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!