Hi Everyone,
The pictures below show a cherry salad bowl I just completed last night. The wood came from a large wild cherry ("Choke Cherry" I believe) tree Bill Grumbine and I harvested back in the Fall of 2002. Since this bowl was rather large, the roughed out blank was allowed to dry for more than a year. It's been sitting in my shop for all that time waiting for me to get the chance to work on it.
The bowl measures 13" diameter x 4 1/2" high with a 3 1/4" diameter base. The wall thickness is approximately 1/2".
I decided to dress up the rather utilitarian profile with some beads along the rim. At first I was going to add Inlace. But, reasoning that sometimes "less is more", decided against it in favor of the beads. The base also features a cove and bead in keeping with the motif of the rim. The sap lines running along the inside give the piece a nice bit of "distraction" and in my opinion seem to add to the overall feel of the bowl. But like the dark spot on the outside, these too will fade over time. That's is the reason I went with the more tactile, and lasting bead decoration.
After final turning, the bowl was sanded to 220 grit, then wet sanded to 2000 grit. The finish is Watco's Danish Oil (natural color), which was recommended to me again, by Bill Grumbine. I had never had the opportunity to use this finish before and was very impressed with the results on this piece of Cherry. It brought out the grain better than the Urethane Oil I was previously using. I gave this bowl several coats over a period of days and allowed each to dry before buffing in between coats with 0000 steel wool. The final step was buffing with a Beall Buffing System.
If you look back a couple of days ago, you will recognize this bowl as the same one in which I was asking about methods for coloring the cherry so to remove the dark spot. The majority of you felt that attempting to color the wood to obscure the spot was not necessary. The wood itself would darken over time as it aged. Far be it from to to disagree with a logical course of action that requires me to do nothing! So here it is, the way Nature intended. Until the same Nature causes the wood to mellow and darken.
Thanks for viewing
See ya around,
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