Where to go from here?

I have now been making bowls for over a year now.  I have learned a lot of things, both from experience and from other bowl makers.  However I have reached a point that I have become comfortable and I think it might be time to take a step in a more advanced direction. 

I really enjoy making bowls without first creating a pre-cut blank.  So I could easily switch to making that style bowl all the time.  However, that would require a lot of tools that I have not yet acquired, though I am trying, to make the bowls as nice as I would like them to be.  Plus, that limits the variety of bowls I could be making as well. 

Another change I could start doing is to work the outside of my bowls.  Currently I either leave them with a natural look or I just sand off the band saw lines and leave them smooth.  When my mentor works on a bowl he first starts by hewing the outside of the bowl to give it what he calls ,"A more handmade" look.  I have considered doing that or using my spokeshave to give the edges a rounder smoother look to them. 

Of course the option of hand carving intricate images and designs is possible too, but that may be a little too much of a step into the more difficult range that what I want to do next.

Well regardless of what I decide to start doing with my bowls, I am sure I will be happy with my final decision and that many hours of experimenting will be needed to decide.

First Attempt with Osage Orange

I helped Bob, my mentor, cut up some Osage Orange for him to used to make some bowls.  He had a few scraps left over that I noticed would work for soap dishes.  So I cut out four soap dish forms from his scraps and took them home.
I finally got to those forms about a week or two ago.  I sharpened my adze because I knew that this was some really tough wood to work with.  Well that was pointless because after my first chop my adze was dull again.  I took to more chops and the side of the bowl broke off.
Bowl number two and little smaller then the first one so I had to watch my finger tips.  Five chops and a section fall out of the middle of one side.
Bowl number three, I see a trend going here so I decide to take it easy.  First swing doesn't even make a mark, swing harder, still nothing, a little more umph, and success.  Fourth successful chop splits the bowl right in two. 
Fourth and final bowl, about twice the length of the first three bowls.  Start chopping, really don't care what happens anymore, and am actually having some success.  The bowl is taking a lot of work but is slowly being hewn out.  Then I notice it, May adze is so dull at this point that instead of hewing out nice chips of wood I and actually shredding the wood into a pulp that leaving ugly gauge marks in the bowl.
I then decided to grab all four bowls walk back into the house, over to the fire place, and threw them in.  Final score Osage 4 - Me 0.