Remember when you were little and played with that little plastic contraption that spun a piece of paper really quick and you could drip paint on the paper and make these really cool designs that looked like the paint just exploded out from some unseen explosion in the middle?  Yeah…  Me either.  My parents seemed to instinctually know that getting me one of those things was a really, really bad idea.  Looking back, I can’t really say I can blame the for the harsh judgement.  Well the joke’s on them, though, because a mere 45 years or so later, a guy brought a bowl to a club meeting and taught me that a lathe spinning at a couple thousand RPM’s is like a giant sized version of that little plastic toy, only turned sideways to make a MUCH larger spatter zone!  SCORE!!!!  Look who did it anyway, Mom!

Dave Bloom brought in these small(ish) bowls he had made on his lathe, with the colors running from the middle.  His method was painstaking, calculated, and detailed.  He used a hypodermic needle to carefully apply just enough paint so that the line would be made, but not so much that the ceiling, walls, workbench, tools, and overly trusting small animals would not be covered.  Well, nuts to that!  I duct taped a 10″ wide ring of cardboard from an empty case of beer together, put it around the wood where I guessed the splatter zone would be, then got out the spray paint and let’r rip!   In all, there are four different colors of blue, a healthy dose of white that blended itself with the blue, and some silver metallic spray paint that won’t blend with anything.

I think I’ll keep this one, at least for now.  I also noticed that the local Wal-Mart store has spray paint on sale…