Inspiring work that is hard to believe was done on a scroll saw.
I had the opportunity to review one of the best How-To woodworking books I've ever read. Carole Rothman makes a seemingly impossible task utterly simplistic through her many step-by-step bowl, jar and vase projects in Wooden Bowls from the Scroll Saw.
I was impressed with how detailed each project in the book was so intricately laid out and explained, but what really made me fall in love with Carole's how-to writing style, was that she must have her beginner readers' best interests in mind. In the first chapter she discusses the pro's and con's of several species of wood and encourages the woodworker to try other types also.
Carole discusses all of the possible tools needed and how to use them. She even includes templates for how to build your own bowl glue-up clamps.
This book has taken me on a journey to learn something that I would never have thought possible on just a scrollsaw...
Wooden Bowls from the Scroll Saw(Fox Chapel) will surprise readers with its collection of projects that look like they were painstakingly turned on a lathe. Instead, these handsome bowls, vases, dishes and jars were made easily with just one affordable tool - the scroll saw.
Using a simple method of cutting a concentric set of rings, Carole Rothman, a former teacher and award-winning cake decorator, can achieve the same graceful form and beauty usually found in lathe-turned objects. Twenty-eight projects walk readers step-by-step through choosing the appropriate wood, cutting rings with a pattern, drilling entry holes, stacking & gluing the rings together, sanding and finishing.
When she first began woodworking in earnest, Carole Rothman used skills honed on the sewing machine to control the band saw -- but it's her scroll saw work that she hopes creates a new genre in woodworking.
Although Carole has been involved in working with her hands since childhood, it didn't come from any family influence. Her family are teachers and academics -- "my father would call an electrician to change the light bulb." By age eight,she had learned to knit and crochet from her mother, but when they bought a sewing machine and learned to sew together, Carole quickly surpassed her mother's skills, sewing her own clothes by age nine.
As a young married woman (she designed and sewed her own wedding dress), Carole encountered a situation familiar to many: "We didn't have much money -- we were pretty strapped." She began refinishing furniture for her new abode, because it was less costly than buying new."Oak was in, in those days," Carole said. She learned about oak and other woods -- "how it worked, how it finished" -- from an antique dealer.
When her young family moved on to a 50-year-old Tudor style home, Carole began learning a new set of skills, in carpentry, plumbing, heating and more home improvement. "We built a deck; we replaced doors....," she said. "I learned to find my way around a lumberyard," and, also, "I learned to deal with contempt. I once had a man in a hardware store ask me why I wasn't home making soup."
Enough reticence regarding the male-dominated aspect of woodworking remained that it took Carole over a year to join the woodworking club which is part of the condo unit where she and her partner live. Carole,divorced from the husband of her younger days, had wanted her partner to make a collapsible wooden basket but, after a year in which he hadn't made the project, she decided to do it herself. As she made the basket on the band saw, she discovered, "It was not a big deal. The skills I'd developed on the sewing machine gave me control."
As she continued to work on the band saw, other people in the shop began noticing her work and asked Carole, who has 32 years of experience teaching at the college level, to teach a class on band saw basics to publicize the shop. The class was approaching, and "it was around this time that the band saw went badly out of alignment. I was going to be teaching new people, and I was afraid for their fingers. I needed a backup plan."
The shop had a scroll saw, but "it was a pin type, that was a piece of junk when it was donated," Carole said. She characterized the attitude of the other shop members as, "It's a scroll saw, what do weneed another one for?" After convincing them to buy a more modern scroll saw, Carole used an introduction to the scroll saw book by John Nelson to teach herself about the tool. Self-taught in other areas, she learned how to use the tool, successfully taught the class -- and began moving her own scroll saw work from baskets to boxes.
The boxes incorporated techniques honed from another of Carole's crafts: cake decorating. "I'd always been interested in cake decorating," she said, and at one point, submitted a picture of one of her cakes to a contest, won a prize, and began an extensive contribution to a cake decorating magazine. She developed her own style in cake decorating, with a particular interest in "recreating edible objects that looked real. "When those objects were meant to reflect wooden items, she used wood graining tools in her sugar paste, and mixed wood grain alcohol and shellac flakes to create the look of finished wood, "that was completely edible." These cake projects -- such as a cake shaped like a wooden wine crate -- trained her eye to see how things were constructed, Carole said.
The first piece of furniture she built was a pie safe with pierced tin panels to act as storage for her cakes and cake decorating supplies-- and when she began scroll sawing in earnest, she brought her cake decorating skills and patterns to the new medium. A box she made in imitation of a cake decorated with gift-wrap bows won third prize in a woodworking contest judged by Frank Klausz.
"As I moved on, I discovered scroll saw bowls," Carole said. She had liked the look of lathe-turned bowls, but "I was put off by the tremendous waste; you just leave shavings on the floor." She found a book by Patrick Spielman on scroll saw bowls, but the construction methods relied heavily on the router, and she felt the level of instruction was too high for a beginner.
"I don't like using other people's patterns,"Carole said, and so, as in other areas she'd explored, she made her own,cutting up wood to see what would happen and using her background in sewing and understanding of fabric construction to recreate, in wood, patterns such as ginghams and plaids.
As she made more bowls using the scroll saw and sandingtools, Carole soon found herself with her own book contract. Wooden Bowls from the Scroll Saw, published by FoxChapel [ISBN 978978-1-56523-433-8], is "the book I needed when I started out," Carole said. It's also the book she hopes will launch scroll sawn bowls as a new genre in scroll saw woodwork, along with such items as fretwork puzzles.
