May 15th – Club challenge.

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.

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!