For now I must buy my plaques at craft stores. Well, one craft store. It turns out that the only place within a thirty mile radius to buy the blank, unfinished plaques, is Michael's. And the Michael's forty miles away doesn't even carry them. I have this latent fear that one day I'll be in desperate need to restock and Michael's will have discontinued them entirely. Oh wait - I take it back - you can find them at JoAnn's down the road, but they only get the lower grade ones.
This is my dilemma - I'm super picky about what pieces I get. I learned my lesson after one such unhappy piece I bought very early on. As you can see...
The problem here is that there was a grey tone through the middle of the plaque. Little did I know that it would make my color bleed and make Inara look like she got beat up. This is why I pretty much only use pine, and only clean, pristine pine at that. Occasionally even a beautiful piece of wood can have little veins of extra resin. As soon as you put heat to that vein it boils the resin and darkens the wood around it. Just one of the many little hiccups you can encounter in wood burning.
I have tried one other kind of wood... basswood. Normally used for carving. And that is all it will ever be used for. Normally, in wood burning, you can get the wood to be nearly black if you work hard enough (or are careless enough), but basswood is like Scotchgard carpet - work hard enough and you can make it take some color, but it's nearly impossible to eclipse the tone completely. Below is the basswood piece I attempted - to get the background as dark as I did, it took three extremely slow passes over the wood instead of one.
As is more and more common nowadays, I could always buy my plaques online and possibly even get a better price. However, knowing the potential flaws and how hard it is sometimes to find pieces that are desirable, I think I'll keep cherry picking.
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