Pencil cup

First off, now that my year is up I'm going to stop numbering the posts.  I didn't take the day off today, we have a club meeting on Saturday so I spent an hour or two signing pieces and getting things ready. 

This evening I worked on a relatively simple and very fun project.  My son asked me for a pencil cup for his desk at school.  When he asks me to make him something I usually pay attention.  I didn't want to do a plain cup so I did a bit of burning on it to liven it up and make him excited about it.  The wood is Visco Acacia from Boyce Thompson Arboretum.

I decided to go with a sylized flame motif circling the cup.  I drew it on freehand in pencil and then went over it with my burner now that I've gotten it working again.  I bought a replacement dimmer switch a couple of nights ago and got around to replacing it tonight.  Before I replaced it though I decided to take the dimmer switch out of the circuit.  The burner worked with the dimmer out of the circuit so I knew that the problem wasn't with the charger itself or with the headphone jack that the burning pens plug into.  On the off chance that there was just a loose connection I put the dimmer switch back into the circuit and double checked all of the connections and everything worked just fine.