Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Flag Proposal #3

I've started the third of my flag series in order to work out some construction issues with what I am planning for my State of the Union flag. The curly yellow birch I've used for this one is the left over lumber after rough cutting what I needed.

With this piece, and future ones, I am trying to add more levels so that they are more sculptural. There is about a 1/4" difference between the stripes and another 1/8" inch added to the blue sections.

The bird's-eye maple was made up of a lot of heartwood so I had to bleach it in order to get a better blue on it.
After bleaching it a couple of times I still wasn't happy with the results so I did another search on how to bleach wood with lye and hydrogen peroxide and was able to find this excellent article by Jeff Jewitt. The mistake I was making was waiting too long to add the hydrogen peroxide after applying the lye. It needs to be done at the same time or very soon after.
It is still a long way from being finished but I needed to put it together in order to see how it is going. I'm trying to get each of the blue pieces to be a different color.
I think this is going to be the preferred orientation.

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