About the “Dough Bowl Maker”
My passion has been making beautiful “handmade wooden bowls”. I’ve been making them in various sizes and shapes since 1988, sticking mainly to styles that were fixtures in kitchens before the invention of plastic. Every bowl is unique. Every bowl on this site is 100% food safe! I try to have something for everyone, and I stand by the products that I make.
History:
My Wife and I were raised in Reidsville, a small town in central NC, about 20 miles south of the Virginia line. I worked in a textile mill and Nancy worked at the local hospital. On our wedding day we had $15 between us. She had $12 and I had $3. I jokingly tell folks that I married her for her money – because she had four times more than I did! We were married in Milton Warf’s living room and as soon as he said, “you can kiss your new wife”, the first thing I said to her was, “can I borrow $2” so I could pay Preacher Warf the $5 he wanted for marrying us. (No Joke) The pictures below are of the wedding ring I made her out of a 1957 silver quarter (the year she was born), and her wearing 2 rings. As she’s gotten older, her fingers have shrunk so the original ring started falling off. So I made her a slightly smaller one to keep the original one on her finger. I’m proud to say she’s my “Ol’ Lady” and has put up with me for 105 years (or so she says). Feel free to zoom in on the pictures for more detail.
Eating what we raised
Raising a lot of our own food and making our own bread was the norm back then. I wanted my wife to have a “Dough Bowl” to use in making our bread. We normally made 3 small loaves of “sourdough” every week or so. I looked for a handmade wooden bowl that I could afford at local flea markets and estate sales. It was very discouraging when we’d find nothing or even worse when we’d find a high priced bowl that was cracked so badly as to be unusable. I figured I’d never find one I could buy so I started planning on making one myself.
Enjoying Sunday Afternoons
Back in ’88, on Sunday afternoons we’d usually go up to “Mabry’s Mill”. It’s an old water-powered gristmill on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Meadows of Dan, Virginia. There I would play fiddle, mandolin or banjo (all badly – LOL) with a group of locals that made music for the folks to dance to, 4 or 5 hours each Sunday afternoon. I’ve never considered myself to be much of an artist but have always had a knack for drawing. I would often draw pictures of some of the folks I saw up at the mill. Most of them were mountain folks that lived in the area and – like us, came to the mill for a low-cost way of enjoying a nice afternoon.
Getting the tool I needed
One of the characters there that I really enjoyed seeing and talking to was “Phipps Bourne” (nicknamed Festus). Phipps was a US Park Service “Ranger” and also the blacksmith at the mill’s blacksmith shop. I gave him a picture I had drawn of him, and wouldn’t let him pay me for it. The next Sunday when we went to the mill he returned the favor by giving me a “hand-adze” which is the tool used to chop out wooden bowls. He had forged it for me at the mill. He knew that I was a “jack-of-all trades and a master of none” and figured that I’d make good use of the tool he made for me.
