Shrink Cup with Tigerwood Handle

For a long time I've admired shrink cups from Central Slovakia decorated with architectonic elements. Then I decided to give it a try and I created something rather original.

The cup is from maple and the handle is from exotic wood with commercial name tigerwood. It is sold as a material for floor boards. The wood is from Astronium graveolens or Astronium fraxinifolium tree. These trees originate from Brazil, they are from cashew nut family, but they are quite similar to our ash trees.
I'm pretty sure that no one has ever made a shrink cup from these materials before. Not because tigerwood would be so hard to get or because the idea would not occur to  anyone else. But I found that tigerwood is a tricky material, tears out easily, so you can ruin the whole work with a single careless cut. If I wasn't so stubborn and if i didn't have so much time during the quarantine, maybe I would have given it up, too. But now I think it was worth the trouble.

I was able to document the process of creating a new type of handle. I began with cutting a template from a carton and fixing it on the cup to see how it looks.

Then I retraced the template to the board with a white pencil (for better visibility on the dark wood) and I drilled several holes.

After removing some wood, it looked like this:

I cut the small windows with Swedish knife Mora 106, the narrow blade is ideal for such tasks. I used a small pocket knife blade for the spiral column because nothing else seemed to work. Thin strips of tape were used to keep the spiral pattern even.

Bit by bit I removed the excess wood. The spires on top were carved last to protect them from breaking off accidentally.