Last weekend I got a call from a guy, kind of a friend of a friend type deal. He said he had a box of rough turned bowls and wondered if I was interested in them. I drove to his house and he told me the story behind them. His father had been a woodturner years ago. He had a stroke in the early 90's and died a few years later. The guys daughter was married to a guy that was a wood worker and he took all his stuff, including these bowls. He never did anything on the lathe and they think he either gave the lathe away, junked it, or something but no one knows where it is anymore. Then this guy died a while back. So the guy I know, who is the brother-inlaw to the last owner of the bowls was helping clean out his place and came across all these bowls. They aren't very big, 6-12", and there are a bunch of wooden discs about 4-6" diameter and about an inch thick. Most are marked with a date, day and month, but some also have a year ranging from 84 to 86. Some look like they've been sealed with wax and some look and smell like they've been rubbed with heavy grease. They were all roughed using an assortment of face plates and various screw hole patterns in them. The guy took me into his house and showed me some of the finished work his father had done. It was incredible stuff. Mostly utility things like candy dishes and small lidded boxes. There was a cookie jar thing that had been segmented and made to fit a tin cookie can inside of it. (They gave me a cookie from it too). But the segmenting pattern was like nothing I've seen anywhere else. Then they had two large segmented table lamps that were really nice. All the joints were perfect and they had some interesting designs that I haven't seen either. All his work was finished with felt on the bottoms, I'm guessing to cover the screw holes, and had a really nice finish that gave the wood a nice dark patina. Probably just real genuine aged wood. It was just cool to see this old work and wonder about the guy that did it.
So now I have a box of roughed blanks and a bunch of discs to try do something half as nice as what he had done with them. The wood is hard to tell what variety it is because of the coating on it but it's pretty well preserved. I turned one of the smaller bowls just to see what the wood might be. I'm pretty sure it's apricot but it has a darker and richer color than the fresh apricot I've worked with before. I tried making a lid for it from one of the discs that I think is also apricot but it just didn't turn out as well as I would like. The grain doesn't line up and then I let the buffing wheel grab it out of my hand and it got chipped anyway. But If you haven't nodded off yet from my long winded story, here's some pics.....

l stephens bowls 1.jpgl stephens bowls 2.jpgApricot bowl 1.jpgApricot lidded bowl 1.jpg