Ritual accompaniment

Final Board, I choose to add color pencil highlights to show the wood grain and highlights.

IN ACTION

 A detail view of the grip.

I choose an ebony colored stain and sanded it till the grain cam through. I like the burnt wood look it delivered. This picture is prior to treating it with polyurethane. 

Success with magnets! Insetted and glued in.

Chiseling out the wood for the magnets...

Before more sanding and being treated with stain.

I used this piece to experiment how i wanted to manipulate the wood of my final product, notice the uneven surface which is what my final looked like before sanding. I'm glad i practiced my ideas before manipulating my final pieces given this was my first time working with wood.

A section cut and some detail views of what I thought my final product would look like. This is before I switched from the rubber gripping idea (seen above) to the insetted magnets idea. I also thought it would be cool to carve CLEAN into the bottom given it is a part of my hygienic routine, but since I am neither expert chiseler quite yet and did not have a laser cutter, I thought it would be best to just keep it clean in my final product.

I sketched this when we were talking about our designs, a goofy looking shape that led to my final product. Talking about why the design is the way it is often is what sparks ideas in my experience.

Originally my idea was is mundane as the object itself, based off of what I thought i could do and what i had seen before.

A sketch of the ritual object itself. I identified some of its aspects to help me figure out some ideas.

For this project I created two accessories to an object I use ritually. The object of my choice was my toothbrush which i have used every morning and evening of my civilized life, ritually. Our restrictions in this project were that one of the objects had to be made out of wood, and the other of our own choice. At first my ideas bounces mainly off of the concepts of familiar designs. When talking about ideas for this project I sketched out a curvy hollowed container for my toothbrush adorned with sanded down curves on it's cap much like that of the curvy rubber gripping on my ritual object. I had never worked with wood before until this project so I tried to get a good understanding of how I would go about achieving this design before I went to the wood shop. Since my design was relatively curvy I sanded down the curved gripping of the cap of the container. Prior to that i cut 2 five inch cylinders off a piece of about a poplar dow with about 2 inch in diameter. I hollowed each piece out about 4 inches and the continued to sand it the next day in order do achieve the curvy grip I was hoping for. 

Originally planning to introduce the second material to the cap in the form of rubber gripping of sorts, I got the suggestion to think about magnetizing the two parts together. Personally, I loved the idea and carried forth with it soon afterward. The trick was finding magnets that were both strong enough to hold the two pieces together and yet small enough to fit into the edge surrounding the hallowed out parts which is only roughly about 1/4 inch thick. After various trips to different hardware stores, I found some which had the magnetic quality I wanted, but was a bit too big. To fix this I broke the magnets in half, and they ended up being the right size for my objects. The next step was chiseling out the wood in order to inset the magnets. Although the chiseling took much longer than I expected, it was successful and the magnets fit nicely with some "hard as nails" glue to keep them in there...that wasn't enough. Neither was an E600 glue I tried. After these failed attempts to secure these temperamental magnets I invested in some gorilla glue epoxy and it worked wonderfully, at last. After sanding down the pieces a bit more the final step was to add some wood stain. I choose the darkest; an ebony stain. After I applied polyurethane to protect it from water that could very well damage it, given it comes in contact with my toothbrush.Working with wood was definitely had a process to it. Even with the loud machinery, working in the wood shop had a sense of calm to it, maybe it was the concentration of manipulating material with big machines, but certainly after this project I'd like to see what I could make next.