My wife regularly and beautifully changes our house decor by the season. Some of my wood creations become part of that decor. Over the years I have experimented with various kinds of Easter eggs. On the “woodturned vessels” page you can see some of the small maple eggs that I have turned and decorated with burned lines and various colors.
I recently added a photo to the “holidays” page that shows some of my other egg creations. Two of them are purchased basswood eggs that I have chip carved, one colored and one not. Chip carving is the process of removing triangular “chips” of wood to create a repeating pattern and is used in various kinds of folk art.
The largest creation is actually a hollowed candy dish with egg shaped openings to show the colors of the candies. It looks like an egg sitting on a separate egg cup but it is actually one piece of black walnut. The egg to the middle right is made of black date palm, a beautiful wood that gives nasty splinters if you don’t work with care. The one to the right front is my newest creation, a walnut egg with a lighter wood band. This was created by bandsawing the blank in half and gluing it back together with a thin strip of lighter wood between the halves. The red and multicolored eggs on the left are made from the same type of manufactured wood that I used for my recent Christmas ornaments. The tiny egg in the front was made from a cutoff from a plastic pen blank.
The egg cups are of various woods. The back left cup with the chip carved egg is made from an ash tree from our yard. The black one is ebony and the tiny one in front is tulipwood. The middle right one is dated 2004 but I’m not sure of the wood variety.
Making eggs and egg cups is a great way to produce something pleasing from wood scraps and cutoffs. We’ll have to see what next year brings.
Ed Downey
