Staining Wood-the fruit platter project continued-hollowing out the platter and falling over

Hello Again,

Well, I finished lunch, or should I say the cats helped me finish lunch, and I went down to the wood shop and hollowed out the platter. Here are the photos:

Picking up where I left off-here is the platter blank on the lathe. I've flattened the face of the blank-not the screw holes from the face plate. I'm going to try to turn the platter to about 3/8" thickness and keep the inside and outside surfaces parallel to one another:

I've created a narrow, simple rim and you can see from the photo that I've dropped the outer edge of it just a little below the top of the platter:

Ok, now to hollow it out. I put down the camera and completely hollowed it out which took about 25 minutes to do:

As I got nearer to that 3/8" thickness, I switched from a roughing gouge to a large, heavy bowl scraper. This is one of my favorite tools:

And here it is, scrapped and sanded and ready to be sealed:

 Here it is at present. I took the platter with the Nova chuck attached off the lathe and placed a couple of rocks inside so you can see the depth a little better. I was just congratulating myself when I miss stepped and fell off of the stairs that the platter is sitting on:

Ok, now while I'm nursing a sore wrist, I'll do some research about the stain color and come back and work on this some more. I'll apply both the stain and the varnish to the platter while it's all still on the lathe.

Having a painful afternoon,
VW