Please consider your intended purpose of the piece. Wood and water are enemies! Never allow liquids to come into direct contact with wood for any longer than absolutely necessary. Resin can easily scratch and cannot take high temperatures.
If you want a bowl that you use every day to mix food, salad, drink from, or eat soup out of, I would not choose a resin bowl or one with a resin finish. A straight up eating bowl would be solid wood with a more "rustic" feel, but just as beautiful, super functional, and would last forever. Sure, resin is colorful and shiny, but it is also going to wear over time. A little resin accent is fine, but the more moisture and metal utensils it might see, the less resin you would want.
If you wanted something that was going to hold dry goods or fruit or to just use as an art/display piece, then you can go resin crazy! All of my bowls can be used with dry good, e.g., candy, fruit, chips, popcorn, nuts.
Some people wish to use by bowls and taller vases to hold flowers or plants. This is fine so long as they have a LINER. You can find inexpensive liners at many hardware stores or (better) you can use 1L or 2L bottles cut to height as a liner. These prevent water from sitting on the wood/resin and can be swapped out when they get old.
Most people buy my resin bowls for dry use or for their pure artistic value, e.g., as a center piece or for display. I can also embed just about anything you want into the epoxy, so long as I can carve it, mold it, etc. Really, it is just about imagination at that point. If you have a vision, let’s work together to make it a reality.
Yes. All of the finishes that I use are food-contact safe. I use pharmaceutical grade mineral oil, organic beeswax, potable ethanol, food grade shellac, and Tried and True linseed oil. Importantly, I ONLY use resins from Designer Epoxy from Canada, which are rated safe for food contact.
Although the resins are food-contact safe, there are some important rules: You DO NOT want to use the resins bowls for anything hot (max 160F, so no tea/coffee in a resin cup). Really, you should not use any wood product for hot beverages, as the thermal expansion and contraction, especially when water is added to the mix, will eventually cause the wood to crack. Yes, you see wood mugs sold to hold hot beverages at some sites; I do not recommend that people use those. You also should not use resin to hold high alcohol beverages such as liquor. Alcohol can dissolve resin over time. You should also not cut on a resin board (it will scratch). I do sell some cutting boards with resin designs on the edges. These are fine, as one usually cuts through the center of a board. But resin will not last long with direct knife cuts. With all of that said, for incidental contact such as a cheese or charcuterie board, dry goods or fruit, or brief contact with cold/room temp foods/liquids, the resin that I use is perfectly safe.
You can read the Safety Data Sheets (SDS) on both Tried and True and Designer Epoxy's sites (links above). Never buy from a company that is unwilling to provide their safety data sheets.
Absolutely! Want something is a different color? A different species? Please contact me to discuss. Generally speaking, I will give you an estimate of the price ahead of time and require 50% down prior to beginning the work. If the piece is complicated and requires design, I might also need to charge a consulting fee. Send me a message and we can work out the details.
Can I make an heirloom piece from that special tree in your yard? The answer is: Maybe. I am always up to try. But, the difficulty here is that the type of wood, the condition, and how it has been handled all greatly affect the outcome of the final product. If I cannot control the variables, that means that the outcome might not be consistent with your expectations. You just never know what a log will look like when you cut into it. So, I cannot make any promises. But, I am always up for a challenge. Contact me and we can discuss the options.
Almost all of the wood that I use comes from my farm in southeastern Pennsylvania. Thus, I have access to a wide range of Eastern temperate species as well as those pesky invasive and ornamental species that people have brought in over the years.
Please note that the list is not exhaustive (new species come down all the time) and I may not have stock available in all species at all times.
Apple
This is the hardest of all of the woods on my farm. The wood that I use here came from the original tree that was knocked down in a tornado (read “My Story" if you care). It was a tree in my little orchard. I do not know the subspecies, but it produced very tasty eating apples (so it was some eating apple cultivar). The wood smells SO GOOD. It does not smell like apples, but it is super sweet smelling. This is why people use it to smoke things like bacon.
White ash
Ash was traditionally used to make baseball bats. On the east coast, the ash borer beetle has killed most of them, so there are very few trees left living, although there is a whole lot of it right now in lumber production.
River birch
Birch is a pretty soft hardwood. Unlike its cousin, paper birch, which has white, paper-like bark and likes to grow straight, this species loves to “go rouge” and leans, bends, and twists and has flaky golden bark. Birch is good for bowls and carving, especially utensils, since it tends not to have much of a flavor, which is why it is used for things like toothpicks and popsicle sticks.
