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Wassail!

What’s wassail, you ask? Wassail, the noun, is a drink, a hot winter punch commonly made with beer, brandy, sherry, spiced sugary syrup and frothy beaten eggs. I know it sounds weird, but it’s delicious. Wassailing, the verb, is an English winter tradition in which you go from house to house and sing outside in hopes of getting the hosts to invite you in for a drink. Depending on your local tradition either the hosts have their own bowl of delicious wassail to share or the wassailers carry their own bowl with them and each house would pour a bit of something into the mix. I definitely prefer the former.

The wassailing tradition is alive and well in our neck of the woods. Contemporary wassail bowls tend to be whatever enormous bowl is available (those huge maple bowls from Williams-Sonoma actually work pretty well), but the bowl shown here was made for someone who likes the more traditional English bowls from the 1700s and 1800s, which almost always had a stem and base. They often had lids as well, which is handy if you’re tromping through the snow and don’t want wassail down the front of your coat. In this case the bowl will stay put on the table, so no lid was necessary. 

This is the bowl, without the stem or base. It’s about 13-1/4″ wide by roughly 6″ deep (outside measurements). Since this will be holding hot liquids, I left the walls a little thicker than I would for a salad or serving bowl. This is walnut harvested from a vineyard up near Healdsburg, CA, about half an hour from my shop.

The 3 pieces (bowl, stem and base) are held together with tenons, those little stubs you see at either end of the stem. The bowl and base each have a hole into which those tenons fit snugly. Once all the parts are completely sanded, I’ll assemble the three with epoxy, and after that I’ll oil the whole thing.

Once the joints were functional I had to tinker with the size and shape of the base. Here you can see it assembled, but the base is still very rough and chunky. There’s a long way to go yet.

Here’s the base partway through shaping. Still chunky, but you can see the final form emerging.

Now you can see the base completed. The parts aren’t yet glued, but the tenons are snug enough to hold it together for the photo.
Final dimensions are 9-1/4″ tall and 13-1/4″ wide.

When you’re gluing things together, you need a way to hold them in place, preferably under a bit of pressure, while the glue dries. Often you can use clamps for that, but a piece like this doesn’t have any convenient places to rest a clamp. So I used the lathe itself as a clamp. On the left you can see the base of the bowl attached to a chuck in the headstock. On the right, attached to the tailstock, is a large plywood faceplate covered with very thin foam padding. The shaft that that’s mounted on can be cranked toward the headstock to provide pressure.

Here’s the whole assembly held in place on the lathe. You can see the tailstock crank on the far right. Turning that moves the tailstock quill in and out.

Looking at it from the headstock end of the lathe, you can see that the headstock chuck is seated in a shallow recess in the bottom of the base, and is cranked open into that recess to hold it.

The blue tape has lines on it that helped me align the grain of the 3 pieces to where I thought it looked the best. When you’ve got glue all over everything is not the time to be making artistic decisions. You get all that sorted out first, then mix the glue. Ask me how I learned that lesson…

You can see a teeny and appropriately-sized bead of squeeze-out here. With any glue-up, you want to see a little bit of squeeze-out, but only a little. If there’s none, you worry that the joint is too dry (some folks say “starved”). If you’ve got gobs of glue drooling all over the place, then you’ve created a clean-up nightmare for yourself. These surfaces have been finish-sanded, which means I don’t want to have to dig into them again. This tiny amount of glue can be carefully scraped away, and the touch-up sanding should be minimal.

The bowl is assembled and detailed, but there’s one more step before oiling, which is to measure the capacity. I lined the bowl with a trashbag and filled it with birdseed. Now I can lift out the bag and measure the seed. Turns out this bowl will hold 7-1/2 quarts. The folks who are making the wassail now know how to scale their recipes.

For this piece I’m finishing with food-grade flaxseed oil, which has a rich golden color and a neutral, slightly fruity scent. Flaxseed and walnut oils are the only 2 vegetable oils that will naturally harden, so they’re what I use on almost all my pieces. They’re washable, food-safe and easy to maintain, and the owner of the piece can easily get more of the same oil at the grocery store, if they want to give the bowl a touch-up.

I love this stage of the job. All the hard parts are finished and I can watch the wood color and grain patterns begin to pop. The difference in color between the oiled and unoiled areas can be dramatic.

And here we are, complete at last! I’m ridiculously happy with how this turned out. Wassail!