First Wedding Anniverary: Origami Flowers in a Woodturned Vase

Many months ago (almost a year ago by now), Joyce and I had our first wedding anniversary. As the date approached, I had to determine what sort of gift I needed to get for the occasion. Once I took a look online to see what the traditional gift was for the first year (paper), I realized that it was an optimal opportunity to make a gift.

The first thing that struck me was making some sort of origami flowers. After deciding that roses would be a nice flower to try, I started looking for tutorials. I ended up leveraging these three links:

• List of Origami Roses to choose
• Origami Rose Instructions (directions & video)
• How to make an Origami Rose (video)
  

You will notice that I have no pictures of this process, because it was maybe the most frustrating thing I’ve done in a long time. It isn’t a stretch to say I was cranking out a flower every 2-3 hours. I had done origami before…when I was a kid…but I didn’t remember it being anywhere near that hard.

Fortunately, prior to making the roses, I had a much easier time turning a vase to hold the flowers. I looked online for inspiration, and came across a video of a younger clone of myself who showed how he turned a bud vase. Using the following videos as templates for some of the work, I was able to make a vase in a much more relaxing manner.

• Woodturning a small simple vase
• Woodturning projects: miniature bud vase

Overall, I was quite pleased with the results. I ended up using some tools that have caused quite a bit of frustration for me in the past (spindle gouge), and it was my first attempt at a project that wasn’t a bowl and required using a tenon and drilling a hole (and not having the vase break off and go flying).

Here are some pictures of the vase making process on the lathe, starting with the block of wood, shaving it down into a vase on the outside, drill a hole on the inside, and then the final product.