37 Pencils

I should probably have started with turning a few shapes on a solid lump of easy-to-work wood, but no. The idea was in my head, so it had to come out, and this is what came of it. Having set up the lathe in a decent position at long last, I decided to make some Christmas baubles… out of colouring pencils!

Madness you might think. But no, insanity I tell you.

That was back in 2014. In 2015, after someadjustments to the method, I made a few more that went down to the shop (Homemade Wales) for the Christmas season. Sold out within a week!

So in a nutshell, the first job was to glue up some logs of pencils. 37 of them to be precise.

And then it was just a case of bunging the ‘logs’ on the lathe and turning them down into something that I quite like to consider as rather marvellous.

I say “just”. It’s somewhat more involved, delicate, and sometimes hazardous than “just”.