Rough half-log (Fresh-cut, wet and heavy) 12/6/2024
Roughing ... (Flattening off the bottom) 12/6/2024
Finding a bowl (Locating the bowl - with some sap-wood on the outside edges.) 12/8/2024
Finding foot locations (Looks like it will have three feet on quite short legs.) 12/9/2024
Shaping the bottom (All gouge work for a while) 12/10/2024
More bowl-like ... (I've marked the rim about 1/2" thick. When done it should be about 5/16". Right now it is a wooden bowl full of ... wood.) 12/12/2024
Bottom shaped (About as far as I can go with the bowl this green & wet.) 12/12/2024
Holding fixture (Screwed into the bottoms of the feet) 12/12/2024
Beginning hollowing (A lot of gouge work yet to do but it is beginning to look more like a bowl.) 12/13/2024
Chip by chip ... (The bowl is mostly about 1/2" thick now.) 12/14/2024
Thinning ... (The bowl is mostly around 3/8" so now I need to be quite careful while shaving and scraping. That hook-shaped scraper is the main tool for this phase.) 12/17/2024
The video on the right shows how I'm carefully thinning down the bowl. I'm using a modified gooseneck scraper. At this point I'm aiming for ~5/16" thickness.
END OF BOWL IN PROGRESS

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In April of 2020 I carved this black cherry bowl and after being on display at Northern Michigan University's DeVos Art Museum was shipped to its new owner in Mexico City.

"Cherry Nest"
wild black cherry - 14-1/2" x 10-1/2" x 4"

It had been a couple of years since I'd carved any bowls but that fall while cutting firewood I came across a couple of trees that begged to be remembered by being made into bowls. This bowl began as a large, heavy (at least 50 lb.) piece of black cherry. You can get an idea of how much wood was  removed. For scale, the carving bench top is 24" square.

  

I had a rough idea of where I wanted to go with this bowl; a shallow bowl suspended by a three-footed base. The bowl itself is captured but separate,  secured by extensions upward from the base. I started on this bowl in early January and it was finished around the middle of April, 2021. This bowl is in a private collection.

Click on the image above to see larger photos.

Photos and larger images of some of the bowls I have carved over the years.

     "What I would like to do before it is too late is to get this across to a few craftsmen-to-be who will work after me, and also to a public which will be there to receive them, because we are living in a time when, I believe, this is important. 
     Fine things in wood are important, not only aesthetically, as oddities or rarities, but because ... much of our life is spent buying and discarding and buying again things that are not good.
     Some of us long to have at least something, somewhere, which will give us harmony and a sense of durability -- I won't say permanence, but durability -- things that, through the years, become more and more beautiful, things we can leave to our children"
                                        James Krenov -- "A Cabinetmaker's Notebook"