Woodturning Experiment Gone WRONG - How NOT to Dye a Wood Bowl

So I started roughing this bowl out yesterday, and it was severely out of balance. I didn't cut it in half, this is a full log, it was a crotch piece oak. And after I thought about it, I said, eh, why not start filming it? Give these guys an extra video. So I'm not sure exactly what this is going to be yet, but welcome, and I hope you enjoy the ride. I'm probably going to turn this bowl over a few days, just come out an hour or two after work each day. See where it takes me. I don't like where that's taking me. So the crack's still there, right here, but by the time I hit my mortise, it should be gone. Alright, so when I originally got this piece, oh, and by the way, we're sanded to about 120 right now. 400 on this, because I don't really care if this gets dyed much, but 120 on the general route side. So, when I started this piece, my plan was to, uh, ebonize it, but I kind of want to show y'all another technique I've been experimenting with, it's not foolproof yet, but you know, sometimes if I show an idea of mine, the next person along might figure out a way to kind of nail it. When I do my dyeing, or what I've been experimenting with at least so far, is I put a layer of dye on there, just regular dye, this is an alcohol-based dye, but then since it's an alcohol-based dye, I also add it into my shellac, and I get some pretty cool effects, I think. As you can see, I'm being pretty sloppy right now, because this is when I'm basically just trying to flood it. We might even add some blue on the next couple coats, to get it more of a teal color. It's hideous, right? But just so y'all are aware, I added some blue to this, so now we got much more of a, a true teal color going. We're just gonna kind of dollop it on again. Let it go where it wants to go. Again, experimental technique. Uh, it might turn out like ----, who knows. I've had luck doing this with the shellac in there, this little technique of just kind of letting it go wherever it wants to go. This is new. I kind of liked what was happening with it, so. Almost kind of like watercolors, huh? Alright, so, uh, I'm pretty happy with it. I like the way it looks. It's got that teal-ish, some darker spots, and some tear-out where it absorbed more. This supposed to look pretty funky, though, so we're gonna sand it back. I got 400 on here now, and we're gonna sand it back a little bit, see how it looks. Might switch it back down. I might, if it's not sanding back as much as I want, I'll go down to 220, you know? We'll just kind of play it by ear, see what happens. Alright, bug holes are drilled out, but that's no big deal. So let me show you what we're doing down over here. This is the dye that I had left over. I added half of a nip of blue into this, just to give us a little bit different tone. If you don't know what that is, then I'll show you these little measuring spoons you can buy on Amazon that are actually smaller than, you know, an eighth of a teaspoon. It's super small tablespoons. And I don't have much shellac left outside. This is a one-pound cut, so I'll add this. I'll probably just go ahead and throw in this garnet as well. And that'll get us around a half a pound cut, just looking at volume, you know. It's a very rough guess. And then when I go in for tonight, I will make some more. So now we have a dyed blue shellac. Very thin cut, but basically a sealer. We'll see how this turns out. I'm really not 100% sure. But remember, it's got shellac in it, so you don't want to play with it too much, or else you're going to get a lot of streaks. So we'll let that dry for a little bit. We'll come back in with a few more coats. I know there's a lot of glare on there now because it's shiny, but that first coat of shellac had dried in and sealed up, so I'm just going back and putting a super heavy coat, letting whatever will absorb, absorb. So I definitely don't have this technique down to a science or anything yet, and who knows, it might just end up being worthless. But I think there's something here. There's something here worth exploring. And I encourage others, you know, I'm not one of those guys that gets bent out of shape when I see people mentioning or doing an idea that I had, because we're all here to get inspired by each other. I'd love to see more people experimenting with putting this dye in shellac, and you can also color lacquer, basically anything solvent-based. This bowl will end up looking good. I know it. No matter what I do to it, it's going to look good because I've got a plan B, plan C, plan E, plan F. So anyways, I'm going to let it be, and I'll see you tomorrow. So we're back about three or four days later. I don't know. I can't remember exactly what I was doing this, so I'm going to hit it with some 150. I believe I wanted to knock back some of the green. I know this was shellac. Or dye. I know I had some dye with shellac in here. I don't know. Let's just sand it and see what happens. Right?