Okay, here’s my blog post about working with batten, basketball, and birch timber:

Alright, so I’ve been messing around with this idea in my head for a while, and I finally decided to just go for it. I wanted to make… well, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was making, but it involved some leftover birch timber, some batten strips, and the general concept of a basketball.

First, I gathered my materials. I had these nice pieces of birch left over from a previous project – beautiful wood, really. I also had a pile of batten – thin, flat strips – that I’d picked up at the hardware store, thinking they might come in handy someday. And, of course, I grabbed a basketball for reference.

The Messy Middle Part

I started by cutting the birch into smaller, more manageable pieces. My plan (and I use the word “plan” loosely) was to create some kind of curved, segmented form. Think of it like the panels of a basketball, but…woodier. I clamped a few pieces together and started shaping them with a drawknife – honestly, it was a bit of a free-for-all. There was a lot of eyeballing involved, a lot of “hmm, does this look right?” and a lot of sawdust.

Next, I took those batten strips and started playing around with them. I bent them, I curved them, I tried to see how they could fit around the birch pieces I’d been shaping. My initial thought was to use them as a kind of decorative element, like inlays or something. I used wood glue, and let it dry

• Cut birch timber into segments.
• Shape the segments with a drawknife (and a lot of hope).
• Experiment with bending and fitting the batten strips.
• Glue. and then more glue.

The “Aha!” Moment (Kind Of)

After a lot of trial and error (mostly error, let’s be honest), I started to see something taking shape. It wasn’t exactly what I’d envisioned, but it was…interesting. The batten strips, instead of being just decorative, actually helped to hold the whole thing together. They acted like flexible ribs, giving the structure a bit of springiness, almost like…well, like a basketball!

I added a few more pieces of birch, refined the shape a bit, and sanded everything down. It’s still a work in progress, I guess you could say. It’s not quite a sculpture, not quite a functional object, but it’s definitely something. And I learned a ton in the process. Mostly, I learned that sometimes the best projects are the ones where you just start messing around and see where the materials take you.

Maybe next time, I’ll actually have a plan. But probably not.