The Oldest Sister piece began with a square shouldered vase I'd started in olive wood. Now olive wood is notorious for misbehaving and this piece was no exception - internal checks and proned to cracking if you even look at it wrong. Apparently I looked at it wrong while turning it - and it opened up in several places. But I figured I might be able to exploit those "natural piercings" at some point in the future. The piece was perfect for the Oldest Sister - allowing "flickering candle light" inside the piece to shine out of the small natural openings.

Put a yellow LED inside, wrote a short program to makeit randomly flicker and hooked things up to the micro-controller. Worked fine - when looking at the piece from the side. But it also had light coming out the top of the vase and you could look inside and see the LED - breaking the illusion of a lit candle inside.

So I turned a piece of spalted maple to make the "vase" into a "lidded jar". The spalting went with the random cracks and splits of the olive and the lighter color visually emphasized the lid - which went with my idea of "It's what's in your head and not the appearance of the body that's important."

Seeing the jar and lid together it was obvious there was a need for a finial. If it were turned of clear acrylic . . .
I could get some of the internal LED's light flickering like a flame of knowledge at the top of the piece. Some acrylic rod, a little shrink tubing and getting light up to the finial was taken care of.

Here's the Middle Sister's wiring diagram.

Print the following diagram and stick it somewhere in the piece - for future reference.

To download the program for this piece as a text file CLICK HERE

To see the YouTube video of this piece in action CLICK HERE

<------------ To the Arduino micro controller that make these piece workTable of Content