Chippin’ Right along
Thanks for your interest in my “Food Safe” Handmade Wooden Bread Bowls.
I have bought 2 trees and am currently making the bowls that will be sold on here starting sometime in April. When bowls are made by hand, you have to use “Green” or freshly cut wood as wood already dried would be too hard to “chip”.
After making a bowl, it takes several weeks (sometimes months) to carefully “dry” them. There is considerable shrinkage in each bowl as it dries. A 15″ wide bowl will lose around 3/4 of an inch during this process, and around 1/4th of its weight, so this drying has to be done slowly. I make sure that all this is done before I sell them to be sure that you do not have any problems with them cracking after they are bought.
Any bowls I will have “For Sale”, will be shown on the BOWLS Page, and will have a price under them. I will probably list them on that page a week or so before the sale, so that folks can start getting ready for the sale. Your best chance to get one would be to simply send me an email late on the day before the sale – listing the ones that you would be happy with and let me know how many (total) you’d like – AND INCLUDE THE ADDESS THE BOWL WILL BE SHIPPED TO. I need to know where it is going because I have to add sales tax to those being shipped to North Carolina. There is NO SALES TAX FOR ANY OTER STATE.
Old age and health issues are really slowing me up, so there may not be many more bowls made by me as my health continues to go downhill.
All bowls are sold as “FREE SHIPPING” in the lower 48 states (no international sales!). The quality of my bowls is the best you will find anywhere. Every bowl I sell has been sanded to at least 220 grit smooth, also they have been buffed and waxed.
“Thank YOU” to the many people who have offered up prayers on my behalf. It really means a lot !!!
The pictures below are of the 1st bowl made from 2 trees I bought recently. (God makes Beautiful wood for me to work with!) This one is extra deep – made from heavily “Burled Maple”.
Feel free to zoom in for better viewing of the beautiful graining.
A Special Christmas Present
Last Christmas I wanted to do something special for my granddaughter. She has worked hard getting her nursing degree and we are so proud of her. She’s a person that really holds on to memories and family is everything to her.
When she was small, she loved to play in the leaves each fall. My wife Nancy and I would rake up all the leaves from a big maple in our front yard and go over near the woods and gather even more from all the trees that surround our yard to make her a nice big pile. The two dogs that we had at the time “Sadie and Daisy” would join in the fun and all three of them would have a great time playing in the leaves.
On May 1 of 2022 a tornado tore up several houses just down the road from us. It also uprooted or broke off over 60 big oaks, maples and other trees around our house and destroyed a building I had recently built. I often wondered how the big maple in our yard seemed fine with no missing limbs when almost all others suffered damage or were broken up. In the summer of 2023 after my first surgery of the year for cancer, I was sitting under the tree watching the Purple Martins flying around the houses we have for them and looked up at the tree admiring its beauty. I was shocked to notice a large crack in the trunk where it split into two trunks. The tornado had damaged the tree after all and if it split further, it would be on our house. I had a tree company come cut all the limbs off of it – leaving only the trunk so that I could preserve it until fall so I wouldn’t lose the log.
I cut it down in November after the sap went down and made several nice bowls out of it. These were special because I actually planted the maple when it was very small, and here I was cutting it down to make bowls from it and using one of these bowls as a canvas to burn a picture of my granddaughter Katie and the dogs – playing in the leaves beneath the very tree that the bowl was made of.
