Post #481517 by Benzart on Sat, Sep 5, 2009 4:28 AM

Ben Your "Rotten" Marq is really getting some fine details. I know how difficult that wood is to cut into with the "spaulting", or fungus filled spaces, which is where the beautiful colored striping comes from..

The colored lines are usually soft while the surrounding wood is usually hard. The spaulting is actually natures way of cleaning up. A tree dies and immediately is attacked by bugs, beetles, wasps and other creatures, who open the way foe the fungus spores to come in and do the real work of disintegrating the tree from the inside out. This process goes through many stages and most of them have the wood very usable and beautiful. It's the final stages where the wood gets very soft and finally breaks down and rots away. Some parts of the tree are in more advanced stages of rotting as you can see by the too soft rotting spots.

If you get a piece of wood in the right stage, where the colors are most beautiful, and you dry it out and seal it then the rotting process is slowed down to a crawl. This is why the spaulted wood is so rare, to catch that beauty is a hit and miss kind of thing, open the log too early and there is no color, too late and there is no usable wood.

Another fun fact about spaulting is that it seems every type of tree has it's own peculiar type of fungus and it makes colors unique to that wood or spore so that on any given kind of wood the colors will be pretty much the same and the next kind of tree has its ow color and so on so that you can actually expect each tree to look a certain way .
So you have certainly added to natures beauty on this carving and it will be unique and yours forever.

Hope this helps to understand about those odd colors we all see in a rotting piece of wood.?

Did "Ceaser" ever get his stuff? :)