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I bought some really cool 2 inch thick wood recently that will make perfect cutting boards and other projects. Last night, I made two Michigan Lower Peninsula cutting boards. One was made from nearly 2 inch thick Walnut with the grain going West to East and another one out of Spalted Maple that started off close to 2 inches in thickness, but got run through the drum sander until I was happy which ended up being about 1.25" thick. I am also working on a Michigan State Spartan piece for an old boss of mine that is retiring soon.

I had a request recently to cut out a Michigan State Spartan item to go along with the Michigan cutting board I did for someone. Because of the Spartan head logo, I can't cut it out like I did with the Michigan outline because the parts aren't all connected. I decided have the head stand proud as a full board instead of a cutout. Because I was afraid the image would get a little lost in the board that was all the same color, I came up with the idea to stain the board first and then cut out the background leaving the Spartan head stained. About 10 years ago, I had found out that you can get stain colored at Home Depot and this is just what I needed to do to keep with the school colors. Here is a picture of the piece of wood I started with. Here is the pictures of the colored stain and what the board looked like after the first coat of stain. Here is a shot of the computer screen during the carving process. I got pretty excited about how the image was turning out, so I took a picture after it was only 24% complete. I'll share some more pictures as it gets closer to being finished. Since the stain is water based and not the usual oil based stain that I usually use, I need to tinker with the finish that I am going to use. I am teetering between wipe on poly or polyacrylic.