Over the past month, I’ve been participating in a fellowship at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in Rockport, Maine. I was here last March as well, and it’s a treat returning to a familiar place. The school’s main programs are longer-term woodworking intensives in furniture making & woodturning, but they also have an awesome fellowship program for professional woodworkers who are at various stages in their careers, to develop their designs and produce new work. I’m here for a six week stint, but some people stay up to six months. There is a fully equipped woodworking shop, lumber onsite, and a log merchant nearby who helps me with my greenwoodworking needs.
The pencil points to where my workbench is - smack dab in the middle of the Fellowship Building.
Currently there is more white snow than green grass.
One of my main goals in coming back to the school was to make plates from large diameter trees - specifically cherry because I like incorporating the contrast of the white sapwood and pink heartwood.
This is how I layout plates that I turn on the lathe. I needed to get a large diameter log so that I could get quartersawn blanks and blanks with relatively parallel grain. This is in order to minimize warping as they dry.
The first week I got here, the resourceful and knowledge-full Mason McBrien took me to the log merchant in Windsor, ME and we selected two large diameter logs for me to work with, and an additional log for the students in the woodturning intensive. It was amazing to learn that the crane was manufactured in Two Harbors, Minnesota! A town a few hours from Grand Marais, MN, where I was living for the past year and a half.
This was my first time doing a production run of woodenware and below are the results. I created 7” and 8-7/8” diameter plates. They work really nicely together. I’m selling them as pairs, because by seeing two plates side by side, you can appreciate the design of the sapwood and heartwood better. They’re for sale on my website until the end of this week (2/22), and then I’ll sell them through stores. Next up, I’ll be working on hand carved platters - more photos and stories to come!
Pile of completed plates!
Finished plate & apple for scale.
A stack of cherry plates with the sapwood lined up.