I was pretty proud of this one (though it's hardly perfect), so I thought I'd share. The wood is heavily spalted (but not at all punky) sweetgum. Finish is MinWax wipe-on polyurethane. The finish took forever because the endgrain drank up the poly. Someone elsewhere suggested using sanding sealer to avoid that in the future, so I'll probably be trying that.
The orange staining on the side bugs me (I live in an area with lots of red clay, so it looks to me like I dragged the piece through the mud), but it's apparently something else. I thought maybe mineral deposits, but a fellow turner told me it was probably a fungus that made the stain.
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