I kept making different shapes and trying different approaches to making the bottle openers using simple approaches. The following two actually did use the lathe to provide the body shape, but could have been done with a scroll or band saw (or any other curve cutting saw). The focus on these two is really on Christmas – so I used the basics for the idea – a snow man and a tree.
Since color was required, and I wanted the finish to still show the wood pattern, I dropped back to a technique I picked up when teaching a youth group a while back. Acrylic paint (any type) dillutes in water – it doesn’t really thin the paint as it dillutes it. The video on this post walks through how simple this approach is. The wood used is maple, which has a very light fiber pattern, the paint was thinned out quite a bit. Don’t worry about that, as you do yours, the paint can be layered on the wood to increase the color if needed. In this case I needed to perform that for the green on the christmas tree.
The other “painting” tool I used on these is simply a permanent black marker. This should hold up for a bit, but I expect it will make some form of change over time… we shall see.
If you are in the Leesburg, Va area – there are 3 bottle openers on display for some period. You don’t have to use a lathe to make your own, so feel free to stop in and talk about ideas on a saturday – I’m usually there then.
Brian's Workbench 