Wood Burning 101 - Wood Burn a Coaster

1. Introduction Wood Burn Coaster: Hi, I'm Kasey. I'm an artist that loves to make functional art pieces. A few years ago, I walked into a store and I found one burner on sale for $7, and I've never looked back. I've now what burned hundreds of coasters and I saw them in store and online. Your class project will be to what, burn your state onto a wind coaster. I will go over all of the materials you need for this class. I will go through how to select your design, how to transfer it onto your coaster, how to burn your coaster. Show you two different ways to seal it. One with varnish and one with resin. This is a beginner course. You don't need any previous experience in wood-burning to take this class. Wood-burning is such a fun hobby. You can use it on so many different projects and I'm excited to show you all got it. Let's go have some fun. 2. Materials Needed: First we need to gather our materials out of all the hobbies I love. I feel like this is one of the easiest in terms of materials you need. We're going to need wood to burn on. For this class, we're going to be using a basswood coaster and find these would coasters at my local craft store, you will need a wood-burning tool. Is the Walnut Hollow brand The great tool to start with? That just has an on and off switch. There is no heat setting. We're going to need our design. I have my Minnesota State prints it out with a heart on it. You can print out your state, put a heart on it or draw it on if you would like. As you can see, I already have tape on it. We'll be using that to tape it down onto our coaster. We will need transfer paper, carbon paper. And when you're putting it on your design, you will be putting the shiny side down. You can use this dotting tool or pencil. It is helpful to have a respirator. We'll go over more of this in the safety section. I also keep a fan nearby so that blow the smoke away so it's not going straight into your lungs, a sanding block. We will use this for a couple of things. This is the varnish will use for the back and the front end will use a rag to apply the varnish. 3. Wood Burning Safety : Now that we have the supplies covered, I want to go over safety. You want to make sure that the one you're burning on is raw wood. Certain woods can be chemically treated. You don't want to be breathing in those fumes. It's important to wear a face mask when you're wood-burning. Specifically, this 3M respirator mask has organic cartridges and you'll also want to work in a well ventilated area. I use this Mini fan to put near my work area so that I can blow the smoke away. I should also mention that both of my wet burners that I've purchased have come with these metal holders. So you tape this surface down to a table. And then when you're putting your wood burner down, it rests in here so that you just keep it safe when you turn it off, and that it's not going to slide around on your table and accidentally burn something. Would burners can get pretty hot after working with them for awhile and take some breaks with it just because it does get hot around here. There are finger guards you can purchase. I don't personally have one. Just a reminder to take some breaks, let it cool down. If it does get too warm or if you are wood burner doesn't have a temperature gauge just like this one that I'm using. 4. Choosing our Design : There are a lot of options for choosing your designs. You can find it online, you can find them in books, you can print them off yourself. You can purchase them. I found an outline of Minnesota and then I put it into a Word document and scaled it down to the size that I wanted, I printed it out. So it is helpful if you have a printer to print out your design. You can print out a couple of sizes to see what works best for the size of your cluster. You can also handwrite your designed with a pencil and it's really easy to erase if you mess up. 5. Transferring our Design: Let's grab our sanding block and we'll give it a quick sand, then we can get our design. Tape it on here. It's helpful to use tape if you miss a spot than the design won't move around. Then we'll slide our transfer paper underneath shiny side down. Then we'll take our dotting tool and begin to trace the outline. I'm just using medium pressure here. You can also use a pencil for this too. I do like using the dotting tool though for being able to use the design over and over again. Now that we've traced our design, we can flip it up and just make sure that we've got it all. And it looks good. So now we can get to the most fun part. Let's turn on our wet burners. 6. Burning our Design: We start off with our sanding block again. I give the wood burner a few scrapes just to keep it sharp, let our wood burner heat up for a few minutes and now we're ready to start, like to start off with a straight line in my design. I started off slow and work in small strokes. This universal tip works best by pulling it towards you. So you'll notice throughout that I am rotating the coasters so I can pull the wood burner towards me. I'm not adding a lot of pressure. I'm letting the heat from the wood burner do the work. Doing the rounded parts of a design or a little bit tricky. So just remember to go slow and do small strokes. You are a beginner. I think it's really helpful to start with simple designs like this to get the hang of it. This universal tip works great for what we're doing. But once you practice more and feel more comfortable with wood-burning, you can actually have different tips that do different things. There's ones to do shading, There's ones to do dotting. But for these straight lines like we're doing, it's just really easy to have this straight line tip. Right here. I mess up a little bit, I hold it down a little bit too long and it creates like a little bump, but no worries. We're actually going to go back over this again and make it thicker and you won't even notice this mistake. If you make a mistake when you're working and you don't plan to make it thicker to fix it, you can always try using your sanding block and sand over that area, and then try again in that same spot. Basswood is a really easy wood to burn on. I've also heard of people really liking maple and Poplar. But basswood is nice because it is so inexpensive and it's a great one to practice on. I like to finish the outline completely and then we'll go into next and do the heart. If I have something like this that I like to fill in, I do the outside first, do the outline. It makes it a lot easier than just be able to fill in the remainder of the heart. When you know that you like the outline. Also you can get creative with this. You don't have to do a hard if you don't want to do something related to your state, you could write family, you could write home. You could do the name of your state. There's lots of different designs you can do with your state. When I have sold them at craft fairs, I will find that people do gravitate towards the heart. One's the most part, it's fun because now you just get to fill in the heart and I pull it down in lines to fill it in. Now we're gonna go back over the outside line and make it thicker. You'll notice I held it down a little bit too long and there are some heat spots where it turns a little orange, but the varnish that we're going to put on it makes it all blend together. So no worries. Sped this up just so you can see that we are making the line thicker on the outside. I think doing this adds more definition to the state and really makes it pop out more against the color of the coaster. Alright, here's our finished design. Now we can go varnish it. Don't forget to turn off your wood burner. 7. Varnishing our Coaster : Let's open up our varnish and we're going to dip our towels into this and do a thin coat on the top. Once it's all coated, we're going to let this dry completely for about 8 h. After it's been 8 h, we're going to rough sand it, wipe off the residue, then re-code it. I've repeated the steps three times and this is how it turns out you can leave it like this or you can follow the next video and I'll show you how I resonant for the backside of the coaster, I also use a sanding block to remove the sticker residue. And then I repeat the steps from the front and also varnish it. 8. Advanced Resin Sealing: I think the varnish looks great, but I also will show you if you want a resonance, resonance is more advanced and it also has a lot of other materials. So I'll leave a list here. I use counterculture DIY resin. It's a one-to-one ratio. So since I'm going to make 6 oz of resin for doing a couple of coasters. We're gonna do 3 oz of Part B, 3 oz of part a. I sped this up, but you're going to mix slowly for 3 min until it's fully mixed. Now we're going to coat are coasters. And I use a gloved finger to spread it to the edges. Now we use our blowtorch to pop any bubbles. And I'm also going to use my heat gun to do the same. Then I take my toothpick and I'm going to pick out any hairs and fix any spots I missed. I cover it with as clear container and keep an eye on it. And then I just end up popping more bubbles one more time before I cover it to sit for 24 h. 9. Thank You for Watching!: Thank you so much for taking my class. Please let me know if you have any questions in the discussion below. I would love to see your finished projects. Please share them with me and with less by uploading them to the your project tab. If you enjoyed this class, I would appreciate it if you would leave me a review. You can also find me on Instagram at Cassie ink. And I post videos on TikTok frequently. If you like making coasters, you can check out my other class here on Skillshare that works with resin. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you again soon.