Filling in the Knotholes

Today I spent some time trying to smooth out the knotholes in my bookshelf wood.  I bought this wood from a man on Craigslist.  He had gotten tons of wood from a friend who was taking out shelving from the basement of a hardware store.  This wood was probably originally used in the '50s.  I got it for a good price.  Unfortunately, I stored the wood in the garage over the summer and when I brought it in to my woodworking class it had warped pretty badly.  But this was the wood I had and I needed to make it work.  I cut each board between two to three times along the length wherever it was not straight, and then re-glued all of the pieces together again after planing the edges.  In order to make the shelves smooth enough to look good I really needed to deal with the many knotholes, so I bought Durham's Rock Hard Water Putty.

I feel like people should buy this product just for the man on the packaging.

 I chose this based upon a recommendation from the paint guy at Home Depot.  It is a powder that you need to mix with water.  I poured the powder into a cheese bucket from Judi:

Then I poured in water a little at a time and stirred it up with a plastic fork:

The consistency seemed ok, so I got to work.  This is how the knotholes looked before putty:

And this is how they looked after:

It took about forty-five minutes to make the putty and fill in the holes on the top of all my boards.

Hopefully tomorrow I will have enough time to sand these down and fill the holes on the bottom sides.  Or the kids and I may just make a cake instead; I've got a pretty big craving for cake.  We'll see!