A year or so ago I turned a really crappy bowl out of an equally nasty piece of willow. It was so ugly and so poorly turned, I decided to use it to practice dying wood. Since the wood and the turning was bad, the dye job turned out absolutely horrendous! It was literally sitting on the top of the wood pile to go to the fire.
My daughter Courtney asked if she could do some pyrography (wood burning) on it. I figured why not? I’m gonna burn it anyway, and if I’m lucky, she’ll set it on fire with the wood burner and save me some time. What she was able to make out of my mistake actually turned out looking pretty cool!
My daughter created something really nice out of my failure. Maybe I’ll let her pick the home I go into, afterall…
Over the course of a week, here are the other bowls I finished…
Another bowl from Lisa’s white oak tree. Love the coloration in oak trees when they shoot those lines out that go opposite of the growth rings. It looks like cracks in the wood, but it’s not.I came across the blank for this bowl in my shop, having forgotten ever roughing it out. Judging by the shape and where I found it in the shop, it must have been from at least 4 years ago. What emerged is an ash bowl, about 8 inches across. Pretty boring bowl, but put it next to the garage door and it would make an acceptable key holder.Ok, so willow is either really pretty, or it’s a nightmare. Doesn’t seem to be any middle ground! This piece had all those little bark inclusions throughout it, which actually look pretty cool up close. Kinda like a bird’s eye maple, only really, really soft. Too much sanding with 80 grit and I think you could go right through the side.I don’t remember what kind of wood this little bowl is made out of . Pity, cause if I could remember what kind of wood it was, I’d remember to never use it again! It’s small, about two inched high at the highest point, and maybe 7 inches across. Of those 7 inches, there’s a crack running right through the bottom that’s at least 6 1/2 inches long. This one will get burnt.The curve the outside of this bowl has is called an ogee. This little willow bowl is only 3 inches high and actually turned out really nice. The color differentiation between the heartwood and the sapwood is something I haven’t seen in this wood before.I love the grain that cherry has. For this particular piece of wood, it had started to break down, which is where the dark coloration comes from on the end-grain part of the bowl.This is another piece of cherry from a co-worker’s tree. It ended up being taller than I had expected, because the crack that you can see in this picture sealed up nicely and didn’t have to be removed.Not sure what kind of wood this is, perhaps birch. The spalting (the black lines that run through the bowl) looks pretty good on this one!
My boss’s parents had a walnut tree that got struck by lightening. He asked if I wanted any of the wood. After I wiped a little drool off my chin, I said yes and made the customary deal: “you give me wood and I’ll give you a bowl”. Since this is my boss we’re talking about, I ended up making him two bowls, one from each side of the same log. He can pick one of the two to keep, then give the other one to his parents. Guess he could also keep them both and tell his parents I welshed on a deal. I’d never know… Anyway, here are the two that came out. Both are about 10 inches around, or so.
Walnut trees have a blonde color around the outer part of the tree (aka sap wood) and the deep brown color in the middle (aka heart wood). For this piece, there seemed to be some confusion going on about what color the different parts should be. very unexpected!top view of the first bowl.This kind of coloration for walnut seems pretty uncommon, at least to me. Usually, the transition between the light part of the tree and the dark part is much more immediate.This bowl is shallow, only about three inches tall.
Last month, I talked about a mulberry bowl that cracked so bad I didn’t think it could be salvaged. Luckily, I was wrong! This one actually turned out pretty good!
In the April, 2016, blog, I talked about a bowl that I had started out of Mulberry and talked about how bad it cracked while it was drying. This is what the final project turned out to be. I filled all of the cracks with black CA glue, which not only keeps the bowl from continued cracking, but also looks pretty good. The white lines are from where the wood had cracked, but not deep enough to where the black CA glue could get into the crack. These are sealed with regular, clear, CA glue.Here’s another view of the Mulberry bowl. The deep golden/yellow color of the wood will fade to a brownish/yellow over time. I really like working with this wood, at least the non-cracked parts of the wood…
May 18th – Q’s screwdriver – I said earlier that my son was working on a screwdriver for his shop class at high school. He finally finished it and I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. Q was VERY happy! He sanded it to 8000 grit, so it was as smooth as glass. The end is a piece of blue Corion tile that was polished to the point there are no tool marks in it. He took it to school to turn it in and the other kids in the class were pretty excited. Made him feel pretty good about what he had created. When he showed it to his teacher, his teacher said, “I’ll have to take a picture of it and then grade it later.” No “hey, this is pretty cool looking”. No “wow, you really must have spent some time to make this.” No “I’ve never liked you and I intend to hit you with my car someday.” Nothing… Hope he gets the ‘A’ he deserves, but I don’t have high hopes.
