Lilac a beautiful flower, a shrub and eventually a tree

If you are popping over from Etsy, please find your way back here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/233617831/badger-brush-for-shaving-free-engraving

Lilacs are Springs' beautiful lavender flowers. 

What is less well known is that lilacs are actually trees but very slow going trees.  The shrub form happens when the homeowner trims and maintains the form that produces the most flowers.

If one leaves the shrub (Siberian or Common lilacs) unattended or let to mature on its own, it will grow a trunk.  In a scant 40 years you will have a tree.  Not a huge tree.  a rather funny looking lilac tree that doesn't really flower.

This is the outside of the trunk which is about 6 inches around.

It's not terribly attractive and it feels very punky, soft and flaky.

But the inside is another matter completely!  Yes, it's violet! Red violet! red violet is the color of inertia! Absolutely 100% natural!  Okay enough (!).  But seriously, how cool is that?

What we have made are a good lots of handles for the shave bowls, a shave brush and are just beginning the finishing of a shave brush.

Handles for shave bowls:

Shaving Brush:

Another Handle for a wet shaving soap bowl

 

Etsy listing: https://www.etsy.com/listing/233617831/badger-brush-for-shaving-free-engraving

Below are another couple of pics of the lilac shave brush.  The swirls are completely independent of the way the trunk stood.  It is really quite magical. 

 

For the Wet shavers who pop by, the knot is a silvertip 65mmx22mm and has not bloomed yet.  In other terms, the brush part is 65mm tall and 22mm across the bottom of the knot.  Silvertip means it is a badger brush made from the natural hairs of badgers. 

The knot "not being in bloom", is that the brush part called the knot, appears kind of narrow and the bristles do not yet fall in an arc like they do after the shave brush has been used for a little while. 

This brush lives in NYC with a serious wet shaver.  He also has a shaving bowl or shaving scuttle the has a lilac handle.  It is very rare that one is able to harvest a lilac trunk that is this big.  We are very fortunate to have the bush that it came from in the side yard.  Someone must have planted it when the house was built in the early 1900's.  It was left to it's own devises for many, many years.  We are so fortunate to able to harvest it in a normal yard, in a normal small town in Pennsylvania.    

To go back to the Etsy listing:  https://www.etsy.com/listing/233617831/badger-brush-for-shaving-free-engraving

Wet Shaving Soap Bowl Scuttle

In working with spalted wood there are times we get voids.  Voids are usually places where the wood has broken down to eat into the wood. Many time it is a branch which the fungus and bacteria follow into the tree.

One of the challenges we face is how to approach the problem.  Bowls with holes make you no friends.

We decided to try filling the hole with a combination of clear epoxy and mother of pearl flakes. 

Here is the custom bowl we did for a customer in Maple with mother of pearl.

                                        

 

Here you can see the mother of pearl which has filled in to match the top and the bottom.  First we turn the bowl and them add the filler after the shape is finished and before the finishing coats go on.

 



 

Here it is from a little bit of a different angle.

Here is what the mother of pearl fill looks like inside the bowl.  

 

 

 

Our customer liked the Lilac Wood handle so he had some choices.  The lilac handles are on the left,  the two on the are maple.  They are dry fit (not anchored into the top yet).

 

Here's the maple handle on the top.



      Here is a lilac handle on the top.

 

 

This is the bowl after the handle is secured and the rest finished with the marine quality varnish.  Ahh the varnish...it is my love/hate relationship.  It is simply the best.  It is imported from Holland and is used on luxury yachts and boats.  It however, takes its time to dry and sometimes in cool weather it takes a couple of days.  But it can also move from a liquid to a gel form overnight for no reason. 

Here is a close up of the customers name in ruins.  It is a straight one-to-one translation in the major futhark. 

 

Here is the finished bowl with engraving.



 

 

 

 

 



Brush of a Lifetime Tall men and Big hands need a big brush

To show the large handle better here is a mahogany in comparison to the usual size. The smaller brush knot size is 22mm x 65mm the larger one is 30mmx 75mm.

Reclaimed Beams and Custom Wet Shaving Brushes

With another custom brush, we started with a Douglas Fir request. Harder to find than I thought it would. The older growth wood in the Pacific Northwest, can be found in reclaimed barns but most of those dealers have a zillion board feet. Our sizes are too small for their operations. We were lucky to find a reclaiming company in Quakertown, PA that has reclaimed pine beams.



 We got one that will not only provide these pieces, but will go into a limited addition set of brushes that we will be making which will be numbered.

We are very keen to find out what is on the inside. Here are the pictures of the pine beam. by counting the rings, we came up with an approximate start date for the tree about 1622. Too cool. We are also getting an old growth mahogany piece that was a banister. It was rescued from a house demolition.  Those will also be numbered brushes.

Custom Shaving Brushes and Flame Box Elder

Another custom Badger Brush that went to live in Singapore. We have had a piece of flame box elder for close to two years. The color of the wood is just amazing. It's a lot of work to track down interesting pieces of wood. First I have to scour the usual sites, ebay, nc woods, and our neighborhood. Actually, some of our best apple wood that has come from pruning our apple trees. One of the best parts is that the handle and the bowl are scaled up to his hand.

Family Insignia on custom wet shaving brush

We have enjoyed working with another customer. Having created an insignia or a family crest, we had some work to with Corel to get it on the Mahogany brush handle. It was really great that the importing the file into Corel went so well.

Exciting new Developments

Having been away working hard there a few projects I would like to share. We have been doing a lot of custom work for people. This brush is in Latin on a mahogany handle. Wonderful to work with the folks of Badger and Blade and the Shavenook bulletin boards.