Color at the Lathe: The Craft of Friction Lac Woodturning

There is a way of coloring wood that most Western turners have never seen, and it works like this. The wood is spinning on the lathe. The turner picks up a stick of colored shellac — solid, about the size of a fat crayon — and touches it to the moving surface. The friction does the rest. Heat comes up under the stick, the shellac softens where it meets the wood, and a film of color lays itself down along the turning. Then the turner takes a dried leaf, presses it to the spinning piece, and burnishes the color until it shines. No brush. No rag. No film sitting overnight waiting to cure. The finish goes on in the same breath as the shape.

The technique is old and it has a name: talegari, the lac-turnery craft of southern India. And the place most associated with it is a small town called Channapatna, between Bangalore and Mysore, known for two centuries as the town that turns wood and colors it with lac.

A town built on the lathe

Channapatna's story is a good one. The craft took root there under the patronage of Tipu Sultan in the late 1700s — accounts differ on whether he brought artisans from Persia or opened the trade to Persian merchants, but either way the technique settled into the local workshops and stayed. By the end of the 1800s hereditary turners were already working the lathes there, and the town organized around teaching and refining the craft. One local master, Bavas Miyan, is remembered as the figure who studied lacquerware elsewhere and brought a disciplined version of it home; the Maharaja of Mysore is said to have sent him as far as Japan to learn how other cultures worked lacquer, and he came back and trained others. The craft has been passed down in families ever since. Today several thousand artisans still depend on it, many of them women working from home, the skill handed from one generation to the next.

What they make is bright — toys, bangles, spinning tops, small turned vessels, all of it lacquered in colors that don't fade the way paint does. The lac melts, spreads, burnishes, and hardens into a mirror finish in seconds. Durable, beautiful, and highly resistant to damage, while also being non-toxic (an important quality for toys kids will be playing with).

One craft, many addresses

Channapatna is the best-known home of this work, but it isn't the only one. The lac-turnery family spreads across South Asia, and every branch found its own way to be clever with a stick of colored resin.

In Etikoppaka, on the Andhra coast, turners charge their lac with dyes from seeds, bark, and turmeric — an all-natural palette gentle enough that the toys are safe in a teething child's mouth, which is precisely the point. Varanasi has turned and lacquered bazaar toys for generations. In Sankheda, Gujarat, the trick is layering: metallic leaf laid beneath tinted lac, so the finished furniture glows through its color. In the Kutch desert, hereditary turners feed several colors onto the spinning work at once and pull them into marbled zigzags — no two pieces alike. Across the border in Sindh, the jandi workers of Hala build up bands of different-colored lac and then cut through the layers as the piece turns, exposing stripes of the colors beneath. And in Sri Lanka's laksha villages, where a piece is too fine or too still for friction work, craftsmen draw the warmed lac into threads and lay it on by hand, guided by a thumbnail.

Same insect, same resin, same friction and heat — and a subcontinent's worth of different answers to what color on wood can be.

How the color goes down

The mechanics are worth slowing down on, because they're the whole reason this belongs in a shellac catalog.

Lac is shellac's raw material — the resin the lac insect leaves on the branches of certain trees, the same resin that, refined, becomes the flakes and buttons we sell. In Channapatna the turners don't dissolve it in alcohol the way a French polisher would. They cast button lac into solid sticks, colored through, and apply it dry. The lathe spins the work fast; the stick is pressed against it; the heat of friction is enough to melt a thin skin of colored shellac onto the wood as it passes. Because it's friction and not a brush, the color goes on even and thin, and it bonds to the surface.

Then comes the burnishing, and here is the detail most people get wrong. The traditional burnisher is a leaf — screwpine, Pandanus, sometimes called kewda — dried and pressed against the spinning, still-warm shellac. (Screwpine is not a palm, whatever the common name suggests.) The dried leaf has just enough texture and give to work the surface to a glow without cutting it. Fresh leaves don't do it; they have to be dried first. It's the kind of specific, hard-won knowledge that only survives by being shown, hand to hand, another reason it never crossed over to the Western bench on its own.

Why you've never been able to buy these

We know of no past or present sales of sticks like these — colored lac made to be applied dry, on the lathe, the talegari way — from any Western vendor. The knowledge stayed where it was practiced. The materials never got made for export in a form a turner in Virginia or Vermont could pick up and use. A few pioneering American woodturners have made great progress learning the craft through experiment — our friend Tyler David, who presented the technique at the 2026 AAW Symposium, has some great videos, including one on how he makes his own sticks from button lac.

The best results come from using buttons that are 100% shellac. The craftsmen of Channapatna have told us that it's nearly impossible even for them to find genuine pure button lac (a situation we have remedied), and highlighted how rosin and other adulterants make for a less durable finish in their experience. Our button lac is guaranteed always pure, uncut, and genuine, so if you want to experiment, you'll have great material to start with.

Bringing it to this bench

The fifth-generation refining family we've worked with since 1990 — the same tradition that supplies our flake, button, and seedlac — spent time this year in the lac-turnery towns, learning how these sticks are made and cast, and has been working with us to bring the real thing to turners here. The results of that research, work, and partnership are coming fall 2026, a small first edition in true natural dyes, made by the craftsmen who have carried the tradition for centuries.

If you're interested in trying them out when they arrive, sign up to be notified.

Image credits: Cover — Sri Lankan laksha ware, Chandan.S, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Channapatna artisan — Kartik Mistry, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Etikoppaka lakka bommalu — Ashokpatnaik3, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Kutch lacquerware — Geetanjalidhar, CC BY-SA 3.0 — all via Wikimedia Commons · Coat rack photo courtesy of Tyler David.