Carved Bowls

  A lovely maple tree stood beside our house. The tree was most likely planted just after the house was built back in the 50's. It was a beautiful tree spreading out seemingly forever shading us during the worst of the summer heat. The kids loved to climb in it and would play in the ocean of crimson leaves it dropped in the fall. So many memories........

  The old tree had developed a large split down it's middle and we feared it would eventually fall uncontrollably during a storm. We cut the tree down this last winter.

  A tree that nice must hold some beauty on the inside as well. Unfortunately the tree was not well suited for sawing out planks of lumber. It was more of a firewood tree.

  Determined to make something from this tree I picked up a Pro 4 cutter from Lee Valley for my angle grinder to try some power carving. The roughing work is done with the cutter then you move onto sanding disks of finer grits that also attach to the angle grinder. Lastly I use curved scrapers to smooth out the sanding marks.

The following pictures are some of the bowls sculpted from the old maple. She really was a beauty.

  The first bowl is small and I left a lot of the wood that lay just under the bark to let that old maple speak for itself.

 The second bowl was a much larger piece and I discovered I could curve the edge to make these crazy swooping edge lips.

 The last bowl is very shallow. It wasn't really coming along very well then suddenly this. Reminds me of a bird.

Thanks old tree. I enjoyed working with you to reveal the beauty you worked so long to create.

I hope you enjoy them too.

Thanks for reading
Ken