Back to Work-Project finish photos

Hi Everyone,

I'm back to work and slowly getting back into to the swing of things. While I was busy last week I had a couple of hours to kill and so I completed a couple of recent projects.

Here are the finish photos:

The Oatmeal Bowl

This is the bowl I started for a cousin of mine in California. I've been reading Robin Wood's bowl book and was entranced by the wooden bowls that were retrieved from the excavation of the Mary Rose that he writes about. I wanted very much to do a couple of projects based on the design of those 500 year old bowls so I created several turning blocks out of a linden wood tree branch that I retrieved earlier this summer. My intent then was to produce bowls similar in shape, design, and size to those bowls used by the crewmen onboard that ship.

Here is the first. It's a little larger than a personal soup sized bowl. The wood contains a lot of mineral staining and it has a rather rustic look to it. This is the interior of the bowl:

And this is a side view. You can see that the bowl is a little distorted and that was intentional on my part:

And the bowl will be mailed to my cousin later this week along with one of my cooking spoons and a bag of my favorite steel-cut oats and a brief history lesson:

Sharing Wood Turning bowl:

This is the bowl I made with my nephew several weeks ago when he was here visiting. I really enjoyed getting to know him again while he was here and he seemed to enjoy his brief intro to wood turning. We produced a small bowl than the previous bowl and this has a slightly different rim. Both bowls have   chamfered rims like the originals which enabled their owners to drink from them as well as eat from them: 

 Here is a photo of the interior along with a smaller, eating sized spoon that I made for him. As he's something of a foodie I'm also sending him a bag of my favorite steel cut oats for him to experiment with:

The Kuksa

Along with the above two bowls, I produced a small kuksa, which is a small wooden cup. I carved it down from the larger cup-blank of several weeks ago and here it is at present. Turning this with the handle protruding was a real pain and so I don't recommend trying to turn a kuksa in this manner. The next time I do this I'll turn a wide section just beneath the rim and carve out the handle from that.

This still needs some refinement and I'll have to think of a good finish for this. I'll probably finish it with salad bowl varnish like the bowls above:

The Veggie-Dip Bowl

This came out rather well. I'm sending this to a friend in a week or two as a Christmas present. I hope she'll enjoy it:

I think we can stick a fork in those projects and call them done.

It's freezing cold outside and it's also Thanksgiving week here in the US so I'm going to put off started my next project until the end of the week when it's supposed to warm up some.

The next project is the long promised box elder bowl for a friend of mine.  See you all on Friday.

VW