Bowl Carving Tutorials

When we started making bowls, our goal was to use highly figured wet wood to sculpt them into a variety of shapes, sizes and aspect ratios. We started with a lathe but were frustrated that the lathe’s requirement for making round objects did injustice to some of the most evocative features in many pieces of wood. We learned from our lathe work that our choice of using the most dramatic, wet wood meant that we must be able to accommodate warpage from drying. Lathe turners twice turn their wood, first rough carving and then allowing the bowl to wood to equalize stresses through drying and then turn the bowl again using the fixed axis of the lathe to re-enforce symmetry. We needed a carving process that duplicated the twice carving approach, but which was reliable, quick, and easy to use. This led to a systematic approach that had three components: 1) A set of simple design protocols to create reproducible designs for several categories of shapes that were based entirely on the rim, 2) A set of carving rules that maximized the ability to easily recover the original design after warpage, 3) Several procedures that enable the quick and reliable execution of symmetrical bowls with thin and uniform rims and wall. 

While there are many written and video tutorials on bowl carving, none were suited to carving finely crafted, symmetrical bowls from wet figured wood. For example, ovals were typically designed by the two-pin method, which is fine for dry wood, but is unusable for the bowl’s redesign needed for the second carving because the hollowed-out bowl no longer offers a place to mount the pins in their original position. Rim-only design is required, so we had to develop an alternative approach and then take that lesson to the other bowl shapes.

Many people have asked how we do this, so we have created our own tutorials to guide others that are enamored with highly figured, interesting wood.