Burned or already there? Reading wood grain

Somebody picks a pendant up, turns it to the light and asks how long the shading took. Often the honest answer is: that part is the tree. A driftwood surface arrives already covered in linework — rings, rays, checks, fungal staining — and a good deal of my job is deciding which of those lines to answer and which to leave alone.

Four things you are looking at

• Growth rings. Concentric on a cross-cut disc, long parallel stripes on a lengthwise cut. Regular, continuous, and they run right off the edge of the piece.
• Rays and figure. Faint lines crossing the rings, plus the shimmer that shows up when you tilt maple or ash. It changes as you move it — a burn does not.
• Spalt lines. Hard, thin, black-to-charcoal lines that wander, fork and sometimes stop dead. Fungus drew these while the wood lay wet. They look painted, and they are the single most-mistaken-for-burned feature.
• Burned lines. Slightly recessed, with a faint raised lip at the edges, and a tonal range from caramel to black that changes with pressure and speed. They stop and start where a hand stopped and started.

The fingertip test

Close your eyes and run a fingertip across the piece. A burn is felt: a shallow valley with a slight swelling either side, because heat drove the moisture out of the cells around the tip. Grain and spalt are flush with the surface — you see them, you do not feel them. Under raking light the difference is just as obvious, because a burned stroke throws a thin shadow into its own trough and a spalt line throws none.

Why I work this way round

It would be easier to sand a board flat and treat it as paper. But a knot is already the exact tonal weight of an eye, and a spalt line is already a river, and a check running out from a split is already a branch. Fighting that costs effort and produces something worse. So the design gets chosen after the piece is in my hand rather than before. Nature made the design. I'm just complimenting it.

One example I keep going back to: a cottonwood round with a knot slightly off-centre and a spalt line curving up past it. I burned nine short strokes and it became an animal looking sideways. This knot became an eye — I didn't plan that, the wood did. Nine strokes is not craftsmanship. Noticing was the work.

What this means for buying one

Two pendants with the same rune on them are not the same object, and cannot be. The rings sit differently, the spalt goes where it went, and the stave has to be placed to survive that. If you want an identical pair, I will tell you honestly that I cannot make one. If you want a piece nobody else has, this is the only kind of piece there is.

This knot became an eye — I didn't plan that, the wood did.