Introduction: Wooden Mosaic Vase

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In this instructable I show you, how to make a simple but beautiful vase (or basically any kind of vessel) by recycling an old vase and some branches from a tree in your garden.

Step 1: What You Need

Some wood branches (between 0.5cm and 3cm in diameter)
Saw (bandsaw ).
Sander (Random orbital sander)
Some vessel to glue the mosaic onto (I used a cheap tall narrow ceramic vase)
wood glue.
wood finish (I used danish oil).

Step 2: Choosing a Vessel

I've done several vessels like this. In this instructable I show you the first I made.

I chose a tall and narrow ceramic vase. It' quite easy and straight forward to glue the discs onto this one.

Don’t take anything with a concave shape, it’s a pain to sand at the end (the second I did was concave)!

I've also alread used a small pot and a drinking glass. My next one will be a really large vase (1m tall and 25cm in diameter).

you see, it basically doesn't matter what you use, or what material it is made of.

Step 3: Cutting the Wood Discs

Get some wood branches. I used some from my own garden, after cutting back a cherry and some other tree.
you have to cut thin discs off the branches. I figured out, that about 0.5cm of thickness works quite well.
To cut the discs I used a bandsaw. be careful while cutting! The small discs can shoot away straight in your direction. For security purposes i positioned myself at the side of the bandsaw, and not in front of it. This might work better on a circular table saw... but I don’t have one.
Depending on the size of your vessel, you might need quite a lot of those discs.

The diameters you need depend heavily on the size of the vessel. For large vessels with a big radius you can use quite large discs. For smaller radiuses you should use smaller discs.

The bigger the discs, the less to glue, the more to sand. Basically the time you need for a vase stays pretty constant!

Step 4: Glue on the Discs

Now you can start gluing it up. Put large amounts of wood glue onto a disc and put the disc onto the vase. I used wood glue in a bucket and let it stand around open for an hour so that it became more viscous, so the discs won’t slide down the vase so easily while your are gluing!
repeat until your vessel is fully covered with wood discs! This might take some time;-)
The wood glue has to connect the whole disc with the underground, so you might need to put a 2-3mm layer of glue onto a disc.

As I had a tall and narrow vase, I layed it down and glued about half the vase. Then I let it dry, turned it around and glued the other half. Try to leave as little space as possible between the discs. It doesn’t matter if some discs stick out at the top or at the bottom, you can sand those pieces down easily.

Unfortunately I don’t have any pics of this step, but it’s not really much to see here

Step 5: Sanding It Up + Finish

After the wood glue is fully cured you can start sanding.
I sat down on a chair and clamped a random orbital sander upside down between my legs and started to slowly rotate the vase over the base plate until it is completely round and the rough cuts of the band saw where not visible anymore.

Basically you can use any method you like best for sanding. Belt sanders mit also work well!

I applied one coating of danish oil to emphasize the grain of the darker wood.

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