wedding date tea light holder

This is the now finished tea light holder I made for my sister’s wedding. As you can see she hasn’t got it yet, so shhhhht. I’m sorry for the bad quality of the pictures but I guess it’s better to use them than never post the project. Well ,the camera stuff is another story …

It’s a lamination of seven strips of wood. I used smoked oak and “copper oak”. That’s what they called it at the saw mill.

I experimented with a Dremel tool for the numbers but found that my router worked better. I spray mounted a paper template on top and went at it. After removing it and colouring the letters with a gold acrylic paint from the art shop a pass with the random orbit sander removed the rest of the paper and excess paint on top. I then drilled the holes for the tea light glass inserts and put chair pads underneath to elevate it a bit. It looked like a brick when it was lying flat on the table :-) The pads have pretty long nails so I predrilled for the holes. The edges are chamfered on the router table with corners clipped off at 45 degrees.

After that a couple of coats of water based spray laquer and a last finish with wax were added.

My sister can’t possibly know how much time went into this small piece. Most of the time was worrying I might make a mistake a mess it all up in the last steps. This is why it slowed down the further I got.

I nearly got a heart attack when I was setting up the router, let it run to see if the bit was in tight and pushed it down when I got up from the shop stool. I really hated myself that moment. So I had to move the numbers slighly to the left to let that hole fall into the first number. First thing my wife said when I showed it to her: Oh, the numers are off center ….... (looking at my face) ....... oh, and it’s of course the most beautiful …...

Well, enough words, I hope she’ll like it.

-- Alex ----- Bavaria in Germany