So it was my friends birthday recently and I really wanted to make something special for her. I have always enjoyed working with wood, and I had been looking forward to another woodworking project, so here is what I came up with.

Tools & materials:

timber 600mm x 100mm x 45mm
wood glue
glue stick
saw
chisels
angle grinder
flap sanding disc
sander
walnut varnish
finishing wax

Step 1: Cutting

First of all I started by cutting a piece of timber into halves and gluing them together. To help myself whilst cutting I printed out the heart template and attached it onto the wood with a glue stick. After that I proceeded to cut out the shape with a saw. I decided to leave a handle at each side so that I could clamp it onto the worktop whilst chiseling.

heart template.pdf
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Step 2: Chiseling

Before I started this project I thought it would have been relatively easy to just use the chisels for carving process, but I realized very quickly that my chisels were quite blunt and sharpening them was not as straight forward as I imagined :D

And because I was a little pressed for time I decided to abandon the chisels and move onto something much quicker.

Step 3: Hello Angle Grinder

I cut off the handles since I no longer had a need for them and glued another template onto the bottom of the heart to make the shaping process easier. Next I attached the flap sanding disk to my angle grinder and started shaping the bowl. I carried on sanding until I was happy with the overall shape of the bowl.

It was so much easier and faster even though my garage began to look a lot like a winter wonderland. I'm seriously considering getting some of those carving discs for the next time :D

Step 4: Sanding

At this point the bowl roughly had the shape I was striving for so I decided to swap the angle grinder for a sander. I started with the grit 60 sandpaper and carried on sanding until I was happy with the curves. To make the bowl nice and smooth I used the 120 followed by 240 grit sandpaper.

Step 5: Finishing

To finish off I applied three coats of walnut colored varnish which really brought out the patterns of the wood and a coat of wax on top made it all nice and shiny.

Step 6: Final Thoughts

I'm very happy with how the bowl turned out considering this was the first time I used angle grinder for carving and I absolutely love the wood pattern. If you look closely you might be able to see an alien smoking a cigar :D