The Twenty Bowl Challenge

In September of 2013 president of the Greater Vancouver Woodturner’s Guild issued a challenge to turn twenty bowls and bring them to the meeting in May. The guild usually has monthly challenges and this was issued far in advance to give everybody time to work on it with the idea being that making twenty pieces would challenge and improve the skills of those who took part. In the next meeting the challenge was modified to be a ‘twenty something’ so that those who do not turn bowls could bring twenty of whatever they do turn to meet the challenge.

I chose to stick with the original twenty bowl challenge and wound up with a wide variety of bowls and plates with a wide variety of sizes, shapes and types of wood. Those who are paying attention may notice that I have twenty-one pictures in the gallery because I actually turned one extra bowl.

In general I am not very sentimental about my work and prefer to have pieces move on to other people rather than keep them for myself. The reason for this is that as my skills abilities evolve I find that pieces I originally liked lose their appeal for me and all I see are the flaws so I prefer to see them go on their way while I still enjoy them. With that said though there are two pieces out of this group that I decided, before they even finished, I would be keeping. Both came from wood at the crotch of a tree with one being maple and the other walnut. The figure of the wood in both pieces is just amazing and I am happy with the way that I was able to show it in these two pieces. I guess I’ll be seeing how the appeal of the pieces over time lasts  for me.

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