My ebay-order of dried wood came in on Friday, and the kids are at the grandparents house for the weekend. Perfect timing, eh?

I got some of the following species:

• Bolivian rosewood (morado)
• East-indian rosewood
• Lignum Vitea (iron wood)
• Black & white striped ebony
• Zebrawood

I started working on some christmas ornaments, and this one is the only complete one so far (the rest need some hand-finishing before they get pictures). It was my first attempt at making a multi-piece ornament, or multi-piece anything for that matter. It’s decent, but there are some finer points that bug me. The ball is black & white striped ebony, and the top and bottom are east-indian rosewood.

My nephew is in town, so I wanted to make something for all three kids. I tried some spinning tops, from B&W striped ebony, east-indian rosewood, and Lignum Vitea (iron wood). They look pretty good and they work!

I turned a miniature vase from maple. I mounted it endgrain (grain runs vertically when it stands up) and turned it wet. It’s about 3 inches high and 1.5 inches wide. The wall thickness is about 3/16″. With the grain orientation and the wall thickness it shouldn’t crack as it dries.

This was a bit of a “proof of concept” since I’ve never turned a vessel with that grain orientation before. Because of the orientation and size I got to crank up the lathe speed and use the spindle gouge instead of the bowl gouge, which was a nice change of pace.

Lately my time has been put towards rough-turning lots of bowls and putting them on the shelf to dry (some with DNA, some without, so I can compare drying methods). But… I want to learn to turn other objects too. So this weekend I ordered some dried wood pieces from ebay, including some zebrawood, rosewood, ebony, and some others. I want some dried exotic pieces to make ornaments, toys, etc. I was even eying plans for a chess set, but I’ll do some other simpler projects first. I’ll post photos of the blanks when they arrive so you can see the variety.

My wife has a thing for fruit in artwork. Pears in particular. We have 4 pear paintings that immediately come to mind. For her birthday, I bought a set of 3 spalted maple apples turned by Jason Guest from Vancouver.

Tonight I took a stab at turning a pear from maple. The stem is turned from oak and sanded to a “rustic” shape. Here’s the catch: with no dry wood on-hand, I used wet maple. I can’t say my wife was happy when I told her to keep it in a paper bag for 2 months to prevent cracking.

There’s the excitement of turning your first bowl, and then there’s the excitement of turning your first good bowl. Well, as far as I’m concerned, this is my first good bowl. It’s maple with a nice figure, due to its location beneath the intersection with a large branch. I roughed and soaked it a few days ago, but wanted something to take to the local club’s show & tell on Thursday so I microwaved it for a while. I got lots of checking, but was able to turn it away.

I waxed the hell out of this, so much that it took 40 minutes to buff out the globs of unnecessary wax that I accidentally applied. 5.5″ x 2.75″. Hope you like it.

And the inside… note the figure with the windswept appearance:

Here’s a small beech bowl I just finished. I like the grain pattern that results from being in the trunk near a trimmed branch. This was DNA soaked and sat for a week, but apparently not long enough because now it’s 4″ x 4.5″.

Some of the other rough-turned bowls cracked, so I need to get more serious about my drying methods. I rough-turned a maple blank today (about 7″ x 3″) and soaked it for 2 hours, let the surface air dry for an about an hour, and then wrapped it with paper. Hopefully I’ll have better luck with this one.