Some Basic Bud Vases

When trying to think of a project to make, I usually have in mind what I want to make, just not exactly a good idea of the style I’m after. It is at this point I usually Google “bud vase images” for ideas.

Case in point are these bud vases. I looked at a lot of pictures and this basic design caught my eye. The “split” can be anything, I decided on a symmetric split, but many of the pictures had asymmetric cuts.

The lowdown:
These are about 8” high, 2-5/8” square. The base is walnut and the primary wood is from my stash of jatoba flooring. Finish is natural colored Danish oil, satin spray poly topcoat.

The wood:
Wood doesn’t exactly grow on trees around here and with the prices of plain white oak passing the $5/bf. mark, jatoba flooring at around $4/bf. seems like a bargain. I bought a 25 sq. ft.”bundle” of unfinished “Brazilian Cherry”(a.k.a. jatoba). This flooring was excellent! The ordered width was 3” and a mix of lengths from 16” to 6’. Probably evenly split from flat sawn grain to rift/quarter sawn (these vases were made form the rift sawn).
The flooring is 3/4” thick with the usual edge and bottom profiling. Resawing off the bottom profile and trimming the tongue/groove yields material 5/8” thick and 2-7/8” wide. Perfect for a lot of projects. I just ordered another 50 sq. ft. of 5” wide material.

I can’t leave “simple” alone 8^)
With many of my projects, I wanted to try a new technique. This time it was a mitered rabbet joint

I hate gluing up boxes with mitered corners. Things tend to slip/slide around. The mitered rabbet eliminates this problem.

These vases were made by creating a “tube” out of wood. Most of the vases others had made used a solid chunk of wood. I wanted to use the jatoba and liked the consistent grain on all sides. Just like making table legs with consistent properties, the same ideas were applied here.

The mitered rabbet was a bit tricky, requiring exact setup and measuring. My attempt was, lets say, a bit crude:

You can see the gap, about 0.012”. I did do some trial cuts on test pieces, but after completing the cuts on the project pieces, I noticed the error 8^)
Here are the sides after cutting:

I figured out a flaw in my technique that I will fix next time. I also never verified my 45 deg setting. This resulted in a gap on the miter.

Jerry added an inlay on one of his box tops to visually divide the point where two boards were joined. I figured I could try this on my corners (why not?). I used my 1/16” kerf blade and ripped a slot on all the miters (after glue up). I slipped in walnut splines and viola!

In the future I’ll use a contrasting wood.

The tubes were then sliced into corners on the bandsaw and the curves refined with a template on the router table.
Screws secure the corners to the base.

Next time if I biff the miters, I’ll use a contrasting material as fill (maple, copper?). I also am thinking about filling the split with some decorative material (glass, copper, ???)

Thanks for following along!