Looks pretty good, I think!View of the Corion insert in the top.
The woodturning club that I belong to has a “president’s challenge” at every meeting. A project is given, then the club members have two months to present a finished project to the club that fits the challenge. Being new to the club, I haven’t participated, yet. There are some people in the club that have been turning for 50+ years, several who are making serious money from selling their work, and some really creative people that I would actually call artists without feeling pretentious. Kind of intimidating to be a newb in a group like that! The last challenge was bottle stoppers, but I didn’t take one in. I was going to, but then I saw the work that was coming in, I had that sudden feeling of being unworthy. Kinda like being back in school when I was drawing stick men and Ted Nowlin was drawing photo-realistic pencil sketches of all three of Charlie’s Angles. The current challenge is to turn a flower. At the meeting last week, I was watching as the entrants came in. Several made tulips, which are pretty common and a few others made marigold-ish things that I’ve done in the past. To be honest, aside from the guy who made wooden roses from the shavings hand planed off of a 2×4, there wasn’t anything that really knocked my socks off. I figured the bar this month wasn’t all that high, so I could wade in.
The current challenge, to celebrate spring, is to turn a flower. At the meeting last week, I was watching as the entrants came in. Several made tulips, which are pretty common and a few others made marigold-ish things that I’ve done in the past, and several brought in creations that were an absolute failure. I have to admit, I secretly like the last group! To be honest, aside from the guy who made wooden roses from the shavings hand planed off of a 2×4, there wasn’t anything that really knocked my socks off. I figured the bar this month wasn’t all that high, so I could wade in.
Here’s my finished piece. I figure it’s not the best thing I’ve ever done, but it’s not so horrible that I’ll be asked to leave the club.
looks good from a distance…
Getting the walnut edges on the pansies was a complete pain in the ass! There was supposed to be another flower, but as I was cutting the petals on the bandsaw, I found out I hadn’t glued the wood good enough. As I started to cut the pieces, they exploded into shrapnel! Since this is just for the club meeting, I figured I’d just pitch it in the fire when the meeting was over. Getting beaned in the forehead just reinforced the notion that a hot dog roast was on the menu for the night immediately following the next club meeting. The vase is a piece of lightly spalted maple that I made in literally 15 minutes. One of my daughters has now “claimed” it, so I’ll have to sneak it into the fire pit. Kids…
UPDATE: When I took this to the club meeting, it was actually VERY well received! The little vase was literally a throw away scrap of wood that took about 5 minutes to make, but people seemed to like the vase as much as the flowers. Go figure!
My son is taking a woodworking class in high school and now that the school year is all but over, they are finally allowed to do something involving the lathe. The “official” project is to make a screwdriver, which in all reality, is pretty boring. Nothing like sparking an interest by having the kids do something really mundane, with only a scraper and 80 grit sandpaper to use for tools. Well, I’ll just say that’s a casualty of the public school system and try something at home. We can certainly do better than that.
I took my son to my friend/mentor’s shop for this introductory lesson. I figured Bob could stress the basics and since the message was coming from someone OTHER than me, the odds that he would actually listen had to be higher. He did pretty good! His first lesson was to turn a sweet potato. MUCH safer and more forgiving than wood and didn’t really make that big of a mess. Next was a piece of softer wood to practice making beads and coves. Q didn’t make any finished projects that night, but he did make a mess and lots of woodchips! When we got home, we decided to make something a little more “free form” that he could keep. What he came up with is a little cup made from a piece of plum. Not sure it has any practical use, but for a first piece, I think it turned out pretty good!
Quintin’s first completed project. I really like the way plum wood looks after it is sanded. Look close and you can see all the little brown lines that cross the growth rings. Haven’t seen that in any wood except sycamore.
