Black Walnut wood cookies for wedding decor.

Last summer one of our neighbors said his daughter was going to get married soon and asked if we could cut him some walnut cookies (round cross cut of a tree) to use as the base for their floral arrangement centerpieces at the wedding reception. He asked for 20 twelve-inch cookies for the guest tables, and two fifteen-inch cookies -- one to put under the wedding cake, and one to put under the groom's cake.

I quickly agreed and immediately got to work, only to find that the Alaskan Chainsaw mill was the wrong tool for the job. It's meant for cutting slabs out of trees that are felled out in the middle of the woods, not for making thin cross-cuts of logs. D'oh!! But I'd already accepted the job, and didn't want to let our neighbor down. So we did some research about what it would take to get these cookies cut and quickly learned that if we wanted to do more than cut slabs out of logs, we were going to have to up our game. We needed a band-saw mill.

With a band-saw mill we would turn a great big log into all sorts of wood products. Slabs, beams, cookies, boards, blocks, you name it. But the band-saw mill that we wanted was back-ordered and we didn't think it would possibly be delivered in time to get the job done. So our short-term solution was to buy a five foot long two-man manual cross-cut saw. We screwed a jig to a trailer and cut the twenty smaller cookies by hand.

The two-man saw is work, but it's also a lot of fun. And it's satisfying knowing that we can cut a log without any power or fuel beyond what our own bodies can provide. But after cutting twenty rounds, all of them slightly uneven and showing saw marks that required planing to perfect, we weren't all that excited about cutting the larger cookies that would have to be hand finished, since they would be too big for our electric planer.

Thankfully, our new piece of equipment arrived and saved us many hours of labor.

Our Wood-Mizer band saw was made it so-o-o much easier to cut perfect cookies.

Our neighbor took his pick, and after the event he shared a few photos.

A perfectly and naturally pretty base for our neighbor's daughter's wedding cake.

And a wonderfully woodsy base for the groom's lumberjack groom's cake!

Simply pretty reception tables using live-edge walnut cookies as bases for table flowers.

We also sent over a little oak slab for them to do a "branding ceremony" after the wedding.

It was an honor (and lots of fun!) to be trusted to help with decoration for this important day!