My wife bought a customized spoon as a gift for someone.  Without the context, it doesn’t make much sense, but regardless, it seemed incomplete to me if it wasn’t mounted to something.  So, I cut up some scrap oak and stained it a nice golden color and mounted the spoon with some wire.

This isn’t worth a full page, so I’ll just put it in a post.  I had a set of outdoor chairs that I picked up on clearance a long time ago.  I’ve already got my money out of them, but when they started to rust, I wanted to see what I could do.  I wire-wheeled the rust off as best I could and used a phosphate rust converter to get the remaining surface rust converted to ferric phosphate.  From here, I painted the chair.  Unfortunately, the surface was just going to rust again and even had some remaining holes in it.  To deal with this, I made a set of custom red cedar armrests, curved to fit the chair.  Red cedar is perfect because even without finish, the wood won’t rot and maintains a very pretty finish (though it will turn grey).  I considered doing a laminate to fit the curve, but instead I traced the shape and cut it out on my bandsaw.  After a whole lot of sanding and fitting and sanding and fitting I finally got to with 1/16″ along the curve.  A simple bit of rubber mat between the metal and wood kept it from rattling and is hidden nicely.

I plan to do the other chair.  Perhaps for that one I’ll do a laminate.