Oat Meal Bowl

Ok, I'm back.

The bowl I began has changed a little bit from what I had originally intended. This is going to become an oatmeal bowl for a cousin of mine in California. Here's the story:

I have a lovely cousin who is a retired educator in California and judging from her life and the lives of those folks around her, she was, and is, an exceptional person. And she's helped to support another cousin of ours who has been very ill this year. And since caregivers are always on the top of my list of super people, she gets a special bowl.

Now the oatmeal part of this addresses the fact that being a busy person, she eats, gasp, microwaved oatmeal. I can't think of anything worse than that. So she's getting the bowl, one of my hand carved  spoons, and a bag of steel cut oats for her birthday next month.

If you remember from yesterday, I split a linden tree branch and made a bowl blank out of a section of it that I band sawed off the branch:

And I began shaping it. I was going to make another porringer but given the size of the resulting blank, I decided to make her a simple wooden bowl, similar to bowls made in England several hundred years ago. This isn't a reproduction or replica per se, simply a bowl based on those earlier designs with some modern touches to make it easy to use and maintain:

 Here's today's production photos:

I've cut the bowl down more and created a rim and left a shorter foot so it doesn't sit so tall. That should make it easier to eat out of:

This what it looks like from the side. And you can get a better sense of the color of the wood.

This evening my nephew Michael and I are going to hollow it out and get it ready for drying and finishing in the coming weeks.

Stay tuned,

VW

Sharing Wood Turning

Good Morning all,

Well, it was a wild, windy night here last night.  The wind blew hard last night and all of the leaves are probably in Wisconsin now!

I have some family visiting at the moment and one member, my nephew, is a charming young man named Michael. He's in high school and he really wants to work with his hands when graduates.  Yesterday evening I was down in the wood shop working on a bowl when he came down and asked if he could watch and of course I said YES!! please do.

To make a long story short,  we talked a lot about wood turning and I have him looking at wood turning books and today we're going to work on the bowl together. I think there is definitely a spark there.

Is it possible I've found an apprentice?

Stay tuned for future postings on this subject.

VW

Spitting logs and getting ready for more turning on a cold November afternoon

Hi Everyone,

I've had a large section of a box elder tree trunk and a large linden tree branch in the wood shop for a while now that have needed to be split and cut into bowl blanks. So my youngest son Ollie, aka The Critter, and I decided to go down to the wood shop and split the logs and get going.

Here's some photos of the splitting:

Here is the linden tree branch and splitting this is easy to do. I always begin by driving an axe into the edge of on of the ends to the branch and open up a big crack. You'll wind up with either a crack across the face of the branch or along the length of the branch:

In this case, a crack opened up along the shaft of the branch. When it did we started hammering splitting wedges into the crack and opened it up:

And viola! It broke apart. It took us about 5 minutes of hammering away:

This is the box elder tree trunk. This had developed a crack along the long axis of the trunk and so we did the same thing-insert wedges into the crack and hammer away:

...almost there...

 And BAM! it falls apart. The sections are now narrow enough to cut on a bandsaw or cut by hand with a carpenter's saw into blanks (see the next posting):

And this is the Critter. Axe in hand. Smile on face. The family that splits logs together stays together: 

Ok, there's a reason for all this craziness and we'll talk about this in the next blog posting.

VW

The Porringer, continued

Good Afternoon,

I've had a really busy day today and between everything, I decided to go down to the wood shop and carve out the handles on the porringer and unwind a bit.

Here are the photos:

I went down and placed the porringer in my wood vice and carved away the waste wood between the handles. Normally soft maple isn't hard to carve but this particular piece of wood was harder than usual and it took me a while to carve the handles. You can see how they stand out from the bowl:

The inside of the bowl:

And this is the foot. I'm debating whether or not to turn off the foot and or to leave it on. Leaving it on will make it more stable on a table (yes, we do have tables!):

I'm probably going to give it a thin coat of salad bowl varnish as this tends to make cleaning and maintaining a bowl a lot easier.

The next porringer I make will be from a larger block of wood and so will have deeper handles than this one does and I'll post photos of that process.

Have a good rest of the evening,

VW-PS: I caved in and oiled it with flax seed oil:

Porringers-Discussion and Plans

Good Morning All,

Well, it's 30 degrees outside and the wood shop is really cold so I began this project yesterday and I'm doing it in stages because my hands get so cold!

Let's make a porringer.

What's a porringer?

Discussion

Porringers are small bowls that have handles that stick out from the rim and are designed to be held in the hand whilst eating food out of them-they resemble the American Sierra cup that are popular with hikers. UK pole turner Robin Wood in his marvelous book on bowls writes about porringers quite a bit.   In the UK, in the medieval period, tables and other types of furniture were not very common so eating utensils were designed to be held in the hand. And of course the shape that works best for this is a small bowl with a round bottom. Later on when furniture and tables became common, plates and saucers with their board, flat shapes became the predominant design for eating utensils because they sit on a table better.  These little bowls held whatever happened to be cooking in a kettle at the moment and they were produced by woodturners, an occupation that was very familiar to people, unlike today.

If you google the word porringer you'll see lots of metal ones and a few wooden ones and you'll see the ones that Robin Wood makes on his pole lathe.

