Small Oregon Myrtlewood Bowl

This Small Oregon Myrtlewood Bowl is the perfect "gateway" bowl. Just the right size for candy, keys, or your morning cereal, and the small size makes the price quite affordable - just $20.00.

Oregon Myrtlewood, also called California Laurelwood, is a hardwood with a wide variety of colors depending on the minerals in the soil where it is grown - from light tan to dark brown, olives and reds, and blacks from spalting as in the bowl shown. It is noted as one of the world's most beautiful woods. This bowl, and all my bowls, are finished with mineral oil and beeswax - the mineral oil brings out the natural colors, and the beeswax protects the wood and adds a satin sheen. It is food safe, washable, and ready to use.

For any open-formed bowl, multiply the height times the diameter, and add to this the price of the raw wood 'blank' and that's your price.

Turned Cedar Box Set

These boxes are made from Aromatic Cedar. Aromatic Cedar is popular for boxes and chests due to its nice fragrance, which also repells moths. The wood has dramaitc grain, and finishes very nicely, polishing to a mild sheen without sandpaper if you use your tools right when turning a project. The boxes use a friction polish to get the bright sheen and have a vacuum fit, meaning you feel and hear a slight pop when you pull the lid straight off.

This was a very enjoyable project. I've got the hang of the suction-fit lids, jam chuck techniques, sanding, friction polish, the works. The grain matches from lid to base too which looks way cool. The boxes are from 2 to 3 inches in diameter, from 2 to 6 inches tall. Boxes are a pretty detail-intensive thing to make on the lathe, so I don't expect I'll sell a lot of them. I'd have to charge about $80 for this set to make it worth my time, and so unless you're in to high-end home decor, that's probably a little steep for you. It's too bad because they are fun to make, and they look and feel really cool.

Still, if you want a box, they start at about $25 each for a short box with simple styles and inexpensive wood, and they go up from there. Check out my links (below left) for some good places to order wood from if you're interested. Pick the wood, email me, and I'll give you a bid.

Purpleheart Bowl

This is a purpleheart bowl, hand-turned and finished with mineral oil and beeswax for a food-safe finish, 8" diameter, 2" depth. Yes, that is its actual natural color, with no stain.

Purpleheart, also sometimes called amaranth or violet wood, comes from several species of tropical trees native to Central and South America. The heartwood is a light purple when cut, and darkens upon exposure to sunlight, reaching first a darker purple and eventually a brown with a purple cast. It is hard and strong, and takes attention when turning, requiring sharp tools, gentle cuts, and a LOT of sanding. An interesting side note: every kind of wood smells different when turned. Maple smells kind of like pancake syrup, mesquite like warm raw meat, walnut like something sour. Well, the dust and shavings from this wood at first smelled kind of sweet, but as I kept smelling it as I was working, it started to smell more meaty, and then kind of like sweet warm old meat. Yuck. Wikipedia says the dust can cause nausea. I can see that. Don't worry, the finished work is scentless.

I wanted to try a more artsy form, less practical with this one for two reasons - one is because I've been wanting to try this brimmed form and see how it would look, and also I could use the wood from the sides under the brim to make some pens and a pencil (future project). As with any nicely-turned wood bowl, it feels great to hold and stroke, and as with all of my bowls, it's ready to use or show. Price as shown: $36. Or as with other open-form bowls, you pick the wood, and add to that $1 per each square inch of profile and I'll make it per your order.

Oregon Myrtlewood Bowl

Oregon Myrtlewood, also called California Laurelwood, is a hardwood with a wide variety of colors depending on the minerals in the soil where it is grown - from light tan to dark brown, olives and reds, and blacks from spalting as in the bowl shown. It is noted as one of the world's most beautiful woods.

This bowl, and all my bowls, are finished with mineral oil and beeswax - the mineral oil brings out the natural colors, and the beeswax protects the wood and adds a satin sheen. It is food safe, washable, and ready to use.

