AAW forum opens voting on April salad bowl turning challenge
Twenty turners, twenty finished bowls, and three votes each make the AAW salad bowl challenge a sharp snapshot of where the craft is headed.
The April salad bowl challenge in the AAW forum reached the voting stage with a clean number that says a lot on its own: 20 participants, 20 finished bowls. Michael Anderson kept the tone light, but the turnout gave the monthly contest real weight, and the poll opened on May 1 with voting set to close at 11:59 PM UTC on Sunday, May 3. Each member gets three votes, the poll is secret, and the prize is pure shop-room theater, a vintage cracked Red Oak salad bowl, with the winner possibly having to pass a lie detector test before taking it home.
The prompt was simple enough to sound easy and hard enough to expose real turning skill. Anderson posted the challenge on April 14 after saying the previous week had flown by and the shorter timeline made a bowl challenge the right call. The rules pushed makers toward a table-ready form: a stable base, either a large foot or a flat bottom, no carved feet, and no older “moldy oldie” pieces made before the challenge was issued. Entries were due by 11:59 PM UTC-ish on Wednesday, April 29, and each submission had to include two to three photos, a profile view, preferably a shot of the bottom, and dimensions.
That is where the contest becomes more than a vote. A salad bowl sounds plain, but the brief forces turners to make decisions that matter in every bowl they put on the lathe: how deep to go, how to handle the rim, what kind of base will keep the piece stable on a dining table, and whether the finish reads as practical or display-grade. Anderson pointed readers to inspiration bowls by Dave Roberts, Robert Woodward, and James Seyfried, and that mix of names tells its own story. The April field was open to both restrained forms and more decorative interpretations, which is exactly why the challenge works as a snapshot of what members value right now.
The April contest also fit a pattern the forum has been building month to month. March’s challenge asked for an olla vessel, drew eight participants and eight entries, allowed two votes per member, and closed on April 2 with 54 total voters. David Bartell won that round. The forum home page says the upgrades are complete and describes them as moderate security fixes from the software vendor, while the American Association of Woodturners continues to frame the forum around education, information, and organization in service of the craft. That combination of active contests, low-friction rules, and visible peer judging is what keeps the AAW forum useful between the bigger symposium events.
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