I had been planning to make some more sets of turned Christmas trees again this year, although I had envisioned a more getting-into-the-spirit date of maybe early December; snow on the ground, carols playing in the stores, too damned cold to go outside, etc. Fortunately they look just as Christmasy for being made in a July heatwave, plus it gave me an excuse to be in the cool basement.

I didn't bother to try to stick with using the "ideal" wood (that being a nice piney-smelling Spruce branch) but that was OK since there are lots of wood types with more-interesting looking grain out there. I must confess I didn't closely track or even identify all the particular species used - although of course they are all local.

The description below doesn't have much detail on the actual turning as that was covered when I did the original trees.

I started with branches left over from the end-grain vessel I had recently made, plus some stored branches, plus later some new dead branches gathered from "the bushes" as we called them in elementary school.

The first step was to cut suitable lengths.

Ideally these pieces would be:
- a straight section of the branch,
- with a round cross-section
- no twig stubs in the bark sections
- with well-adhering bark and
- no major cracks.

The tree-length pieces were turned on the lathe using a spur center so a shaft could be formed in one end.

The shaft would allow the use of a chuck to hold the piece from a single end, allowing the other end to be free so the top of the tree could be shaped.

The branch in the back has a masking tape wrapping to keep the loose bark from flying off when turned. Unfortunately the branches from that particular tree (in-law's yard pruning) turned out to be too soft to successfully turn anyway.

This rather long composite photo shows a piece of Scots Pine being formed step by step.

The tree is cut off the shaft at the narrow section seen in the last image of the composite and then the bottom is sanded smooth.

The result is the tree shown here - one of the "large" ones at around 4" high.

This was a not-uncommon problem where less-than-secure bark flies off the piece, often at the thin "lower branch" location.

I usually had little success finding the small pieces of bark that flew off the thin sections so if the bark adhesion looked iffy I would try to cleanly cut some spare bark off the branch before turning. That's the source of these pieces.

I almost never had a full circle of bark to glue on so the circumference was pieced together from a number of segments. Some or all the segments would be glued on (often linked with masking tape for easier handling) and then would usually be wrapped with stretch-film to apply pressure while the glue dried. That's what's happening in this shot (which astute readers will notice is not actually the same tree as on the lathe above).

Then when the glue is dry the excess width of the bark needs to be made flush with the surrounding wood.

If I was in a daring mood, this could be done by re-cutting with a chisel. However this risks having the new bark fly off like the original, so mostly I took the safer route and just sanded it flush using a sanding drum on a Dremel.

OK, so in the middle of making trees I needed to do a little mini-project much too insignificant to rate its own web page. It was just an hour or so of turning a slightly sloped base for a liquid soap dispenser bottle.

This is like the toothpaste tube where when it is essentially empty you can get another week's worth of brushing by squeezing it really hard. In the case of liquid hand soap, when you get to the bottom of a pump bottle there's often another week's worth of hand washing there, made accessible by tilting the bottle to make sure the pickup hose is at the bottom. Well, who wants to do that every time? But if a guy had a tilted base, it could be turned to make sure the pickup hose was at the lowest point and the penny-pinching urges would be satisfied with an elegant, matches-the-other-bathroom-woodwork manner.

So this was a pretty simple matter of turning a base contoured to hold the plastic soap dispenser bottle, cutting it at a slight angle and applying some finish. I used Cherry to match the bathroom woodwork and these shots show the essential construction steps.

The base received some rubber feet and that was pretty much it.

So that was pretty much it. I'll have to see if I remember to use the base the next time the bottle is almost empty. Anyway, where were we? Oh yah - turning more trees:

It seemed to me that the more interesting-looking branches tended to be ones in the poorest shape. Many of the aging processes must also add some colour.

That was the case with this branch that looked to have a nice dark core but also a substantial crack. Turning branches with cracks is usually unsuccessful (pieces fly off) so on this one I filled the crack with epoxy to keep things together while turning.

And sure enough it made a rather handsome tree. The glued crack can be seen on the left side.

This was a piece cut from a fairly old tree. It wasn't very round or solid but it had a nicely coloured and figured core so I thought it was worth checking out.

Well judging by the colour of the top section, it probably would have made a nice-looking tree. Unfortunately it was a bit too rotten to spin at 1000 RPM without part of the bottom section flying off in what turned out to be an unrepairable fashion.

Ya win some, ya lose some.

Now here's a few shots of before-and-after branches and the resulting trees:

Eventually I decided I had enough trees.

While it isn't obvious from this shot, the three rows represent the "large", "medium" and "small" sizes of trees, aligned to make sure there was an appropriate number (14 as it turns out) of each size.

And rejects. There were rejects. Problems due to cracks, brittle wood, rotten wood, unrepairable missing bark patches and the odd turning error.

It wasn't pretty from a statistical viewpoint; 31% of the trees I turned ended up in Reject Forest.

That was it for the tree woodworking.

Before applying the finish I initialed and dated all the tree bases.

Then it was on to the finishing.

Once again I used two coats of Danish oil and here I'm applying the first coat with a small foam brush to one tree while it soaks into the wood on the four trees in the background.

After the oil sits on the wood for 30 minutes or so, the excess is wiped off with a cloth and the piece is left to dry.

My usual practise was to coat the trees in groups of six or so. That took around 40 minutes which was close to my limit of tolerance of doing finishing and wearing sweaty disposable gloves.

The second coat went slightly faster as the finish went on a bit better.

Everyone wearing two coats.

A close-up shot.

The range in diameters is more obvious from the top.

All the trees, obsessively arranged tallest to shortest.

I thought I'd make a few small bases on which to place the sets of trees. I'd actually made one or two of these last year (somehow completely unphotographed) and I used the same Cedar-end-grain approach.

I used a standard cedar 4x4 post as the source of wood. The bases needed to be 4 to 5 inches in diameter so a single slice wouldn't be large enough and they'd need to be made up by combining 3 or 4.

Here the post is producing slices of about 1/4" thickness.

About half the bases were made by combining four slices. After flattening the sides, pairs were glued together and then the pairs were combined as seen here.

I also made three-slice assemblies where the slices were cut to 120° before being fitted together. Due to the difficulty of clamping the odd angles, they were instead held together with masking tape while the glue dried.

I assigned the task of sanding the bases flat to the drum sander, running then through until all the saw marks were removed.

A few bases were cut circular and the edges were sanded with a circle-sanding jig on the belt sander.

The outlines of most of the bases followed the Cedar grain. This particular one is a 4-lobed shape.

All the bases had the edges rounded and after some coarse sanding by hand or with sanders, the final rounding was done using sandpaper strips as seen here.

I eventually figured I had enough bases. This is the whole group with all the sanding done.

The Cedar post I started with had a simple curving end grain pattern. For some more-interesting bases, I also picked up another post that incorporated the core of the tree and made a few bases from that.

The bases received three coats of polyurethane varnish. Here the first of the three is starting to dry.

Bases done.