Musing about coffee cups and popcorn bowls, salad forks and treen.

Popcorn bowls are a gimme. All I need to do is remind a prospect of the thrill of setting a metal or ceramic bowl of fresh popped in their lap, and another customer is made. Insulation is the thing, though I make an undercut "passing" rim on most of my popcorn bowls so they won't spill on a greasy thumb, too. Same insulation works for dough bowls, but they're broader-based and smoothly curved inside.

Since I also make the salad servers, they go as nice sets - birch or hard maple servers, cherry bowl, cherry servers, hard maple bowl, and so on. I make 'em with a thicker graspable rim so they'll take a drop or three, even on the very end grain. Makes 'em more durable than ceramic and glass, and a stainless bowl never sits flat, so advantage to wood there, too.

I think that European beer is a better match to drinking out of birch or beech (Sorry Augie, just age 'em in beech), being at room temperature, and a generally stronger mixed flavor. It's bottoms up drinking, not nursing the stuff, unless you've got an inch thick bottom.

For the rest, well it's just prettier. We aren't bound by a kiln to make things uniform thickness, or to put "feet" on them for the sake sitting level. Before someone jumps in - you only heard that you had to have a bowl uniform thickness, they've been made otherwise for thousands of years with n o problem. We can even make rims or lips on them if we want, just not the kind that the mud slingers are able to do. Not to mention, I'll stack a nice figured or spalted piece up against any Raku out there, and you can use the wooden one if you want to.

I don't suppose it's coincidence that the folks I like to trade with most at shows, and the ones most eager to trade with me are potters. Or glass blowers. Something about round, I guess.

I think nice heavy duty wood utensils with curves in three dimensions are nicer than flimsy flat 2d ones.