You Have Chosen… Wisely
A long time ago, before The Wizard & Willow, there was Wood You Like to Buy. As pun shop names it was supreme, buy in a “pay the bills” kind of way it was less so. In retrospect, limiting the art I was selling to just wood for the sake of a dad joke was a bit of a strange decision. Hand made wooden things really trapped me into wood turning and furniture at the time, both of which are a bit pricey for an impulse or convention purchase. While I did hold on to a nice cushioned and speed felted gaming table, with a false top, extending side panels, cutouts for dice and pencils, folding legs, and all the extras a growing boy could ask for (it definitely didn’t just stay in my inventory so long I became attached), I wasn’t left with many of the wooden goblets I had turned.
I fondly remember working on a nice hefty goblet one night, turned from the pecan wood a tree had so nicely smashed into my garage roof so I wouldn’t run out of stock. I had just started listening to the first The Wheel of Time audio books, and I trimmed and turned well past my bed time as I got lost in the story. I got so excited to continue listening in fact that I continued finding excuses to work on the goblet for the next two days afterward. The second day was spent drawing multiple designs for inlay, then carving until I hadn’t any room left to put brass. The third day of work I re polished and stained the goblet, then with a few chapters left, I just sat on my couch to do a couple resin coats. Spinning the goblet by hand for 90 minutes each layer seemed so much more manageable with a good book, and there were multiple times I had forgotten to keep rotating the goblet and let drips form I had to clean off later.
Spending an exorbitantly long time polishing the goblet on my cheap harbor freight lathe at midnight as the last chapter of the book played is a night I’ll likely always remember. Especially since this goblet took 3x the time as I would have spent without the inlay and resin, and was never picked up off the old table of Wood You Like to Buy to be purchased at that price. I guess it was always destined to be here where it’s tree is, at the head of the game table on Saturday nights. A truly legendary item, letting everyone know who’s the master of the dungeons here.