Thread: G'day from Alice Springs

Hi all,

My name is Eryne, As a kid I always had an obsession with whittling pieces of wood, probably as much to do with using a sharp blade as well as the resultant "carving".
High school brought the lathe into my life albeit briefly.
Skip forward 10 years, and while camping I found a quite large red gum burl on what was left of a burnt log, I thought "hey that would make a nice bowl"....then spent the next week obsessively carving and finishing the piece with what tools I could get my hands on....enter my burl obsession!
I then bought an arbortech carving blade and did a handful of small pieces, and that was it for pretty much another 10 years.
At 35 my passion has returned, while on a job I found a nice root ball, which I carved 2 "bowls" out of (after digging the arbortech out of storage). I bought myself a chainsaw and went burl hunting; it really is amazing what you can find when you know what your looking for...
I have carved another 3 bowls in about as many weeks and have 2 more fairly large burls (35 and 66 kg bone dry off a burnt out tree) sitting on my verandah waiting to be worked on.
Up till my more recent pieces I had only really used linseed oil and wax as finishes with a little experimentation with shellac.
I have now been researching online and talking with some of the older woodworkers in town who put me onto some different finishing products, much to my delight.
All of my work has been hand carved to date but I'm chomping at the bit to do some lathe work again.

Cheers 🌳