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| Bowl for the kind Lady |
Early this spring a lady gave me about three truck loads of apple wood, in exchange I promised to make her two bowls out of the apple wood. This is not a problem to do and is often common courtesy among us bowl makers. I have one of her bowls completed and am still waiting for the second one to finish drying. In the mean time I have cut up and carved out several other bowl out of some of the sections of apple limbs and logs that I received from her.
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| Limb piece |
Now while I absolutely love the final appearance of apple...Apple is one of those really unusual woods that can look completely different from one section of the tree to the next. Lets say a bowl is made out of the trunk of the tree and another is made out of a much smaller younger limb. These two bowls could vary drastically in appearance. The piece from the trunk has much prettier and darker rings and patterns whereas the piece from the limb has a nice light colored outside and a much darker middle section.
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| Trunk piece |
Some of the other problems with apple pertain mostly to the trunk pieces. Apple can have both hard and soft spots in it, specially if the tree was dead, rotten, or bug infested. Surprisingly the hard spots are not the spots that I have the most problem with, it is the soft ones. These soft spots are hard to hew out cleanly and can cause ugly blemished or cracks. The other problem I have with these soft spots is when hewing out the bowl instead of cleanly hewn chips these soft areas will actually either pull apart or absorb my chop turning the edge on my adze.
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| Cracked Bowl |
Despite all of the problems and headaches apple can cause me it is still one of my favorite woods to work with, even if it is only for the possibility of a very beautiful looking bowl.
