Don't skip through if you can help it. This one gets exciting and more than a little sketchy...
It seems like everyone has been heckling me to turn driftwood for a while now, and I also had a customer request a mothers' day gift. Their only specification was "navy blue", so naturally I thought... "What better excuse do I have than to combine navy blue and driftwood?" I was going for an oceanic vibe, with lighter blues to emulate surf at the top of the vase and deeper darker blues to evoke the depth of the ocean at the base of the vase. I had an idea for the final shape, but there was really no practical way to get there prior to casting this weird piece of wood. It was very decayed, and I did not want to limit my options by hacking away at it too much prior to casting. I also should have realized that there might be sap in the wood. After all, pine trees tend to seel off exposed endgrain with sap, and this was no exception even though it had spent some quality time in the ocean.
When the initial mold failed, it was purely by the mercy of God that I decided to check inside the pressure pot. If I had waited just one more day, the project would have taken a very different turn. But as it was, we were able to salvage almost all of the resin and make a new mold in a matter of minutes. Even though by that point, the resin had been tossed around and mixed up beyond hope, I was still hopeful that there would be visible swirls in the resin. By heating the shop, there was a greater chance of achieving just that, so I risked it. As you might expect, I never stopped fighting with the sap, and after about 4 coats of penetrating epoxy and 3 coats of tabletop epoxy, I thought I had finally beaten the sap problems. But I was wrong.
The vase broke, and the client cancelled their order. So I resolved to fix it anyway. When the vase broke into two remarkably boring pieces, I had a suspicion that there might be other weak points in the wood that might cause future catastrophic issues, so I polled my family and my Instagram viewers, who were divided almost 50/50 for and against breaking the vase any further. I elected to cast the deciding vote and went for it. Now, in the past I have been accused of attempting an ancient Japanese technique of repairing broken pottery called "kintsugi" without giving credit to the concept, and I have no intention of calling whatever this resurrection attempt was by the same name. However, the concept of kintsugi--repairing something broken with gold--is a theme I wanted to utilize. Of course, my hubris in rejecting a perfectly fine gold pigment in favor or mixing in contrasting colors meant that the subsequent void-filling ended up looking about as patchy as one might expect when color-matching is impossible. Either way, the remainder of the project went off without a hitch, as one might say, except for, of course, the sap...
By the 5th coat of epoxy, I was resolved not to sell the vase if the sap was still seeping through, and it was. So there you have it. I will probably keep this vase as an object lesson never to work with pine wood ever again, or at least never to turn green or air-dried pine. If you would like to purchase this vase, you are welcome to send me an email with an offer. But don't get your hopes up, as the value of the time and effort invested into this object lesson won't be easily quantified.
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