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Last summer I managed to collect a really large ancient Ponderosa Pine stump and root ball from the Uncompahgre Plateau here in Western Colorado. It was probably a 350 year old tree that had been logged off over a 100 years ago.  The stump and roots were preserved by all the pine resin left and over the years the interior wood has turned a lovely rich gold and brown color and is very heavy with resin.  Here are 3 recent vessels I’ve created from a couple of the main root branches.

I’ve been working on this piece for a few days now.  Fruitwood is always beautiful and it is very prone to checking so it offers a lot of opportunities to do inlay work.  This piece was completely dry before I started turning it which means it is very stable and there should be no further movement in the wood that could start new checking.  Turning dry hard wood makes for slow, messy, and tedious turning though as I produced no shavings but only sawdust. 🙄

I have the basic outside shape and have the piece mounted with the steady rest and have just started hollowing.

Just getting started on a new piece from Eastern Red Cedar.  This piece of wood has wonderful character, colors, and grain patterns.  It will be a challenge to successfully hollow, but if I can manage it without a tool catch causing catastrophic failure I think this wonderful piece of cedar will be special.

This new piece will be a hollow form vessel ... likely bottle shaped.  It’s from a really old dried out piece of crabapple with a lot of weathering.  Should be lots of inlay work.  Think I will do a combination of turquoise and pipestone inlay on this piece.  Here is a photo of the starting piece.