Turnings: Curvilear Bowls

Having never turned a bowl or plate before, I decided to try a form of segmented bowl with splines intersecting in the bowl blank. Wait, what?!? 

Yep, that's kind of a them for how I work. Never done it before? Just sketch something up that thought in your head and go for it. It does help that I've got a decent eye for how stuff works and I work with CAD on a daily basis. Admittedly, the CAD really only helped me with dimensions. I had a decent idea what I was going for when it was still in my head. 

 I had some 8/4 stock laying around and started by cutting out roughly 6"x6" squares. The splines were all cut at a 45 degrees, one at a time. After each cut I glued a thin piece of opposing colored wood. Rinse. Repeat. 

blanks stacked, waiting to go out to the
garage for the next round of cuts 

two of the blanks after the last cut showing the other
splines already glued in

 For this to turn out perfectly, I should have ensured the inserted spline matched the kerf of the cut. Meh, I wasn't too concerned. Even on the ones that are off, you have to look for a bit to see it.

glue-ups were fun on the angled ones

it gets difficult after on the 3rd and
4th cuts to line everything back up

doesn't look like much now

the series of splines appear woven

 The fun came in turning to bowls. Depending on how the bowl curved from its rim to its bottom, the resulting visual spline will swim this way and that.

you can already see the curves appearing
on the bottom

A perfect spherical bowl would produce splines that would appear like the lines on a basketball. Curve a lip on the top of the bowl and you might get the splines to do an 'S' curve. Pretty cool.

 I was pretty pleased with the results on these and they were well received.