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Figured Redwood Calabash

This is the outermost layer of a set of 3 bowls made from a nice piece of figured redwood I got a while back from Harold Seward. The first bowl I finished was the smallest of the 3. I donated that one to the auction at BACDS American Week in 2013, and it went home with Ruth and Gregg Gorrin. The middle layer went to Sebastopol Gallery and went home with someone I didn’t get to meet. This bowl will go to Sebastopol Gallery at the end of April, when Sandy Eastoak and I put up our joint show, called “Full Circles.”

The finish I normally use is Mike Mahoney’s walnut oil. It’s great for food bowls, and easy to take care of and refresh. Since this calabash isn’t your average salad bowl, and since I haven’t been entirely satisfied with the walnut oil finish on redwood, I’m using Deftoil. This is a tung oil and urethane varnish that dries hard. This finish is also food safe when fully cured, so one could use this on salad bowls. I just don’t think it would stand up as well to repeated washing as walnut oil, and it would be much harder to refresh down the line.

Here you can see the smooth, footless bottom of the bowl. The calabash form was originally intended to sit in sand or to be held in the lap. No need for a flattened base. The bowl is sanded to 1200 grit, and has no finish on it yet.

Before a violin gets its first coat of shellac or stain, it’s referred to as being “in the white.” I’ve always liked that term.

Shazam! The first wet coat is going on. I love this moment, when the depth of the grain really pops out.

The bottom, fully coated, still wet. The irregularities in the sheen are due to the fact that the redwood is sucking up the finish as fast as I can brush it on, and faster in some spots than others. Once this first heavy coat is wiped down and has a chance to dry, I’ll build up a few more coats and the sheen will even out.

The Deftoil has a slight golden tone, but most of this color comes from the wood itself. Redwood is amazing stuff.

The bowl looks different from every angle.

The new redwood calabash is even bigger than the walnut one I just finished. Here they are side by side. The redwood is 13″ wide by almost 7-1/2″ tall. That’s a lot of potato salad…

This little guy is the middle bowl of the three I made from this piece of redwood. It’s about 9-1/2″ across. Sadly, I don’t have any pictures of the smallest one.

It took a while to get the finish just right on this one. Redwood is sort of uncooperative when it comes to getting an even sheen. I ended up applying 4 coats of Deftoil (an oil/urethane varnish), then buffing the whole thing mercilessly with 0000 steel wool and topcoating with a very thin layer of Renaissance paste wax, which seems to be better than most waxes at resisting picking up fingerprints. I’m very pleased with the finished result.

This bowl looks radically different from every angle, especially in the sun.

I love this super-tight birdseye figure in redwood. There’s just nothing else like it.

And from this side it’s all ripples and shimmers.