beads and ogees - oh and some
flutes and dentil details - with tiny carved skulls and devil heads
hidden about - in the details of course
'the light at the end of the tunnel'
Start with a lumpy, bumpy burl, preferably in a dark wood. Drill a hole
through it then turn a thin walled light bulb shape, the wall thin
enough to be translucent enough for light to shine through it. Add one of
those little bright LEDs, with its little battery hidden in the threaded part
which is turned separately and glued onto the bottom of the bulb. Place light
at the end of the tunnel
‘few and far between’
A three “elelements” trembleur - maybe a foot long and say 1/16th inch
in diameter between the 3/4” diameter elements?
'over the top'
A turned Yo-Yo hanging from its string above a turned top
(too obvious?). They could sit inside a turned, hollow cone with
oval holes cut in the sided front and back so you could see the
suspended Yo-Yo and top.
"Flat as a pancake"
A stack of turned pancakes with a straight edge resting on the top
"straight & narrow"
a straight 12” long thin piece tapering from 0.03” to 0.02”
straight as an arrow?
A short stubby turned arrow - eccentrically turned so that it is
obviously not straight
"better half"
Two turned hemispheres - one as close to hemispherical as possible and
the other NOT QUITE RIGHT, perhaps with a crack in it.
"last straw"
This one will require one of those old glass straw holders - the ones
where you lift the lid which has a rod atteched to a disk at the
bottom. As you lift the lid it pulls the straws - or in this case The
Last Straw up above the jar rim. The “straw” could just be a simple
straw sized dowel, a shallow hole drilled in each end - and gold leafed
The Drum of The Different Drummer
A traditional taller than it is round drum with turned rims and body and
maybe with string added for the tension ropes - but turned on multi-axis
so the body obviously curves. A pair of turned drum sticks sit on top -
both turned multi-axis to be obviously not straight.
"parting of the ways"
I’m thinking one of those pen blank “plug cutters” could be used to
drill into the end of a blank at an angle to create to small cylinders
that intersect at an acute angle. The part of the blank below the
intersection point would be turned to a fat cylinder. There’s be a bit
of carving and sanding to get things to blend together.
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Get any ideas for a piece from any of this - yet?