An Impromptu Appearance by a Turning Celebrity

Our June meeting had a surprise visitor:  Graeme Priddle (tan shirt and flip flops) was in town to teach at Peters Valley over the weekend, and joined us a couple of days before his class began (as opposed to wild Peters Valley nightlife ;-)

Our group assembled on the second Wednesday of June.  This is the final meeting that will occur outside the normal "first Wednesday" meeting rule.  Our next meeting is going to be July 6th at 7PM and we will follow this schedule for the rest of the summer.

We welcomed Graeme to the meeting and he joined us at the Show and Tell, even displaying and passing around some of his work.  Tony brought an interesting piece of pierced work that displayed great technical skills.  Richard is seen here evaluating Tony's sphere.

Clearly, the wow factor was Mike's piece of big leaf maple that was turned and carved.  Mike described a process of using the lathe to hollow and then refine the shape with power carving and power sanding techniques.  It is as big as it appears.

During the meeting, Ed brought up an opportunity to work with Grey Towers in two ways.  Firstly, in contributing work from the black locust that Ed brought.  If you took a piece (we know who you are...), you should be ready to bring a finished piece to the August meeting.  One piece will be donated to Grey Towers for fundraising in exchange for the opportunity to work with this historic wood.  Please do your best work.

In addition, we will be looking at staffing a day at the Grey Towers Festival of Wood event.  More as that evolves, but in short, it is an opportunity to work in the public eye and recruit new members to join the Water Gap Woodturners.  It looks like it could be a lot of fun.

Ed also had a bowl in a chuck with some cracking.  We're hoping he can save it by appealing to the turning gods.

Finally, the demo of the day was again given by Steve.  Using a hook tool, Steve quickly cut a jamb chuck for a scoop and hollowed out the bowl with a gouge lent to him by Graeme.  It was a team effort, and the scoop is an easy project that utilizes lots of different techniques.  It would be fun to see how many scoops come from the demo, or if the techniques can be leveraged into other projects (hint, hint!)

In July, we will try to nominate a new Executive committee.  Here is your chance to get a big fancy title.  All of the roles are open for volunteers, and none of them pay particularly well, but you can put it on your resume and that's good for something.  Step up and volunteer!

Until July- be safe and have fun!