It turns out that my family already is well-equipped with spoons, spatulas, ladles and other kitchen utensils. This Christmas I got a different request: wooden mushrooms that could be attached to the fridge with magnets. So I dug through the wood stash in my basement. I chose a small piece of plum wood and a scrap of hornbeam burl - a leftover from carving a cup.
This is where some clever electric tool would come in handy because those tiny pieces of wood were difficult to hold firmly and my hands were hurting. But other than that, it was fun work. I played around with the wood types and textures. I left the stems with a delicate knife-carved texture, I sanded and polished the tops of the caps and I kept the bottoms of the caps unsanded and slightly porous to the touch. The grain in the stems runs mostly lengthwise, while the growth rings on the caps make concentric circles when you look from above.
Everything was going great until I realized that even strong neodymium magnets aren’t enough to keep stuff on the fridge. The magnets that I used should theoretically pull almost a kilogram of weight but my tiny mushrooms, which weigh just a few grams, kept sliding and flipping upside down stubbornly. Adding more magnets didn’t help either.
So I visited an unnamed DIY megastore with a vague idea of looking for something thin, adhesive, but not sticky. I searched the entire shelf of tapes (who knew there were so many kinds?!) and finally I stumbled on vulcanizing tape which is basically just a thin slice of rubber. This solved the whole problem like a charm.
Here are the finished mushrooms after sanding and waxing. They stay in place just as they are supposed to.
