I went out to YouTube and fell into the rabbit hole, where one video leads to another and another and another until two hours have passed and you’re so far away from what you were initially looking at that all you can do is shut down the computer and look around to make sure no one noticed.  At some point, I stumbled across a series of videos where people were making bowls out of plywood.  I had never really thought of plywood as being a viable turning material, let alone pretty, but I have to admit that some of the creations actually looked kinda cool.

The next day, I went to Mendard’s and picked up a 3/4″ piece of birch plywood and decided I should try to make something.  What started out as a simple, stacked, segmented bowl, quickly started going off the rails.  First, I messed up the measurements (again) and ended up making the pieces for a bowl that was so big, it would barely fit on my little lathe.  Since I figured I’d have to use a friend’s lathe to safely turn the thing anyway, I decided to change the simple, stacked design into a wide, shallow, platter with a little bit of a basket weave look.  When I messed up the measurements on the second ring, I realized that a shallow platter was out and I was going to have to end up making a HUGE bowl.  After several days of cutting, sanding, gluing, and clamping, I finally had a bowl blank that was ready to turn.

If you’ve ever cut plywood with a saw, then you’re familiar with just how much sawdust is generated by a single cut.  Now imagine doing that same cut with the wood spinning at several hundred RPM.  It’s messy.  Very, very, messy!  Once done, however the final shape looked pretty good – EXCEPT – for all the damned holes!  At some point, the people who make plywood decided they could save a extra penny by using really crappy waste wood for the inner layers of the plywood and if there were gaps, they could save two pennies.  Normally, no one would ever know, but when the plywood is turned, all of those little gaps end up being holes in the side of the bowl.  It took about an hour to fill all the holes with sawdust and CA glue, then about three hours of hand sanding to smooth over all the patches and make the bowl look like the patches never happened.  Three coats of spray lacquer later (that all but disappeared into the extremely dry wood) I decided it was done.  Now, I’m starting to ask myself what would happen if I dyed the vertical pieces a different color, or the horizontal pieces a different color.  This is how it starts!  Stay tuned, because I have a 1/4″ piece of plywood in the garage already…

This is what I came out with.  13″ wide at the top and about 6″ tall.  I really like the finished product, but realize that if I ever had to sell the thing, I’d end up working for about .50 an hour!

Awhile back, I turned a simple bowl out of willow that was about as basic as you can get.  bland, no real grain in the wood, and the inside was nothing but a horrible collection of torn up end grain that simply couldn’t be sanded away.  After about an hour of sanding, with little progress to show, I decided to toss it in the heap and forget about it.  Since I’ve been experimenting with color lately, I was looking for something that I could practice on, without having to waste a “good” piece of wood.  Enter the crappy willow mistake…

I decided to play around with the iridescent paint again, only this time see if straight acrylic paint would show through the colors.  Since the coloring technique is called “cosmic cloud”, I figured why not try to make a nebula inside the bowl?  Gotta say, this one turned out WAY better than I ever expected.

Here are the before and after shots:

Here’s what the inside looks like, after applying the paints.