Hub City Turners draw crowd for bowl embellishments demo by Richard Pratchler

Fifty members and five guests filled Hub City Turners’ April 14 meeting in Saskatoon, and the biggest takeaway was not bowl geometry but surface design. Richard Pratchler’s demo pushed straight into embellishment work, giving the club a look at two finishes that active turners can use right now on rims, faces and end grain.

Pratchler started with a bowl that had a carved rim, then painted it black and applied sizing before adding mica flakes. The approach, tied to The Tiny Turner’s decorative pigments, showed how quickly a plain surface can become a high-contrast edge treatment when the base coat is prepared properly. It was the kind of demo that makes sense at the bench the next day: simple steps, but only if the surface is ready and the flakes are laid onto the sizing cleanly.

He then shifted to the Robert Sorby texturing tool, using it to produce spirals and related patterns on prepared wood. Members were given a reference sheet showing cutter positions for different effects, and Pratchler worked through several variations after cleaning up the end grain. The result was a set of “cookies” cut off one by one to reveal another spiral form, with the tool’s range on display in twists, whorls, knurled crosshatches and orange-peel textures. It was a stronger case for decorative turning than a standard how-to on bowls, because the patterns themselves were the point.

The club’s show-and-tell table backed that up. Members brought multi-axis turned figures, a hollow vessel with lid and finial, a segmented epoxy bowl, a hollow turning and a bowl of eggs, maple burl bowls from a recent burl class, a hexagonal poplar bowl, winged bowl forms, wormy bowls, bottle stoppers, pepper mills, lidded boxes with laser imagery and pens turned from blue jeans, antlers, coffee beans and Celtic knot material. For anyone looking for where the club’s experiments are headed, that table said plenty.

Short business updates mattered because they pointed to what comes next. Mark Noete gave a report on the wood show and other summer events, Paul Schroeder reminded members that Shell Lake Turning Weekend has been an annual event for years and welcomes visitors, and Trent Watts reported that Elio Menis was in hospital in Lloydminster. Hub City Turners says its next meeting is set for May 12, when Deb McLeod will present colour wheel ideas and embellishments to wood turnings. The club meets at 7 p.m. on the second Tuesday of the month at Walter Murray Collegiate, and its $30 annual fee includes insurance and access to the Shell Lake summer retreat.