Burnt Cherry bowl series

This weekend was cold, rainy, and just an overall gloomy day. I went to the shop and decided to straighten things up a bit, put some stuff away, and just tidy up a bit. If I was being truthful, I had just started listening to a new podcast and just needed something to do while I was listening. In the process of rearranging, I found two cherry bowls that had been roughed out, waiting to be turned into their final shapes and finished. I put the smaller one on the lathe, turned up the speaker, and finished the piece in about a half hour. The finished bowl I was holding was nice, but there really wasn’t anything special about it. The shape was typical, the grain was very straight, and the color of the cherry wasn’t anything that would catch your eye.

About 6″ across and maybe 3″ deep. Nice, functional, cherry bowl, but there’s really nothing special about it. Pretty plain, really.

When the turning part finished, the episode on the podcast finished, when meant two things. First, an hour had passed since I walked into the shop and second, I either needed to go back to shuffling and cleaning or I needed to find something new to work on. Putting away all the stuff left out from prior projects would have been the smart choice, but I moved to the workbench, pushed aside all the stuff I had meant to put away before starting a new project, and started a new project.

I decided to play around with the wood burners a little, with a vague image in my head of a piece that I’d seen online as a rough example. It seemed like a pretty simple 3 step process in my head: burn in some flowers, texture the background, claim success. As I started thinking about the logistics, I realized there was more to this than I’d thought. One hour long podcast episode later, I had the design laid out that ensured the flowers were all of the same size and was about half done with burning them in. Another episode ended and I was just beginning the shading process. After the the next episode, I was well into the shading process.

Really like the look of this one, the contrast of the natural wood to the darkness of the burning and the texture feel really cool!

After a break for food and to let the feeling return to my fingers, I resumed the podcast and the shading. Another two hours and two episodes and I was done with the burning.

All done with the burning, just need some finish added. Given the small size of the bowl, the only problem is you can’t really see the burning when it’s sitting upright

Not too shabby for a practice piece! After seeing that my process worked, and seeing a much larger cherry blank that was ready to finish turn, I jumped into the next project. another 30 minutes of turning, followed by at least 10 hours of burning and it was finished!

REALLY like this one! It will be staying at home, safe from the pilfering of the kids!