Making custom coasters

Over the summer I've been experimenting with various woodworking projects, and one which I made on something of a whim was a set of coasters. I thought it'd be fun to take some thin strips of different-colored wood, glue them together (laminate them), cut out short pieces, then glue those pieces together in a pin-wheel, like this:

Woods used are whenge (black), jatoba (brown), maple (white), and purpleheart.

Here they are after I leveled out the slight differences in thickness in the wood strips and applied a finish (on top of a few cutting boards I also made):

The mineral oil in the background is for the cutting boards, for these I used a spray-on tung oil finish.

They came out looking pretty good, but I'd underestimated how much wood doing the spiral would take, so from my initial, roughly 24-inch-long piece of laminated wood strips I got a grand total of two coasters. However, they were thick enough that a friend suggested cutting them in half to make four…which I proceeded to do in possibly the dumbest, hardest, least-efficient way by using the reciprocating saw I'd acquired as part of a package deal when I bought my first power tools back in November (and hadn't used until now).

Have I mentioned I don't own a vice?

Though even if had it wouldn't have helped much, as I discovered when I built a Frankenstein-ian contraption of various clamps and pieces of wood to hold the coasters as I cut them. My attempts to secure them usually lasted a couple of seconds before the oscillating action of the reciprocating saw worked them loose resulting in a lot of awkwardly re-clamping coasters, but it somehow – incredibly – resulted in two sets of roughly-equal thickness coasters with a remarkably straight cut across them.

They're definitely not perfect (even after some more sanding and smoothing), and it was mostly a lesson in what not to do, but y'know, sometimes those are helpful. They might still work as coasters (I haven't really tried), they do look pretty, and it was just a spur-of-the-moment project, so it's all good in the end. Just part of the learning process! A hui hou!