This one is hands down, the best thing I’ve made in a very long time!

This wood came from the birch tree that the girls helped me salvage this spring.  When I was roughing out the blank, a huge chuck of wood came flying off.  Turns out (no pun intended) that there was a tree branch embedded in the wood that must have broken off and the tree grew around it.  Because of where the divot was, I decided to flip the bowl and make it a natural edge piece, hoping the hole would be turned out.  As the piece was shaped, a whole bunch of stress fractures started appearing in the wood.  I’m not sure this was from the drying process or if it was from the remaining wood readjusting as internal stress was released by the turning.  Either way, once the shape was set, I took it off the lathe and put it in the kiln to finish drying.

After a month in the kiln, I started to re-turn the bowl, but more and more cracks started coming out in the wood.  When I started to add the colored epoxy to fill the big hole that was in the bottom, there were so many cracks within the bowl, epoxy started leaking out all over the place!  Every time I’d get one crack plugged, epoxy would leak from some place else.  It took several layers of tape, several pours of epoxy, and a lot of clean up of the garage floor, but eventually, the cracks were full.  It wasn’t until I started to turn off the tenon on the bottom of the bowl that I realized just how deep the cracks were and how many weird angles they ran through the wood, which explains why it took so much resin.  Most of the sanding had to be done off the lathe, by hand, because the wood really wasn’t that stable.

All things considered, although this was a pain in the ass to make, I think the final product was definitely worth it!