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Idle musings re turning every piece of lovely wood we find.

I live in S.E. Florida on a river near the Atlantic. I'm blessed with every kind of driftwood imaginable. The same with so many varieties of fallen and trimmed tree logs and branches. As found, many stir my sense of beauty ...whatever that is!

I like to think I am a decent hobbyist woodturner, a fair shadetree machinist, a jackleg sculptor of welded objects and a self styled (as my eye beholds) judge of taste and discrimination about three dimensional wood art.

Many of the pieces of wood I find are beautiful or very interesting as found, but I always want to put them on my lathe or incorporate them in a welded sculpture. It is very hard for me to leave them alone and enjoy them as is. Too often after I give in and turn even a few coves, beads, tapers etc. or combine the wood with various chunks of metal, my interference has really added nothing to the inherent beauty of the wood and in many cases detracted from the elegance presented by nature and its elements.

You and I turn wood of course, and it's natural for us to put every piece of wood we find on our lathes and turn it. At least just a little bit. Sometimes we feel a need to add even further decoration.

Just wondering if any of you have the same problem or even consider leaving well enough alone to be a problem. Woodtuners turn wood. Is it in the province of a woodturner not to turn every piece of lovely wood he or she finds? If so, when do you decide and and how do you manage it?

Sometimes I leave a chunk of driftwood or an unusual branch alone and put an angel wing or something, but never a finial, on top. Sometimes they turn out pretty good, ....sometimes neither pretty nor good. :)

Turn to Safety, Arch Fortiter

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Arch
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Arch, You know the rule...First do no harm. Nature has taken months and often years to "work" a piece of wood that once was a living part of a tree or shrub and create this thing we call driftwood. Water,salt,sun,wet,dry,rain and wind have each had a hand in working the wood. So we need to give the driftwood an opportunity to show us its artistic self. Then, and only then, we may try and improve what nature has presented to us. I live further up the coast from you, in Jacksonville....also with a river near the ocean. There is an abundance of driftwood to admire. I am reluctant to treat driftwood as raw material "wood" as, for instance, I do a fallen black cherry tree or an aging redbud that had to be cut down. I do turn some driftwood however. Two of my favorite pieces are a lidded box and a pen turned from a smallish piece of driftwood cedar. The interior wood of the cedar was dark and rich, a reddish walnut color. It still retains a mild cedar aroma. I think one difference in our approach is that I was a late comer to woodturning but a long time lover of trees and wood and for twenty eight years a lover of driftwood. So my first reaction to a piece of driftwood is to first try and find the beauty in nature's creation and if nature has demonstrated a crass eye then I undertake to"improve" what nature has done. Maybe what we do to things in the shop depends on what we bring in ourselves to the shop.Bob Tidwell

Reply to
Bob Tidwell

Hi Bob, Many thanks. Your's and others's thought provoking or humorous responses make some of my musings worthwhile.

Musing about it, seashells should be the ideal embellishment for driftwood, but growing up near Tallahassee, I saw too many tacky gifts decorated with shells at Stuckey's and B Lloyds' garish roadside tourist traps. I have an aversion to turning cypress knees for the same reason. Guess I'm not fully immune since I have turned a couple of clocks from cypress slabs. :)

BTW as an OT aside, some of you will remember those awful yellow and purple signs at intervals beginning 5 miles ahead of the store like Burma Shave ads. Then on arrival there was the inevitable stuffed gator or a sad and hopeless gaunt old black bear caged out front. Inside were the shell and knee gifts and the world's thinnest and greasiest burgers, watery orange juice and moon pies that children just had to have so they could throw up in the car later ...and did you buy a few of those funny (not funny to me) outhouse humor post cards that insulted blacks, southerners and women?

I'm sure mid-westerners, and westerners and all parts of the USA had comparable roadside tourist traps and suffered the same insensitivity of the times. "primum non nocere" ...Not!

Sorry for the soapbox, I got carried away. Now back to the fascinating driftwood that washes up on Jax beach and _UP_ the St. Johns river. :)

Turn to Safety, Arch Fortiter

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Arch

Fortiter

Not a soapbox message, but it involves Florida. This week my neighbor returned from a trip to FL. He rang my doorbell and said he brought me a chunk of palm tree to turn. It was NOT palm tree--appeared to be maple and long cut and dried. I thanked him, and cut into it and even made a bowl blank from it but it was cracked through and through. But a nice thought to bring a 40 pound piece of wood back just for me. It was not driftwood so it wasn't pretty.

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Gerald Ross

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