The Craftiest Workshop

While we are still in the Christmas season, I thought I would share this wood burning project I was working on most recently. I have said before that sometimes it is the wood speaking to me that decides what my next project will be.
My husband has been working on a few bigger projects in the last month for friends that had requested some wooden chests and wooden crates. While he was in the garage puttering around, he dropped something on the floor. Whatever he dropped had rolled under his work bench so he had to get down really low to fish it out. While retrieving the item, he also found this piece of wood under his workbench. It must have fallen off my smaller work table close by and then got kicked under.

We had cut up a spruce log that we had found on our property and it left us with this pile of larger wood cookies.

When the slices were initially cut, some of them had no cracks but, over time, all of them became cracked to some degree. Some of them I cleaned up and cut into heart shapes. The half cookie above, was a cookie that fell onto the floor and cracked in half.

I have been toying with the idea of doing a a Christmas nativity silhouette scene on a piece of wood. I thought about using a 2×6 or 2×8 but dimensional lumber didn’t seem rustic enough to be the backdrop for the nativity. Jesus was born in a manger, in a stable outside a small town. I wanted the piece of wood to not be perfect, to have some colouring on the live edge and the bug trails were an added bonus.

I drew out the scene I wanted and the words onto tracing paper then transferred it to the wood using carbon paper. I could have used any Christmas Hymn lyrics but “O come let us adore him” seemed to fit the best for me.

Spruce is never easy to burn onto because the grain of the wood is so prevalent. My burner had to be at least at 8 (highest is 10) and it was slow going. Here is the result after burning.

Once I finished the Christmas scene, I got to thinking that the back was too nice to leave blank. Often, when I burn onto a wood slice, there are colours or patterns in the wood that I want to showcase on the back so I would choose to leave it blank. With this spruce it is the opposite. The wood colour is very clean aside from the strong wood grain.

I thought to myself, why not burn an Easter scene onto the back. One side of the wood representing Jesus’ birth and the other his Death and resurrection.

The rounded shape of the top made me think of Calvary and the three crosses so I decided to burn that. Choosing the words were a little more difficult. I resorted to words that I have used before in my pallet cross sign “For God So Loved the World.”

I rarely choose to leave a project without applying a sealer coat but I wanted this one to showcase the cracks and blemishes in the wood. A reminder that neither Jesus’ birth nor his death was in ideal conditions yet we continue to celebrate both.

I am quite pleased with this project.
A two-sided piece of log art which can be used at both Christmas and Easter.