Priscilla's Bowl-Discussion, Plans, and Photos

Good Morning Everyone,

I'm going to work on a project that I began late last year. It's a small bowl for a friend of mine and here is the story behind it:

Priscilla is a buddy of mine that I met in library school a few years back and over the past several years she's faced several life challenges. She's met them with aplomb and she has moved to Saint Paul to begin her life anew. She bought a lovely home earlier this year and at one of our periodic coffees, I promised her a bowl when she got her new home.

I began the bowl several months ago. It was a medium-sized block of red maple and I laminated a foot out of jatoba wood to the bottom and began turning it. Well, the lamination failed and the bowl came off the lathe just as I was finishing the exterior. It hit the floor and the rim was damaged. Just about that time I had a number of challenges of my own and I had to sit the bowl aside. I've dug it out of my wood pile and begun working on it again.

Plans
I'm going to re-mount the block on the lathe and re-shape the exterior. I'll create a new foot and create a tenon on the bottom so I can flip it over and hollow out the interior. I'm also going to add some detail to the exterior to match a ribbon rim that I originally cut into the top of the bowl. The rim needs to be undercut to emphasize it and the whole thing will need to be sanded to 400 grit. At that point I'll hollow it out and finish it.


Here we go:

The next two photos show the bowl blank mounted on the lathe. The dark brown spot on the bottom was were the original foot of the bowl was attached. You can see a ribbon on the rim:

I'm about to drill into the foot area so I will have a place to re-mount the bowl a little later:

This is the beginnings of the bowl foot:

In this photo you can see a small nick in the rim where the bowl hit the floor. I really like the rim and I don't want to remove the ribbon so I'll deal with this by hand when I've finished cutting and sanding the exterior:

I've decided to add some scallops to the bottom of the bowl to match the ribbon on the rim. If you look carefully I've drawn some pencil lines to mark the areas that I'm going to cut out:

Here is the bowl at present. I've created a foot, cleaned up the glue from the previous lamination, and cut and begun sanding the exterior. It will take me a day or so to finish the exterior of the bowl. This is a side view:

And this is the bottom:

I think this will be a lovely bowl as red maple is a wonderful turning wood and the blank has a lot of beautiful grain patterns in it.

More later,

VW