Did I mention...

...that I have the best wife in the world? She watches woodturning shows on TV with me. Yeah, you read that right... we watch woodturning shows together! (I sometimes watch Knitty Gritty with her, but she's a much better sport than I am...)

Last night we watched Two Ways to Make a Bowl with Stuart Batty and Mike Mahoney. That was a really good video, and it showed a great comparison of two very different techniques for making a simple bowl. It's amazing how different two approaches can be to such a simple finished product... yet both work equally well. Personally, I like Stuart's method better (so does my wife, but we won't get into that...) and tonight I roughed a maple bowl with his method. I used very wet red maple, which will tear out really badly if you're not careful, and the push cut to turn the final surface of the outside (granted it's only a rough turning) produced great results. Now if I practice it a few hundred times maybe I can nail the shape in one cut...