Valentine’s Day Flowers

Inspiration for this project comes from Carl’s “turn a flower” video a couple years ago. I made some turned flowers last year, but this year I wanted to step it up a bit and try to learn some new skills.

I turned a purpleheart flower bud that has three strips of copper & cream acrylic layered in. This was difficult because some of the petals of the flower bud are held only with epoxy on the acrylic.

The stem is lignum vitae, which is a naturally green wood, but I drakened with a green dye since it was a light green/yellow after turning. The stem is made from three pieces, two of which represent my very first attempt at multi axis off center turning using three axes. These stems are only 5/16″ in diameter. It was an immense challenge to not snap it when cutting it on the lathe as it spun around off center! The center section of the stem is a heart in which I turned a cone and and then shaped the flat sides by hand.

This project isn’t complete yet. I am currently making a segmented base to mount the flower on.