My Personal Collection
Folks are always asking me, “How many bowls do you have displayed in your house?” as you can imagine, I’ve had a hand in the making of over 2,000 Handmade Wooden Bowls, and many were absolutely gorgeous. But as I am always quick to say, “GOD alone makes the beauty – I just find it and show it off to the world”.
So to answer the question – I have kept very few of them and none are displayed. I want the beauty to be enjoyed and if I have them all holed up somewhere in storage then no one ever sees them. I have kept about 20 bowls, most were the “first of a kind” (1st round bowl, 1st with handles, etc.) so only a few are real “lookers”. The bowl at the top of the page is as ugly as sin, and the guy who made it (me) clearly didn’t have a clue about making a bowl. BUT … that’s Bowl #1, the very first bowl I ever made and had no one to ask how to go about making one. Completely unusable, over 8 hours of chopping … but it is my starting point.
Below is a few of the others I have kept.
So to answer the question – I have kept very few of them and none are displayed. I want the beauty to be enjoyed and if I have them all holed up somewhere in storage then no one ever sees them. I have kept about 20 bowls, most were the “first of a kind” (1st round bowl, 1st with handles, etc.) so only a few are real “lookers”. The bowl at the top of the page is as ugly as sin, and the guy who made it (me) clearly didn’t have a clue about making a bowl. BUT … that’s Bowl #1, the very first bowl I ever made and had no one to ask how to go about making one. Completely unusable, over 8 hours of chopping … but it is my starting point.
Below is a few of the others I have kept.
This bowl was made in 1989 about 4 months after I first started making doughbowls in the fall of ’88. It was also made with the narrow “adze” Phipps Bourne made me and it is know as the “3 day bowl”. It took 3 12 hour days to make, and was completely hand sanded. I had no money to buy a sander at the time and I wanted it done up right. Notice the lines from the center of the handles to the bottom. All it would have taken was 1 bad hit over the line and it would have been ruined. Some folks can’t understand my attempt at total symmetry. I make each one the absolute best that I can. It’s as simple as that.
This is my “root bowl”. I had a large Red Maple that had the top limbs dying so I knew it was time for it to come down. It grew on a steep drop-off in the middle of my land. It was literally on the edge – half the tree in the ground, half out of the ground and after I dropped the tree I realized there was over 4 feet of the stump showing on the back side (the drop off side). I hate wasting wood and love a challenge so I built a scaffold and ripped out a block with nothing but a chainsaw, a chain and a 1956 Ford tractor. The circle in the center of the bowl is where a root entered the block almost exactly 3 feet below ground.
This bowl is a “crotch bowl” where the tree split into two trunks. On the bottom Picture you can see the two hearts (top right of the bottom pic – and lower left of that same view … and in the right end of the bottom there’s only 1 heart. I’ve made far prettier but saved this one for some reason.
This bowl depends on your imagination … look at the inside of the bowl. On the right side I see a pig head/neck looking left across the bowl at a donkey head (he’s got his head down but you can see the floppy ears) … and on the back there’s a bear on the right side looking to the left. Yeah – I’m really weird.
This is one I call “Asteroids” as it looks like a swirling mass of energy to me. This bowl is from around 2007 or so and came from a tree that produced about a dozen others like it. It was sprayed with several coats of Beheln’s Salad Bowl finish (15-17 coats).
This was one of 38 bowls I got from a tree that was fixin’ to get cut up as firewood. It’s Sugar Maple and I knew what it contained simply buy looking at the bark. I bought the tree – paying the man about the price of two split loads of wood. He was happy – I was estatic, and so were the folks who got 37 of those bowls. I just kept this one.