A Flag for the Canadian coin guy.

My dad is a coin dealer.  He has a good friend in Canada who he's been doing business with for a while.  He asked me to make another Canadian flag to present to him as a gift.  

The process for making a Canadian flag is pretty straightforward.  I transfer the maple leaf onto the center piece of the wood (maple, of course) using a chisel.  I then carve out the interior of the maple using a combination of bench and carving chisels.

The pieces are burned individually before they are stained.  This darkens the stain, but also gives it a lot of texture and depth.  

I then stain each piece individually.  While staining the leaf, there's usually some bleed over into the raised non-leaf area.  Also, you can see that the torch isn't the most precise instrument.  After staining, I sand the high spots (the non-leaf part) with a random orbital sander to clean everything up.  I use a similar technique on the stars of the union of the American flag.

Here's what it looks like when it's done.