I was working on some finishing for a sofa table that I’m making, doing as much of it as I can before I glue the whole thing together and create hard-to-reach places, when I accidentally knocked my jar of garnet shellac off the table, sending it smashing to the concrete floor, spewing shellac in a beautiful splatter pattern which will certainly spruce up the dull, boring gray of the concrete.

Fortunately, I am a serial procrastinator and, having used the planer last weekend to mill all the boards for said sofa table, I had yet to clean up the giant pile of sawdust that had resulted. I’d swept it into a neat (but large) pile, but it’s just been sitting there all week… a nice big mix of walnut and white oak sawdust preventing me from parking in the garage for an entire week.

Yes… that’s how bad my procrastination is. But really, the weather was nice this past week, so parking outside wasn’t a problem. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Anyway… because I had this wonderful pile of sawdust and shavings, I had the perfect ingredient for sopping up a bit starburst puddle of garnet shellac. I tossed a few handfuls on the shellac, waiting a minute or so, and swept up what I could. I repeated that process a couple more times and now I have a nice starburst on my floor, but no mess.

Procrastination, for the win!

(I mixed up another batch of shellac so I can continue working tomorrow.)