Life has its hard moments and soft moments; good ones, and rotten ones. It is light and dark, yin and yang, and doesn’t always seem to come together. As it is with life, it is with this art pot as well. It’s perfect as is to display as an art piece, or to add silk flowers to for a vase. Heck, it would be a decent pencil holder if you wanted. The beauty of this, just like life itself, is that you can do whatever you want with it.

One side is darker, solid, and made of live oak. The other side is lighter, softer, and had some rot (that was turned away). That side is Silver Maple. Both sides came from trees removed from that yards of friends here in North Texas. And just like life, if you look close, you’ll see that it doesn’t quite line up, and even the good sides have some issues.

It was a fun one to make. Once the pieces were selected, I had to cut them to similar sizes and then use a planer to create two flat sides to laminate together. As you can see, I still need to practice with the planer as a few corners fell a little short of lining up. The inside does have a good bit of tear out (sanded down but still there) as I had to work between hollowing out alternating hard and soft woods.

This piece was originally a challenge response for the North Texas Woodworkers Association. The challenge topic was lamination. Since lamination is really nothing more than glueing two or more pieces of wood together, I took it to heart and glued two blocks of different local woods together and threw it on the lathe. The result is this piece.