Price for 8"x4" Oregon Myrtlewood Bowl as shown: $75.00. For this particular bowl, however, because it's so spalted, it has a couple of hairline cracks, sealed of course, but perhaps not able to withstand washing and drying needed if used for food, so I'll sell it for replacement cost of the wood - $31.50 plus shipping. Email me if you're interested. Thanks!

Elm Bowl

Elm wood is hard, with coarse, interlocking grain. It polishes to a satin sheen with no finish applied, and has a comfortable woody smell when cut or sanded. It is hard, resistant to cracking and splitting, and useful for anything from cart wheels and chair seats to water pipes during the medieval period. The bark is edible, and saved Norway from famine in 1812. Once a highly popular ornamental street tree, elms are more rare now due to the effects of Dutch elm disease, a beelte-borne fungus that wiped out elms across Europe and North America in the 20th century.

If you ask me, everybody with a desk at work needs a bowl on it. Of course that's what I'll say - that way you'll order a bowl from me... This bowl is 8" across, 2" deep, and about 1/4" thick, with a beeswax finish. Use it for your breakfast cereal if you want. Open forms like this turn nicely and quickly.

There are so many beautiful pieces of wood out there to be made into bowls like this. Just do an ebay search for "bowl blank" and you'll see some spectacular pieces of wood for surprisingly little money. Buy it, ship it to me instead of to you, and tell me what you want it to look like and I'll send it to you when it's done. Food-safe finish will be used unless you tell me otherwise.

I'll be honest - I love turning bowls. So I've priced these so that they're not really worth my time, just so I can do more of them. Take the diameter of the bowl blank, times the height, and that's your cost in dollars if you provide the wood. This bowl would be about $32.00. Exceptions are for natural edge bowls and enclosed forms, which I have to charge more because they're more difficult to make.

Come on, you know you want one, or maybe two - yeah, that's it - one for your candy on your desk, another to keep your keys and wallet in while you work...order now!

Natural Edge Hawthorne Bowl

Hawthorne is an interesting wood - very hard, light and smooth color, and nice attractive strong bark. It's prized for firewood, among the hottest burning woods, and also prized for woodturning, because of its strength and smooth grain. Also known in celtic and witch circles as a fertility something or other - I don't go there...

Natural Edge Bowls are cool - bark edges, irregular shaped rim, warping, bark intrusions, even checks - these irregularities are the name of the game for a bowl like this - turn it wet and then nuke it in the microwave to accelerate and accentuate the warping. And along with these imperfections comes a set of challenges for turning the bowl on the lathe, not otherwise part of bowl making - catches, chuck or faceplate tear-out, sanding problems, etc. Not an easy bowl to make, but therein lies the challenge...

OK enough drama - This bowl had me banging my head against the wall, and in the end I settled for about 3/8" thickness, where I would have liked to go to 1/4", but still a satisfying project when all is said and done. Thanks to Keith Tilley for the tree!

Due to the challenges in turning a natural edge bowl, I'll have to charge more than for a regular bowl, or even an enclosed form. Plus the availability of good, natural-edge wood is intermittent. $2.00 per square inch of profile, plus wood. This bowl would be $30.00 including wood.

Spalted Maple Bowl - Enclosed Form

Spalted maple is similar to ambrosia maple in that both are colored from fungus that is allowed to attack the wood while it's kept moist and near room temperature. The difference is that spalted maple is just randomly attacked by fungus however it is introduced, whereas ambrosia maple is attacked from the fungus introduced by the ambrosia beetle into the holes it bores. You get completely different coloration patterns. This Spalted Maple Bowl has dark spots throughout, and a large stain on the bottom of the piece. Maple is a popular wood for woodturning because it is smooth and closed grained and hard. And it smells great when you cut and sand it - faintly of maple syrup.

