Bowl #5 – WIP

Work In Progress
2020 was catastrophic in many ways. Maybe in 2021 we can start to return to normal. All of the artists mentioned in this post lost significant income in 2020 due to pandemic related cancellations. Let’s help them recover some of those losses.

Here is my small step, a bowl of Tulip Poplar. All the roughing work is done and it now sits quietly drying. (no cracking sounds so far) The only prevention I took to thwart cracking was to rub a candle over the end grain of the handles. The handles are the places where I have seen cracking before.

Dave Fisher saw most of his 2020 in-person classes cancelled. So did the chairmaker Ilia Bizzarri. Ilia and his colleagues developed an alternative, live streaming via Zoom meetings, and put together a number of classes of interest to chairmakers. Then, he created a class featuring bowlcarver Dave Fisher as the guest teacher.

Billed as three 2 hour sessions, they ended up overdelivering, over 9 hours. The sessions featured Dave demonstrating techniques, which Ilia then copied in his own shop, using the picture-in-picture capability of Zoom. Along the way, they intermixed live Q&A from class members. All seemed casual and flowed smoothly, not overly managed, a result of experienced artists doing what they love, and with the assistance of a couple of Ilia’s colleagues, Seth & Ian, who did behind-the -scenes assists in various ways.

I’ve watched all of Dave’s YouTube videos, watched his video series produced by Fine Woodworking in 2017, have carved a few of my own bowls, and with all that experience thoroughly enjoyed this series of classes. The format, and the amount of time offered gave us much more depth than we see in the other video productions.

Well done, and highly recommended! Recordings of these classes are available for people who missed the live sessions.

Other woodcarvers I follow:

Mary May continues adding a new lesson every week to her School of Traditional Woodcarving. Almost all of her in-person classes were cancelled in 2020, but this year is already looking better for her. Some time ago she started having live streaming sessions once a week, Tuesdays at 1 PM Eastern, on Twitch. Be on time to see her live streams as they happen, or show up later and pay a subscription fee for replays. Subscribe to her newsletter to learn of recent lessons, Twitch sessions, and upcoming in-person classes.

Alexander Grabovetskiy continues adding new videos to his School of Woodcarving site. Like the others he had a lot of cancellations in 2020 and is looking forward to in-person classes this year. He too does live streaming videos on YouTube and other media. Alex’s live stream sessions remain on his YouTube channel for later playback in case you miss the live event. He too has a newsletter where you can learn about upcoming live streams, latest school lessons, and future in-person classes.

Bottom line: we have all missed a lot of things in 2020, and all of these artists took big hits in revenue. I’m doing what I can afford to help them now and hope you can too.