The Craftiest Workshop

I was sifting through my finished compost pile today. I wanted to add it to a few of my garden beds that are done growing this year. Of everything that had been put into the composter I could only clearly still recognize three things: corn husks, peanut shells (never again) and avocado pits.

As much as I would like to say that it was this that prompted me to see what I could do with the pits, it was actually a photo that my brother Greg had shared. It was a photo of a small hollowed out branch with tiny pebbles lined up inside. I asked myself, “what small piece of wood could I use to create art?” I had an avocado that same day and immediately started looking on Pinterest and YouTube to see what others had done with them.

To start, right after you take the pit out of the fruit, you wash off any green oily residue on the pit and then leave it somewhere out of the sun until the next day. On day two you will do the most detailed work on the avocado seed. First you peel the skin off of it. It reminds me of the skin on a peanut but it will need to be shaved off with a small knife.

Here is the peeled pit. The dark line in it is where you split it to make a pendant.

For the first half of my first avocado seed, I decided to try to insert a tiny amethyst stone. You have to cut a hole smaller than the stone and hollow out inside then push the stone into the pocket. I used a tiny screwdriver from a mini screwdriver kit to gouge a groove as well.

Here is what the pit looked like a week later. It reduced in size to be 3X smaller than it started. I used 220 grit sandpaper to smooth out the surface. It hardens enough by day three to use sandpaper.

For the other half, I tried gouging out a bit more and having a small heart in the center. You have to do any carving on day two before it starts to shrink and harden. Here are the before and after pics. If you look closely at the pattern in the countertop, you can see how much it shrunk; I tried to place it in exactly the same spot.

The back of the half seed is rounded so I tried two different things with these first two halves.

The grooves on the heart one were quite wide when I started but the shrinking brings it in so much.

For my next avocado I decided to try to make buttons. I cut the whole pit into six slices. I left the shiny peel on the one end to see how it would turn out. The other end I cut a small circle to see if I could maybe make board game coins out of avocado pits. I also cut one in a ring shape but I didn’t wait long enough to sand and on day two it cracked.

This was a week after cutting. The buttons have warped slightly so thicker is definitely better. I have some more sanding work to do on them but I like how they turned out. I should mentioned that I cut the button holes with a hard plastic straw. The ring hole was just me using a small paring knife around a coin held in place.

This week I carved two mushrooms out of the two halves of another pit. With all my apples to deal with, I haven’t had much chance to work on sanding and carving a bit more.

I am unsure when to drill a hole in order to make a half into a pendant. If you drill right away, that hole will shrink and you might not be able to get any cord or string through it. If you do it later, it may be hard to drill a clean hole. I will have to experiment and see.

This small and tedious carving is super relaxing. I have seen photos of these pits carved into faces, turtles, trees…basically anything you can imagine but on a very small scale. The pits become hard as a rock once shrunk and, if you apply Tung oil or maybe Polycrylic, the darker colours are brought out more like with wood. Once I am completely done a few, I will try to coat them in something. If you have the time and patience for this type of thing, give it a try. Better than just throwing the pit in the garbage.