I found a piece of maple that I’d forgotten I’d roughed out. Somehow, instead of being piled alongside of all the others, it was sitting underneath the tool chest. Not sure how it got there, but perhaps I pushed it with the broom as I was cleaning up and just forgot to go back and retrieve it. Since it was dry, I figured that was a sign I was supposed to start working on it.

Looking at the shape I’d left when I roughed it, it was clear this was meant to be a shallow bowl. It only took about 45 minutes to get the turning done, even though it is about 1/8″ thick on the side walls. Surprisingly enough, the end grain wasn’t too chewed up, so the sanding went pretty quick, too! I was just about to take it off the lathe to remove the tenon, when I realized the reason it had been so easy to turn and sand is the grain was about as straight as could be. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but to me, it just looked blah. Like vanilla ice cream kind of blah.

I took out the blowtorch and tried to burn the wood to bring out the grain pattern more. While that works really good on pine, on soft maple, it wasn’t nearly as striking. I sanded it back and realized that very little had changed about the piece. All I had done was darken the entire piece, and not in a good way!

Thinking the blowtorch was a bust, I decided this would most likely end up as a throw away piece, so it would be the perfect project to play around a bit. Since I hadn’t done anything with dyes in awhile, I figured this was as good a time as any other to play with them. At that point, I realized that I’d moved all the dyes from the garage shop into the basement AND that I was too lazy to traipse all the way through the house for a project I figured would be burnt within a week. Then, I remembered I still had a box of RIT fabric dye, in a multitude of colors that I had left in the garage. I found the bottle of black and went back to the lathe.

After coating the whole bowl, I let it dry while I mowed the yard. When I came back, the blank was a dry as it could be, so I was able t proceed. I sanded the bowl back using 240 grit paper, intending to leave just a little black remaining on the wood grain. Nice thought, but what I actually got was the entire bowl looking very dark. In all honesty, it looked surprisingly like walnut! . Next, I put on some red and liked the way it changed to color, without making it look too obvious. There’s still enough of color from both the burning and the black dye, that it didn’t come out a cartoon color. I decided it was as good as it was going to be, called it a day, and added three coats of lacquer.

Not sure I like it, but I don’t hate it…