Box elder
Box elder is technically a maple, although no one really talks about it that way. It is the “black sheep” of the wood family. Why? It stinks. It is pretty. With some spalting, it can turn red or "flame". It makes fine items, but it smells a little like vinegar when you cut/sand it. Interestingly, it also looks a whole lot like poison ivy, so when it is young, people freak out about it when they see it. The smell, like the wood itself, is harmless.
Eastern hemlock
Hemlock is one of the hardest of the softwoods. It is sometimes nicknamed “hemrock”. I make furniture and such out of it. Sometimes I will make bowls out of it
Black locust
This is my favorite tree species of all time. This is technically not the hardest on the property (but just by a few points), but it is one of the coolest. Black locust IS the hardest NATIVE tree (competes with Osage Orange, which I do not have) in North America. (Apple is introduced from Kazakhstan). But black locust is considerably stronger than apple with amazing elasticity and strength stats! Locust is an incredibly tough wood, which will make it difficult to carve, cut, or turn (beyond its hardness rating). The reason is that it is cross grained – the grains go in both directions – and the pores are sealed tight. Usually with wood, cutting with the grain is easier than against. Not necessarily with locust – there is no real “with the grain”. The result is a super tough wood in all directions.
This species was traditionally used for pegs, wagon wheels, ladder rungs, and even nails (yes, you can pound it into other wood!). While trying to make pegs from this wood several years back, I ended up pushing so hard that I slipped and cut my finger off in a band saw (bad day). Because the pores are sealed, it resists water and bugs and does not rot quickly, so it is often used for posts and fences. But, after all of this, once you get the wood worked and sanded, it has a shine like no other wood. You can actually polish it with sandpaper to the point that it looks varnished. The chatoyancy (derived from French for shine like a cat’s eye) is amazing. It can actually look like the semi-precious gem tiger's eye.
I also have very limited honey locust, the species of locust with the giant "acacia-like" thorns.
Sugar maple
This is the classic maple of woodworking. Tried and true!
Spalted maple
Not another species, but a technique. Spalting is the controlled decay of the wood. I let it sit on the ground for a bit and it gets infected with fungus. Then I dry it. This creates black lines, especially in the sap wood. Spalting is fairly common in maple, but you can also see some in other hardwoods (e.g., ash, oak, walnut). Softwoods are typically not spalted because they cannot take the decay – they just fall apart.
White oak
Another classic. This wood makes great bowls, boards, spoons, and furniture that will last a lifetime if properly cared for. This is also the species coveted for making barrels.
White pine
OK, this this might not be the most interesting wood. You can get this species (or similar) at any big box store. But, hear me out… when it fell, this tree was well over 120 years old (I counted the rings; that was my conservative estimate). AND (here’s the cool part) it was hit by lightning. This tree stood in a row of three by my barn and was planted in the late 1800s. They were massive, beautiful trees and then one evening a storm came in. I love to watch storms, being originally from Indiana where we got tornados and huge, dangerous storms, and so I was outside watching this one. I was standing on my front porch about 150 ft from the tree when it was hit. It was dark, so the flash was blinding; but more so, the sound was deafening. I could not hear for ~30 seconds after the flash. Then I smelled the smoke. I thought that the barn was on fire, but I could not check or do anything about it (because of the crazy storm) and hoped that the rain would put it out. The barn was fine. The tree was not. What does being hit by lighting do to the wood? Probably nothing. I removed the charred parts and much of the tree was turned into unusable “toothpicks”. But it’s a cool story that carries on in the finished pieces!
Black walnut
This is my second favorite tree species. This wood was also from one of the trees knocked down in the tornado (read “My story ” below if you care). It has a bit of spalting on the sapwood, and the heart wood is deep purple.
Black willow
This tree was another taken down by that aforementioned tornado. But it was in not-so-great shape to start with (it was coming down no matter what). Willow is not something that you see a lot of, and the “wormy” willow even less so. You see wormy other species (chestnut was super popular historically), but not willow. It is soft, so would need to be incorporated into resin. I also only have slabs of this, so not enough to do blanks. But, the holes and the resin would create some cool effects.
If you are interested in the hardness and other stats for these woods, check out the Wood Database. It is a great website for general information, tips for handling and processing, and identification of wood species.