Really thought it's the enclosed form of this bowl that gets interest. People keep asking if it was hard. Of course it's hard...but not terribly. Still, each project has its own challenges. With this one, one challene was how to hollow it out without specialized hollowing equipment. In the end it went quite well. The other challenge was sanding the inside - sticking your fingers in through a 3" opening with a sharp edge on a lathe spinning at 1200 RPM is a little troublesome - the sandpaper would catch and my fingers would get bounced around inside the rim like a marble in a bowl that you're shaking - ouch. So I didn't spend as much time sanding the inside as I would like. They make specialized tools for both jobs, but unless someone orders enough of these to cover the cost, I'm doing it the old hard way - hence the extra charge for enclosed forms.
Still, a fun project.


Enclosed bowls are the price of the wood plus $1.50 per square inch of profile. This bowl would be about $28 plus shipping.

Ambrosia Maple Bowl

Ambrosia maple is regular maple, left moist and warm and exposed to the elements after the tree dies, so that the ambrosia beetle can attack the tree. The beetle bores into the tree, bringing ambrosia fungus spores with it. The fungus attacks and stains the tree and then the beetle can eat the fungus as it reporduces. The net result: Beautifully figured wood.

So here it is - I'm finally satisfied with it. This is the first bowl I turned, made from Ambrosia Maple. For those fellow turners out there, I started it when I had only a face plate, then when I got my chuck including cole jaws, I decided to improve it - it was thick and clunky because I was afraid of hitting the screws in the faceplate setup, and it was rough with torn endgrain and tool marks. Not very impressive. So I turned a recess in the base and mounted it in the chuck.

I worked on it some more, thinning it out, improving the form, cleaning up torn endgrain. I brought it to work and put it on my desk. Then every time I was waiting for AutoCAD to do its thing, I picked up the bowl and over time noticed more and more I wanted to improve, but I was afraid of making it too thin and breaking it. Then my dad gave me a set of bowl calipers so I could check the thickness everywhere, and so I mounted it again.

I really like it now. The ambrosia beetle worked a pretty nice job on this piece, and left a few holes to show he had been there. I kept this bowl on my desk for a long time till the Farmers' Market this summer where I sold it to this sweet old lady. I missed it though, so I bought another piece of ambrosia maple and made this next bowl:Price for a similar bowl: $12 plus wood. (6"x2")

Segmented Wood Salad Bowl

This segmented wood salad bowl was a way fun project. Not that it went off without a hitch - for my first segmented bowl, however, not too shabby.

I designed it in AutoCAD at lunch, and went to work. I wanted to go as wide as my lathe would allow (10" diameter) and deep enough for salad. I had some leftover aromatic cedar, a gorgeous wood that smells so good, so I ripped it into strips, and started cutting the pieces. There are 6 layers of 16 pieces each, and a solid base. That's 97 pieces of wood. I don't have a thickness sander so I had to complete each layer, sand one side, glue it to the lathe, wait for it to dry, and then true up the top of the layer in preparation for the next. It took some time, that's for sure.

Then turning the finished bowl was a bit tricky. A learning experience that's for sure, but the finished results were great. I sanded it smooth, rubbed in mineral oil, melted in and polished beeswax to give it a food-safe satin finish, and it was done.

You can't help but run your hands up and down and around every part of the bowl. I read somewhere where wood bowls were called sensual and thought, OK somebody is just being gross - they're BOWLS for crying out loud. After finishing this though I see what they mean. It's not a sexy thing, it's just very cool to hold, and to look with your fingers every bit as much as with your eyes. And whenever somebody new takes a look, without fail they do the same thing - it feels as beautiful as it looks.

This one was for my wife. I told her I was glad it was done so she will give me peace and stop forcing me to go out in the garage every chance I get. I'm not sure that she thought that was very funny :)

I've since looked around and seen hand-turned segmented salad bowls of this size on the internet for about $150. I think I could beat that price by about 25%, depending on the complexity of the bowl and how many kinds of wood you want. And I could throw in matching, smaller segmented bowls for a complete set at about $30 each.