Our Work
The process of creating a handmade Stinson Studios wood salad bowl begins with the selection of Eastern Canadian hardwoods.
Logs are culled from sustainable wood lots, from farmers’ wood piles and harvested from the family farm. Our favored varieties include maple, birch, oak and ash.
Our process
If you’d like to see more of our finished product you can browse our shop online.
When it comes to our hand-turned bowls, we start by cutting a section from a log and roughing out blocks with a chainsaw. Once we have a block with the rough shape of a bowl, we take the block inside and mount it onto our bowl lathe. Our lathe does not have a bed and with it we are capable of turning objects up to three feet in diameter. Unfortunately, lathes like these are not commercially available and we had to build this one with the help of our friend Henry Saxe. Henry is a well-known metal sculptor who has been awarded the Order of Canada for his art and on less momentous occasions helped us build a lathe and patch holes in Grumman canoes.
After mounting the bowl blank, we start by turning the outside of the block to establish the shape of our final form. When first starting out, people have a habit of staring intently at the chisel where you are holding it free-hand against the block. However, one quickly learns that shavings can pile up and you are not always able to watch what you are doing. When you become well practiced at turning, you begin to stop relying on watching your chisel. Suddenly you realize that the important information comes not from visual cues, but rather “reading” resistance and vibrations through your hands or listening for the different sounds the chisel makes when carving well or loosing the thread of your cut. Being truly practiced means responding intuitively to these signals and responding to the material faster than we can consciously react. If you have to think about changing the angle of your cut or increase the pressure of the chisel, it is too late. Learning to turn is a perfect example of progressing through the four cognitive levels of learning; unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence and unconscious competence. When I (Jesse) began turning it took take me three hours of focused concentration to do a single step in turning a bowl. Six years later, that step now takes me roughly fifteen minutes of unconscious intuitive movements.
Once the outside shape of the bowl is established, we move our tool rest around to the front of the lathe and begin carving material from the center of the bowl. From this angle you cannot see the outside curve of the bowl and experience the challenge of carving away material without being able to physically see when to stop. Years of practice have enabled us to feel and hear how close we are with the chisel to the outside of the form. Otherwise you have to keep turning the lathe on and off so you can check the bowl’s thickness. Eventually, if the bowl has not blown off or we have not carved right through the bottom, we are left with a nice bowl with walls of an even thickness. From here the bowl is left for two to three weeks to dry before it is sanded and finished with bees’ wax and vegetable oil.
