Hand-Turned Wood Vases & Bowls

VanEss Expressions offers a variety of hand-turned solid wood vases and bowls. These are turned on one of our three lathes. A lathe is something similar to a potter wheel where the clay spins while the potter forms the vase/bowl shape with his/her hands. A lathe holds the wood horizonally (instead of vertically) in a chuck. It spins much faster than than a potters wheel, and various cutting tools are used to carve out the wood to the desired shape. And of course, instead of a pile of reusable clay remaining to redo or make changes; a turner is left with a pile of wood chips (which, obviously, you cannot re-apply).

We classify our turned wood items as either glued up lumber or solid stock. Glued up is board lumber which has been kiln dried (as you would find in a lumber yard). We purchase our wood 'rough cut' to give us as much usable material as possible, then plane and sand ourselves. When we glue up different boards, we either match up the coloring and grain so that the seams are nearly invisible, or set the wood perpendicular to each other to create a unique visual effect. When we designate a piece as multi-wood, it is also glued up board lumber - but it is combining different types of wood. Depending on the way the boards are glued up and the shape of the piece, we can acheive very unique natural color patterns.

Unique Handcrafted Large Multi-Wood Bowl

Solid stock is a solid chunk of wood such as a branch/trunk of a tree. We get our solid stock from local healthy trees that have come down during storms in the fall or winter. We do not use branches that come down in the spring or summer because they are prone to desease and fungus. Even though most wood-turners like to turn 'green' wood (wood with a high moisture content) because it is much easier to turn, we prefer to thoroughly dry the wood prior to turning to reduce the chance of cracking later as it drys. This is a very slow process taking from 6 months to a year and a half depending on the size of the piece and type of the wood. Solid stock wood is also full of surprises, and while we try to create a piece to highlight these unique 'characteristics', there are many pieces that ultimately end up unusable.

Unusual Handmade Solid Stock Wood Urn

Well, that gives you a brief idea of what wood-turning is. I will go into more specifics in future posts. Please Click Here to see some examples of th different wood vases and bowls we have made in the past, and our website to see the wood bowls and vases currently available.