And I have a cousin in California who has absolutely no idea what constitutes a proper bowl of oatmeal and I'm going to make her one a little later on and mail it to her (this is another story) along with a bag of steel cut oaks and a spurtle.

Plans

I have a small 6 x 6x 3" block of spalted soft maple and I'm going to turn a preliminary porringer from that and when I manage to get my hands on a larger block, I'll make one for my cousin and I'll do a posting about that. This will have two small handles on opposite sides of the rim and a small, broad foot on the bottom. And in homage to people who lived long, long ago, I'm going to make this a rougher and more rustic piece, which is probably what most porringers through history have looked like.

Here are the photos so far:

Here is the basic block of wood on the lathe. This is spalted soft maple, a favorite wood of mine. You can see I've roughly cut off the corners of the block:

Here is the same block with the side smoothed and trued up. I've marked off the rim and handle sections of the bowl:

This is a photograph of the backside of the bowl. You can see the foot and the bowl section taking shape. I haven't begun shaping the handles or rim yet:

In order for the bowl handles to be properly shaped I've turned the bowl over and begun cutting the rim  away from the handle section. I'm not going to hollow out the bowl yet as I need the center mortise to re-mount the bowl again. The rim and the exterior of the bowl need to match up in terms of their shape so when the handles are created the bowl will look like one solid piece whose sides match up:

In this photo you can see that the bowl is wider than the rim. I'll narrow the bowl section some so the diameters are approximately equal to one another:

I put the camera down for a while and turned the outside and inside of the bowl and this was a back and forth process. The sides of the bowl and the rim now match up better and I've shaped the handle section in preparation for cutting the handles free of the bowl (more about that a little later on):

In this photo you can see how it will fit in the hand. It will fit better when I've created the handles for it. You can also see the foot in the very bottom of the photograph. I'm thinking of removing it later on as that would make it more comfortable to hold in the hand:

And this is a side view. I've added some coves to the bottom of the bowl to give the hand something to grip on to. I've also left the turning marks on the surface and I've just given it a very light sanding to remove any sharp edges. That's it for the sanding part of this:

The next step in the process is to create the handles by cutting away about half of the rim with a carving knife so this will be something that I'll do off the lathe.

As my hands are stiff from the cold, I'll do this a little later today when it warms up some.

Stay tuned,
VW

Scrap Wood Project-Pine Veggie and Dip Bowl-Finish photos

Welcome Back All,

Well, as its a little warmer now than it was this morning I decided to go back down to the shop and finish the veggie and dip bowl.

Let's look at the photos:

I've been looking at the bowl for several days and I decided it would look better and hold more food if it were hollowed out a little more so that's what I did. I deepened it by 3/4" and I also beveled the rims  This photo shows it mounted on the lathe before hollowing:

The next three photos show the bowl after it was hollowed out more and sanded. I sanded to 320 grit and polished it with pine shavings. This photo shows the end grain on the side of the bowl:

This is a photo of it looking down on it:

And this is it from the side:

Here are photos of the bowl with a coat of General Finishes salad bowl varnish:

As it's too cold for the varnish to dry today, I'll take it inside and let it dry over night and tomorrow and for the next several days I'll give it a very thin coat of varnish. Afterwards I'll polish it. Look for the final finish photos on Sunday.

VW

Snow, Wooden Buttons, and it's just too damn cold to work today

Hi Everyone,

Well, we got our first snow of the season last night. When I got up this morning about 1 1/2" of snow was on the ground. Here are some photos:

Burrr!

Ok, back to the button project

I bought a wooden dowel rod yesterday out of American cherry in order to produce buttons with a consistent diameter. And I decided to treat myself to a thin bladed Robert Sorby parting tool as this would be an ideal tool to use to cut the finished button off of the dowel. 

Let's take a look at some photos:

I cut off a short 5" section of the rod and mounted it in the chuck. This photo shows the rod with the end slightly rounded and a small circle drawn onto the face. This will help me to mark off the spots for the holes:

Here are the holes-I used a 5/64" bit again for this:

Ahhh, new tool!

And these are the finished buttons:

Comment:

The buttons are ok. They don't look like factory made buttons and I suppose that's part of their appeal. The parting tool works well to part off this small of an object without damaging it. It is difficult to get a consistent thickness however. Part of that is that I'm not used to working on small objects like this (I bet pen turners can turn these out by the dozen) and my shop isn't heated and my hands were getting stiff with the cold. 

I'm going to give these a light spray with spray lacquer later on today but I think it will take a lot more practice before I can turn out really nice looking buttons. 

_____

After I finished turning these, I got the stupid idea to try and make a coffee scoop. Those of you who have been reading the blog for a while will remember the numerous attempts I've made to produce a small scoop for ground coffee. Well, I salvaged some cherry wood from a tree in my neighborhood that was trimmed yesterday and decided to carve a scoop:

Here's the tree blank about to be trimmed on the bandsaw:

Gave up and split it in half:

I placed it in my wood vice and was about to begin carving it with a gouge when it slipped out of the vice and I nearly drove the gouge into my knee. By then my hands were frozen stiff. In all the years of woodworking and carving I've done, I've never injured myself but I came bloody close this morning so I decided to quit while I'm ahead and go inside and have some coffee.

We'll return to the coffee scoop adventure another time.

More later,

VW