Ambrosia Maple. Length: about 13″ – Width: about 8 & 1/2″ – Height: about 4″ – Finish: food safe flaxseed oil
This log came from tree maintenance along a wooded road to the South of Lake Welch in Harriman State Part, NY. It was one of the logs I asked about a few months ago. From that query, I learned about the Ambrosia beetle and its habit of burrowing into a tree to establish nesting space. The beetles who inhabited this tree are long gone, but they left their large marks and a few tiny bore holes.
The log rested in a plastic bag for a couple of months before I started on it. By the time I started, it had dried a bit and was as hard as one expects of Maple. I did a lot of the rough shaping using my newly built bowl horse. [ Bowl horse design from David Fisher. ]
I always find it interesting to see how many chips result from carving. Two pics show the bowl. The first is after roughing, with all the chips from that process, and the second is after final carving with those chips. The chips become garden mulch.
FWIW. This bowl is, at the time of this posting, currently lost in the mail. I posted it for a destination in Europe while in the midst of lockdown mania. The post office wasn’t aware at that time that mail to Europe was being held at various points along the way. Some European countries were rejecting entry of all mail and have only recently opened their gates. We have yet to discover whether the package actually arrived in Europe, or is being held at a big airport on the U.S. east coast, or … ??? — UPDATE: arrived at its destination after elebenty-seven days in transit.