Here is another ancient craft I haven’t tried: lucet cords! It has been on my bucket list, but it wasn’t until my Mom was working on making elastic lucet cords for masks and hinted that a smooth wooden lucet would be nice, that I decided to finally make a lucet. Honestly, a lucet isn’t necessary to make a lucet cord; a forked stick would work, or even two fingers, but having nice tools is such a pleasure! I made up some designs in Illustrator, printed them out, and transferred the design to some scrap flame maple and padauk. I used almost every standing tool in the garage! Joy! I used a scroll saw to cut the shapes, a band saw to split the flame maple lengthwise, a band sander to rough out the shaping, an oscillating spindle sander to refine the shape some more, and the drill press to drill the holes. I hand sanded after all that, because nothing mechanical comes close to a hand sanded finish.

I sanded the lucets down to 400 grit, did two rounds of water treatment, then before finishing, I just had to test them to make sure there were no final tweaks to the shape. They worked well! I like the handleless lucet best. I’m going to send the handled lucet and the owlish lucet to my Mom for testing. (Mom likes owls, and the handleless lucet is reminiscent of a great horned owl, so I drilled “eyes” instead of a single hole.)

I finished the lucets with four coats of tung oil. Oh how the flame maple shines! The padauk has a nice color too.