Well, as you may have read in the last post (where I blamed the problem on WordPress) and might have guessed from the original posting A new aesthetic for a sea grape, I lost the second half of that post and I need to recreate the ending.

The last thing you all saw was this pic:



With me patting myself on the back for a job well done in bending the branch with fire.

I’ll blame it on Hubris.

Here are the after pics.





The wood on the sea grape is pretty dense, which caused some of the burning with the carving, but it was also newly stripped of bark and, therefore, very wet. Wet wood won’t hold much detail and is terribly fibrous, hence the need for the torch to burn and dry out the wood.



And the rest of the pics.





I wish I could remember what I said in the post. I’m sure it was my best writing to date. The photos were stored in the blog’s media files, which means that I wrote it and I’m not insane…yet. At least I was able to find them. I had, literally and actually and truly, just erased them off of my phone about 15 minutes before I realized that the blog had eaten the second half of the post.

This was how the tree looked when I began, so hopefully and purposefully.



And after all the carving a few weeks ago.



Bobby….you remember Bobby, right?



Bobby took the tree home and it was his job to apply lime sulphur to the carved wood. If you’ve ever smelled lime sulphur you know why I let him do it. Phewee!

He also used my carving as a guide and did a really good job carving a second sea grape.

Here they are, then, white as bones.





And the tree Bobby did.





Not bad at all my friend.

Pretty good even.

He said that it took about ten coats of lime sulphur to cover up all the black burn marks.

And that’s all on that subject until we find some larger specimens with some wood to carve.

I’ll try to get one more post written today, (no promises though) to clear my phone of extra pics and make room for a photo record of my Louisiana Tour.

I leave tomorrow. Look out New Orleans, here I come!