A quick project completed: a baby pine cone fridge magnet!

First, find a suitable pine cone. They’re a lazy lot, so you can usually just find them lying about.

Gotcha!

What a cute little nugget. It reminds me of all the other little babies out there…

Baby carrots...

... Not mention these little things.

Anyway, I used my Dremel to flatten its bum, then used one of these round bits with the spiral groove pattern to carve out a cozy space for the magnet.

FINISHED! Click for full-size.

Finally, I covered the whole thing (excluding the face of the magnet) with a clear ceramic glaze. I (apparently) did this (ostensibly) to (hopefully) preserve the pine cone in its current state (I guess.)

We’ll see. I want to do this with a more mature/picturesque pine cone, when I do I’ll use a stronger magnet. The ones we had in our craft inventory were fairly week; I wouldn’t trust this to hold more than 2 or 3 sheets of paper.

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Usage note: My incredibly cursory research indicates that “pinecone” is not a proper word. Also, they’re properly referred to as “Conifer cones“.

I hope you like the final state of this project. It was quite a bit of work, but now I have a fantastical home decoration or centerpiece. I may eventually list it for sale on Etsy.com, although for now we’re treating it as a quirky new house guest.

It is not notably functional; although I have had friends offer their suggestions. Sadly most good ideas ( “Make it a lamp!” ) would require a completely new build: utility would have to be part of it’s design from the beginning of the project. It does however make a nice candle holder / nightlight:

Nightlight mode: activated.

I came up with a quick project to do this weekend, but there were some challenges I hadn’t expected.

Pictures from the build below.

The first pickle I encountered was that it can be very tricky to drill through porcelain:
1) Too much pressure and you break this brittle material,
2) Go too fast without lubrication and you can overheat you drill bit,
3) Using lubrication virtually prevents drill bit from digging at all,
4) You must use a drill bit specifically designed for glass & tile with a carbide tip. If you can’t get your hands on that at least use a masonry bit.