I love collaborating with my husband, Colin, and putting our heads together to come up with an awesome project. We love visiting The Wood Store, which is an amazing charity run organisation in Brighton. They collect wood, that would otherwise end up in landfill, from building sites and other places that have ‘waste’ wood.

We had previously bought a really cool little bottle opener and of course we couldn’t leave without some wood to put it on. Once we decided what size we wanted the bottle opener back board to be, Colin got to work making a design. We both like to brainstorm the design ideas together, sketching, talking and making notes. Once we’ve both got a clear Colin will use his superior computer skills to bring our vision to life. A custom made bottle opener was in the works….

Cutting & Preparing The Wood For This Custom Made Bottle Opener

Meanwhile I got to work and made a start cutting the wood to size and sanding it to make the surface smoother. The smoother the surface, the easier it is to burn your design, so it’s worth spending a bit of time on this. We got really lucky with the wood we found, a nice heavy quality slab of untreated, unfinished oak.

You can really feel the quality of a piece of wood purely by its weight. We particularly like using oak for our projects and products, its super durable, is great to work with and will also take beautifully to most types of wood-stains, and varnishes.

Applying Our Design to The Wood

Once the surface and the sides had been sanded flat and smooth I began to trace the design onto the wood. I used a simple tracing method using carbon paper. Remember not to press too hard with carbon paper! Ideally, doing anything with carbon paper you’re going to want a fine pencil line as a base for your design to be decorated and bought to life!

If you’ve not used carbon paper before don’t worry! It’s very simple and actually saves you doing things twice. You simply place the carbon paper (carbon/shiny side facing down) onto the surface of your desired design and then using your printed template draw over the design either using a pencil or a stylus. Once you’ve traced your design you can remove both the paper and the carbon paper to reveal your design!

Custom Made Bottle Opener : Timelapse Video

Using iMove I put together this little video showing the whole process of burning and finishing this custom made bottle opener. We really had fun with this project and the results were stunning. We hope you enjoy watching this as much as we enjoyed this whole project.

As always thanks for reading and please feel free to leave a comment.