This is a handmade wooden coffee table with hand carved and pyrographed (wood burned) koi fish in multiple layers “swimming” in the table. (The legs are shop bought additions.)

It started off as a raw tree slice.

I had to make a router jig to cut a hole in the wood for the fish bowl.

Once the hole was routed, I poured the base layer of epoxy resin with blue glow in the dark pigment which goes right through the cracks in the wood down to the bottom. It was my first time working with resin so it was a learning process. I initially sealed the cracks with duct tape but it went terribly wrong. The resin leaked all over the place and made an awful mess, not to mention wasting a lot of resin. 🙁 I had to redo the resin pour, this the second time using brown packaging tape which worked much better.

I hand carved and burned several koi fish. Some are made of veneer as they were flat for the bottom layer. Again part of the learning curve of working with resin, I didn’t glue down the fish and they started floating to the top!!! Not good for real or wooden fish! So wood floats in resin. In subsequent layers I remembered to glue down the fish. 🙂

After the first layer of resin was sanded down I added in stones, glass beads, coins and several of the hand carved and pyrographed (wood burned) koi. The koi were added in layers with multiple pours of resin in between so that they are suspended, and layered over each other. Each layer of resin takes 24hours to cure fully, so it was a long process.

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