This is the thing about my kids:  They are so supportive of me and the attempt at (finally) beginning life 2.0, they try to help me with anything they think I’m doing just for myself.  If I say I  have a happy hour I’m supposed to go to, they’re right there volunteering to drive me home so I can enjoy myself without having to worry about a DUI.  If I casually mention there’s a movie coming out that I’d like to see, they get busy trying to rearrange schedules to find a time where they can go with me and I don’t have to see the movie by myself.  It’s super sweet and I’m still trying to figure out why they care so much, when in all reality, I don’t deserve it.

Their support of my woodturning hobby quickly became the number one focus of the kids.  They will accompany me to the woodturning meetings, just to help watch the door so I can enjoy the meeting itself.  When I complete a project, they tell me how wonderful it is, even when it’s not.  They have also become the city’s best wood scavengers!  Earlier this spring, I got a text from one of the kids alerting me to a large birch tree that had been taken down by a homeowner and put on the curb for the city to collect.  For me, those texts are like  being sent the secret coordinates to some kind of pirate treasure, since there’s never any guarantee if what you find will be junk or priceless.  This day, it was a jackpot!  By the time I could get there, much of the wood was picked over.  The crafters had come and taken all of the small, straight branches.  The firewood pickers had come and taken all of the limb wood and most of the trunk.  But as luck would have it, the larger, heavier, pieces of the trunk where the branches had started tom come out must have been too heavy for the other looters, so they were sitting there waiting to be liberated.  This is exactly what a woodturner is looking to procure!  I took the two logs home, split them, sealed the ends, and left them in the garage to dry.  Being freshly cut, I figure it’d be two years, minimum, before they would be dry enough to work.  Not being a patient man, I decided to rough turn them into bowl, then put them in my makeshift kiln to speed up the process.  After about two weeks in my overgrown EZ-Bake oven, I fished one of the pieces out and realized it was already dry enough to finish turn.

Since I’ve been playing with color lately, my initial though was to use aniline dye on the wood and perhaps some India inks to accentuate the grain patterns and slight burl that I had hoped would be present in the finished bowl.  When the lathe stopped spinning after the sanding was completed, any thought of adding color was gone when I saw the ripple across the bottom of the bowl and the way the light “flashed” when the bowl was rotated.  The technical term for this effect is chatoyance, but in laymen’s terms is just really frickin’ cool looking wood.

This has a simple wax finish and will be buffed to a higher gloss once the finish cures for a day or so.  Really like this one, even if it is “brown and round”!