Pine Needle Basket Bottoms, with hand cut designs including cats, dogs, sea life, birds, etc. Add a special look to your next pine needle basket and forget about those first tedious wraps.
Home Basket Bottoms  Round  Oval  Christmas  Blanks  How They're Made Books Site Map Links Prev Next   twlack@thepapermill.net	Enter your search terms Submit search form   Web     pineneedlebasketbottoms.com All Hand Cut! All our basket bottoms are hand cut on a Hegner scroll saw. The photo is our master scroller Bill Lack, sitting at his scroll saw in his home shop. Actually he is our only scroller and he is also my Dad. I'm Tim Lack and I create the patterns my Dad scrolls from and this website. And that is the extent of our little company. Well, my Mom keeps him fed and that's no small feat. So, I get or am given an idea for a basket bottom which I then draw up and send to my Dad to scroll. He uses a mild adhesive to stick the pattern to the top of a stack of 4 pieces of birch plywood. We use plywood to maintain the light weight of the basket bottom but because the grain of layers of plywood are alternated the finished bottom has enough strength to hold your basket's contents without splitting with the grain as it would with a single piece of wood. The 4 pieces are held tightly together by small brads (nails) placed outside the pattern area. The last cut made is the outside circle which separates 4 finished basket bottoms from the blank stack. But first a hole must be drilled for each section to be cut out of the finished basket bottom. In the case of our example above there are 14 separate cuts to be made. While we're at the drill press we change to a larger drill bit and drill the ring of holes which are used to secure the pine needles to the basket bottom. Each cut is made by inserting the blade throught the drilled hole and attaching each end to the scroll saw machine. Then turn the machine on and move the stack of wood to cut on the line of the pattern. The last cut is shown in the diagram above in red. This cut will separate the basket bottoms from the blank. The bottoms are then individually sanded with a very fine sand paper and are ready for you to paint, stain or finish to suit your desired affect. © 2005 Timothy W. Lack, All rights reserved.