The scroll saw, she said, is a very safe tool that can serve to demystify woodworking to a larger audience, and is also "economical with wood. It's a wonderful craft for our times. It's a wonderful way to make beautiful things without them being a big deal."
Now that her first scroll saw book has been put to bed,Carole herself has been experimenting with open segmented bowls, different laminations and colors. She gets those colors from natural woods such as padauk, yellowheart and purpleheart, finished with clear finishes. "I'm now able to do things I couldn't do when I started out, because I didn't have the woodworking skills."
Some of her newer bowls defy understanding, she said, and actually could not be made on the lathe. "When you do something that no one has done before and are entirely self-taught, someone doesn't say 'you can't do that,' so you don't know you can't do that," she said. "What I'm after is to make beautiful projects."
Scroll-saw work usually results in straight cut pieces such as those for jigsaw puzzles. Rothman has devised her own method of making slanted cuts by tilting the saw table. Progressively smaller pieces are cut, stacked, and glued to form bowls resembling those turned on a lathe. Projects include pieced designs using different woods.
First Carole, let me say that I love your book. I have a basic bowl in poplar waiting for the round sander to arrive so I can finish the inside. Thanks to your crystal clear instructions in both the book and the video it was very easy. I have a shelf full of wood working books and this is one that I will use frequently. Many woodworking books have indecipherable instructions and pictures and drawings that are useless. I could not find one instance where I couldn't understand what you were saying in minutes.
No lathe? No Problem! You can still create some magnificent looking bowls through the use of your scroll saw.
The author has put together 28 beautiful and utilitarian bowls, vases and baskets using only the scroll saw. Carole Rothman, a psychologist and retired college professor shows how surprisingly easy it is to create these laminated bowls from scratch.
Wooden Bowls from the Scroll Saw is a different take on bowl making. In it Rothman shows you how to make 28 different projects with lots of step-by-step photos and instructions. And you don't need a lathe. The bowls are made with flat pieces of wood and a scroll saw.
Looking for a new project to use some of those wood samples on? The book Wooden Bowls from the Scroll Saw, by
Carole Rothman (Fox Chapel Publishing, ISBN 978-156523-433-8, priced at $19.95) introduces new techniques for creating the kind of bowls you'd typically find coming off a lathe. No need for that here: just a flat piece of wood, a scroll saw and the desire, common among woodworkers, to go to the shop and make something out of wood.
WOODEN BOWLS FROM THE SCROLL SAW, by Carole Rothman, features 28 useful and easy-to-make projects. The surprising part about this book is that the featured projects look like they were painstakingly turned on a lathe. Instead, these bowls, vases, dishes and jars were made easily with just one affordable tool - the scroll saw. Using a simple method of cutting a concentric set of rings, Rothman, a former teacher and award-winning cake decorator, shows readers how they can achieve the same graceful form and beauty usually found in lathe-turned objects. She walks readers step-by-step through choosing the appropriate wood, cutting rings with a pattern, drilling entry holes, stacking and gluing the rings together, sanding and finishing. Projects include basic stacked bowls, in addition to more challenging designs using laminated woods, bowls cut from multiple angles and thin wood bowls. Each includes a list of the tools and materials needed, as well as full-size patterns and color photographs of the work in progress and variations of the finished piece.
This book is absolutely a must whe you have a desire to mak a bowl or urn or what ever. My first project was made inless than 3 days for a Wood Craft Art Show. I Choose a hard one to start with the Tweed Pattern Bowl. This bowl won a second place ribbon. The Judge was such a critic of the show. No other bowls won a ribbon. I recieved the only ribbon for wooden bowls. This would have not been as easily acomplished with out this GREAT book. Carl Harden Boise Id.
A scrollsaw is probably not the first machine you would think of, if you wanted to make bowls.
But, as the author of this book shows,
some very attractive and innovative bowls can be made with a scrollsaw.
Approximately the same method is used for making all 2B bowls. The worktable of the saw is set at an angle and the bowl cut out in horizontal strakes which generally grow larger towards the top.
The bowl is completed by a solid bottom.
When all of the strakes and the bollom are finished, they are glued together and the bowl is finish sanded using, where possible, portable sanding equipment and a spindle sander.
The first bowl is a simple circular shape, but the second begins to demonstrate the design freedom inherent in the technique. Called an Eight-Petal Bowl, it has a wavy form that nevertheless tapers from top to bollom. There is a 'four-petal'
bowl later in the book as well as a RippleEdged
Round Bowl and a Heart Shaped
80wl.
The most striking of the bowls are,
however, those which are made using laminations and multi-angle shapes.
The latter part of the book is devoted to
Think Outside the 60wl- an exploration of vase and jar making using the same techniques.
The minimum presentation for each project consists of a photo of the finished bowl, the drawings necessary to cut oul the shapes, instructions and a guide to materia and tools. The more complicated projects are given a larger amount of space with detailed instructions and stage by stage photographs.
Since the methods used are relatively simple, there is no reason why this book should not appeal to the novice, while the attractive and useful projects should hold the interest of the more experienced.
This book provides you with all the info and ideas you need to get started on knocking out beautiful and complicated-looking bowls.
You want to make wooden bowls but don't have a lathe? Well did you know that you can make some pretty impressive ones using a scrollsaw? The basic principle is you cut out several rings. drill entry holes. glue them together, sand, and finish. This book provides you with all the info and ideas you need to get started on knocking out beautiful and complicated-lookingbowls, vases and jars. Great for alternative bowlmaking.
