Re-Purposed

By now, I’m sure my wife is used to me saying “Don’t throw that away, I can use that.”

My wife also loves this one Christmas scented candle from that place in the mall. She doesn’t fight the crowds on Candle Day. She catches them on sale a few days before, so she already has her annual inventory by then.

A few days after Christmas, I caught her about to throw away the last glass jar from this holiday’s stash.

“Don’t throw that away, I can use that.”

Paint stripper and acetone wouldn’t get rid of the green paint, but some scrubbing with steel wool eventually took care of it.

So, what’s the next step?

A little while back I cut out a blank from some locally sourced cypress (It’s good to have a friend with a sawmill).

Since the grain direction is always changing as the blank spins, a round-nosed scraper is a good place to start for face-turning. It makes pretty quick work of truing up the blank.

The face you’re looking at will be the bottom of the lid, so a recess in the middle means we can turn the blank around and mount it on the 4-jaw chuck to turn the top of the lid.

I also turned the bottom 1/2″ of the lid down to match the inner diameter of the glass jar. The rest of the lid was turned to match the jar’s outer diameter

After the lid was flipped around, the top got dished out, and then, it’s time for some sandpaper.

After all the turning and sanding, a couple coats of oil finished this project off.

Not surprisingly, my wife has already claimed this one. I figured she could use it for a storage container, and the dished out lid could give her a place to temporarily hold some odds and ends.

I bet she saves all of the empties this year.