This week’s crafting orientated blog is an exciting one as we were joined by, that handsome carpenter off of the television – Wayne Perry, The TV Carpenter.
Woo!!
As his name suggests, Wayne knows his way around a saw and some wood – so it was very interesting to see how he got on crafting with WoodUbend.
So, on with our candle holder project!
On the face of it, this project seems like you might need some specialist knowledge which goes beyond just basic crafting. The reality is though, you don’t. As the title of this blog suggests, it’s easy, the beauty of it is, when you’re finished – it looks like something straight out of a home decor store. Interestingly, this project didn’t start out with WoodUbend, it didn’t even start out with wood…it started out with copper!
If you have some old copper piping laying about, then this project is perfect for you. We had one long length of copper, so the first port of call was to cut that down into three – a longer piece for the middle and which would be flanked by two shorter pieces. Never cut copper pipe before? Don’t fret it’s simple! Simply mark up your pipe where it needs cutting and get yourself a pipe cutter (they’re relatively inexpensive and can be bought off Amazon) next, you want to line up your mark with the blade, pop the pipe in, and simply turn it. The blade will score the copper, keep turning and it will eventually slice though. Easy!
Once our pipes were cut it was time to start creating the base of our candle holder. For this we needed our drill! Again, power tools aren’t synonymous with crafting – but again – it’s simple. We had a 10mm pipe so we needed to drill three holes just slightly bigger than the size of the pipes (I’ll explain why in a bit).
Before we start drilling, we need to know where to drill! In order to mark out where our candle stick holders would go we chose three X1008 WoodUbend backplates and spaced them out evenly across a block of wood. This block of wood will eventually form the base of our candelabra crafting creation! Drill spots marked up we got to drilling using a flat bit, again this would be slightly bigger than our 10mm pipes.
Drilling three little holes, we put the copper pipe caps in the holes – a good tip is to fit the pipe caps into the holes, place a spare bit of wood over the top and hit that with a hammer to really drive them in. A nice tight fight for our pipe caps meant meant that the candle stick holders would fit perfectly into the caps and wouldn’t wobble around.
Right…on with the WoodUbend – a bit more traditional crafting you might be much more familiar with. As WoodUbend mouldings have all the properties of wood, due to their very high wood content, they can be drilled (as well as sanded, stained, distressed, painted, waxed etc). So, guess what’s coming next?
Yep, a little more drilling.
Using the same flat drill bit we drilled a hole in two of our three X1008 backplate mouldings, and left the third one for an experiment. As the mouldings have a little hole in the middle, we knew exactly where to drill, placing the spike of the drill bit onto the hole, we had two perfectly round holes which our copper pipes would fit in.
Experiment time! We heated up the third X1008 backplate moulding, WoodUbend mouldings can be heated with a heat gun, hair dryer or even on a griddle, once it was sufficiently warm and pliable, our experiment could commence. We got a spare bit of the 10mm copper pipe hammered the pipe right through the middle of the moulding, just like a cookie cutter. Experiment success, another way of cutting your mouldings during your crafty projects (if you happen to have spare piping to hand).
Right, onto gluing, I might be teaching you to suck eggs a little here but when using WoodUbend, ensure you’re using a good quality wood glue to stick it to your substrate. It’s equally important to ensure that your moulding is nice and warm – this helps activate the glue and gives the moulding a chance to really contour with and adhere to the surface. All you WoodUbend crafting veterans out there should already be well aware of that. Once the three backplate mouldings were properly lined up and stuck down we could move on.
On with the trim. For this particular crafting project, we used TR0117, heating it and wrapping it around the base of our candle holder. Now, another good crafting tip is when you’re using your trim, try to keep it coiled up. Keeping the moulding coiled up makes it much easier to handle and the coil will retain the heat better, meaning your trim will stay bendier for longer. A second WoodUbend top crafting tip is that it’s far easier to apply your wood glue to the surface rather than to the back of the moulding when working with trims.
Wayne, being the WoodUbend novice he is, cut the trip a little short (a cardinal sin for a TV carpenter). If you’ve done the same – don’t fret – WoodUbend mouldings can stretch up to around 10% of their length; provided you’ve not cut it too short, you can simply stretch out your moulding and hide your mistake. See, told you this was easy crafting.
Posh Chalk time! We painted the base using the Posh Chalk Paste in Black Carbon, spritzing occasionally in order to thin the paste out and help it move on the surface. As the pastes are water based, you don’t need anything more drastic than a simple water spritzer, you can even water them down into a wash if you really want to. They’re really quick drying too, so once we’d finished up painting, making sure to get into all the nooks and crannies of the mouldings we could move straight onto dry brushing with the Posh Chalk Pigments.
There was only one colour we could really use with this crafting project wasn’t there. Of course, we went for copper!
Mixing up just a little bit with the brand new Posh Chalk Deluxe Infusor, we gently dry brushed over the mouldings, picking out all their intricate details.
All that was left now was to pop the candles in. Now our candles were a little larger in diameter than our 10mm pipes – not to worry! All you need is what is known as a reducer, a small pipe joint which is fatter at one and and thinner at the other. We got ourselves three 10mm reducers and we were good to go.
Easy, peasy crafting with Wayne Perrey, The TV carpenter!
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