Is driftwood good for wood burning?
Driftwood is excellent material for pyrography for one main reason: the water has already done half the preparation. Months or years of soaking and drying leach out sap and sugars, wash away loose bark and soft outer material, and knock the surface down to something close to sanded. What is left is the dense, sound part of the wood. It takes a clean line and it does not spit resin at the tip the way fresh pine does.
It also arrives with a design already in it. Water and stone round the ends, split the grain along its weak lines, and open up checks and forks. Fungus that got in while the wood lay wet leaves black spalt lines running through the pale surface — mineral-looking, sharp-edged, entirely free. People assume every line on one of my pieces is burned. Often the grain, a knot or a spalt line made the shape and the burning is answering it.
What to keep
- Sound and heavy for its size — it thuds rather than rattles when you tap it.
- Dry to the core, or dryable: a piece that has been out of the water long enough to grey on the surface.
- Fine, even grain, or interesting figure worth designing around: a knot, a fork, a clean spalt line.
- A shape you would want to keep. Pendant stock lives or dies on silhouette.
What to throw back
- Punky wood. If a thumbnail sinks in, the fibre has rotted and the tip will plough a trench instead of drawing a line.
- Anything still soaked. Wet wood steams, hisses, refuses to darken, and cracks as it dries afterwards.
- Milled or treated lumber. Pressure-treated offcuts, painted trim, old dock timber — treated wood releases genuinely dangerous fumes when heated. If it has a square edge and a mill mark, leave it.
- Deeply embedded sand and grit, which will dull every nib you own.
- Anything hosting something alive. Turn the log over, look, put it back if it is somebody's roof.
Lake Erie versus ocean drift
Freshwater drift has a real advantage: no salt. Ocean driftwood carries chloride deep into the fibre, and heating that gives off fumes you do not want in your face and pits metal nibs. Lake Erie wood needs no desalting at all. It is also predominantly what grows along the lake and its rivers — willow, cottonwood, maple, ash, the odd length of birch — rather than tropical hardwood, so the density range is fairly narrow and predictable once you have handled a few hundred pieces.
The other Lake Erie particularity is timing. The beach restocks with weather. I walk it roughly once a week, and I time the walks to storms and seiche-driven water level swings, because that is when the lake puts the good material up on the sand. A calm fortnight in August produces almost nothing; the morning after a hard northwesterly blow produces more than I can carry.
Preparing what you keep
Home from the walk: rinse the grit off in fresh water, scrub with a stiff brush, and let it dry properly. Slow drying indoors — weeks, not hours, stacked with air on all sides — is what stops checking. Then cut, sand lightly with the grain, and blow the dust off. Only then does the tool come out. Rushing the cure is the most common way a good piece of driftwood becomes a cracked piece of driftwood after you have already burned it.
Once burned, a finish matters more on drift than on milled wood, because the surface is more open. Beeswax, warmed and buffed in, sinks into that open grain and stops it drinking moisture back up. Everything here gets beeswax from our own hives, and nothing gets stain, because staining would flood the burn and defeat the point.