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.