Bow Drill - Pine

Spoiler alert - this did not go to plan.

This was actually my first attempt at Paul's challenge mentioned in the recent post on Bow Drill (Poplar).  I'll keep it short.  Here's the tree:

Here's the set I carved:

You may be able to see the major problem from the photo.  There's too much resin.  What I have done is found some promising pieces of fat wood.  When I tried to burn in the set, the below happened:

So I think I was onto a loser here.  On the plus side I did harvest some other pieces of excellent fat wood and tested them out.  I have not used fat wood before - my god, it's amazing.  It takes a spark very easily and then burns hot for easily 30 seconds - it's like birch bark on steroids.

Here's a photo of some honeysuckle I intended to use as my kindling bundle:

Lessons to learn:

• try to select pine that is not too resinous

Bonus: what's this fungus?  I have zero clue.  It was spongy to the touch.  There may have been some alien life form incubating inside.  I didn't cut it open to find out.