Blocks -- # 1

  When I made the legs for the desk addition that I blogged about a few weeks back, I ended up with some hard maple wood chunks left over.   I also had a few walnut pieces laying around from when I was into the wine bottle stopper phase of life.   While those chunks would have made a nice little campfire for me to stare at some cool summer evening, I just did not like the idea of tossing those end pieces away.   So the feeling was that maybe I could get back into making a few little toy blocks for the grand kid's to play with when they come.  (Of course most of the grand kids are past the "playing with the blocks" phase and into playing with smart phones phase, but there are a few little ones around yet.)

  The wood working club that I belong to has made thousands of blocks which have been given to the local care teams and to various nursery organizations in the area.   I think at last count there has been a total of more than 48,000 blocks made by our local club members.    I have to admit that in the past I  have not been what one would call "a big block manufacturer".    I have donated 250 blocks or so to the club for that cause and then I was ready to move on to the next project.     All the blocks made have to meet the 1 1/2 inch specs.    In other words they are 1 1/2 inch cubes.    As I am writing this there was a little guilt buzz that circled my brain, but it seems to have passed.
 

   What really brought on this block making idea was the fact that I did have some small pieces of this nice white maple laying around and  I had seen a YouTube video where some guy had used "Rit" clothing dye to dye wood.     I had been thinking of a future project where I wanted to accent some wood spines with color.   This same thinking process (which doesn't happen very often lately) opened the door to testing the clothing dye theory on wood.   
   So off to Walmart I went to purchase some of this "Rit" dye.   I say Walmart because I could not seem to find this dye in a lot of other stores.

  I ended up buying the three basic colors - Yellow, Blue, and Red.   From there I tried mixing parts of those three dyes to create other colors.    I had to apply a couple ofcoats to make the colors stand out, but I think I got the results that I wanted to get. 
   What really happened was that I had fun playing with the blocks and got on a roll wanting to make several more.   So many more that I think I will blog about all this block making fun again next week.   
     It seemed like the plain white maple was the easiest to dye.    Oak, cherry, and walnut just did not work as well.    The sad part is that now I have decided not to throw any wood away that is larger than an inch and one half.

 
   Here it was April 18th and the snow just keeps on coming.  I used to tell the wife's cat that some day we will get to enjoy a campfire together, (me staring at burning wood -the cat dreaming of getting one of us to scratch her ears) but now the wood saved for use in the fire pit looks to be smaller than kindling?