Hand Made Wooden Earrings & Pendants with Painted Canvas Inserts

I’ve been creating Walnut, Red Oak and Padauk Earrings and Pendants with unique Painted Canvas inserts. They are light. Each pair is handmade and unique.

I start by cutting solid hardwoods such as Maple, Red Oak, Walnut and Padauk into strips. Then earring and pendant blanks are laser cut from these strips. I then create a painting that will be used to laser cut the canvas inserts from. Finally everything is assembled, finished with varnish and Sterling Silver findings attached. Ear Hooks and Jump rings for the earrings and Jump rings with cotton cord for the pendants.

Monet Cowboy Mosaic

I’ve been exploring creating mosaics these past two years. This second 20”x20” mosaic was created from a photo of a friend of mine wearing a cowboy hat. The mosaic colours were chosen from a palette that Monet used in his garden paintings. A significant amount of time is spent photo editing and choosing the best colours to achieve the artistic result I am looking for. There were seven versions that I experimented with before settling on this particular version.

My process, as usual, is technical. It took about 4 months to write an application to convert photographs into a mosaic using a specified set of colours.

Hand assembling a 1600 or 3600 piece tile is time consuming (40+ hours) so this application was modified to consolidate all contiguous tiles of the same colours into one shaped “tile”. This results in large reduction of assembly time.

Each 1/8” thick Baltic Birch panel is painted with acrylic paint for the specific chosen colour in the mosaic. “Tiles” are then cut out using a laser cutter. Each panel is covered in green tape before cutting to prevent smoke damage from the laser. This tape is peeled after laser cutting.

Next comes the hand assembly. Each tile is glued in its correct place using wood glue to the wooden base. The assembly process takes place over three days.

Assembly of Mosaic.

Included here are some of the “boring" technical details for those who may be interested. I used the creation of my Mosaic Photo Application as an opportunity to learn a new programming language called Rust Programming language. This particular language has a steep learning curve and it took about me about four months before I had anything useful. Developing this application using Python would have been much faster. My contiguous tiles modification involved learning edge tracing, bin packing, depth first searching, and a deep dive into the SVG specification. This modification took another three months of development effort.

Regular Tetrahedrons

My latest thing has been regular tetrahedrons. My goal is to eventually make these from stainless steel.

I spent some time creating a 3D model of a regular tetrahedron in Fusion 360. Then I 3D printed a few for sanity check. Next up was to make some of these from 3mm Baltic Birch. Each tetrahedron requires laser cutting 4 equilateral triangles from birch plywood. Then a sanding jig is used to sand each of the 3 edges of each triangle to the correct beveled angle so that each side can be joined the other sides with no gap.

Finally a glue up jig is used to hold the sides easily for assembly. The basic assembly step (laser cutting, bevelling, glue up) of one tetrahedron takes about about 5 minutes per Tetrahedron

Preparing each tetrahedron to use as an art surface requires additional surface prep time. Any cracks are filled with wood filler, then each side is sanded and all the four surfaces are Gessoed in preparation for painting.

Each Tetrahedron provides four perfect surfaces for creating miniature art pieces. Groupings of tetrahedrons builds larger pieces. The possibilities for repeating patterns are endless in both 2D and 3D spaces. I am looking forward to exploring the possibilities of this space.