I’ve had a nice piece of tree bark in my craft cupboard for a couple of years now, so I decided to finally do something worthwhile with it. I had originally shellacked it to protect the bark.

I’d been tossing around the idea in my mind of painting it to look like a couple of raccoons were looking out of a hole in a tree, so had to figure out a way of making a circle in the center that would be smooth enough for painting.

With hopes that I wouldn’t make a mistake and destroy the entire, delicate piece of bark, I jumped in with both feet and used a heavy-duty retractable utility knife to carve the outline of a circle, then gently picked away at pieces of bark in the circle to clear it back to the rough wood. Then I used some sandpaper to gently sand inside…