Lake Superior Woodturners maps mentoring, open turning, and board elections

A meeting that functions like a pathway

The May 9 meeting at the Dorfman Co. building is the kind of club night that tells you more about a turning group than a polished demo ever could. Lake Superior Woodturners has packed Saturday morning with sign-in, badges, coffee, officer reports, mentoring, open turning, and board-election planning, and that combination says the club is building a pathway, not just hosting a meeting.

The schedule runs from 9 a.m. to noon at 1314 Ogden Ave. in Superior, Wisconsin, and the structure is practical from the first minute. Members and visitors get a half-hour setup window with coffee and conversation before the meeting is called to order. After that come the standard club essentials, old business, new business, then the parts that matter most if you actually want to improve at the lathe: mentoring and open turning.

Why this matters if you are new, or rusty

If you have been away from the lathe for a while, this is the kind of meeting worth showing up for right now instead of waiting for a bigger demo later. The club is not treating attendance as a passive sit-and-watch event. It is asking what skill you want help with, and it is asking experienced turners to step forward and share what they know.

That is a better setup than the usual vague “beginner help” model. Lake Superior Woodturners is using sign-up for mentoring and open turning so the club can match the number of participants with the number of helpers available. In practice, that means a better chance of getting actual time, actual feedback, and an answer to the specific problem that has been slowing you down, whether that is spindle control, bowl cleanup, sharpening, or just getting comfortable back at the machine.

There is also a clear financial signal in the open turning setup: it is free for members and $10 for non-members. That is a small price for a room full of experience, especially if you want to test whether the club is worth joining before committing more time and money.

The Dorfman Co. building is becoming the club’s real home base

This meeting also matters because it is not happening in a one-off rented room. Lake Superior Woodturners has been using the Dorfman Co. building as its new shop location across 2026 notices from January through May, which gives the club continuity instead of a different address every month. For a woodturning group, that kind of consistency is not a minor detail. It affects who brings tools, who can help with setup, and how quickly the club can move from talking about a skill to actually putting wood on the lathe.

The May agenda shows that the club understands the value of a stable site. It gives the social side a place to breathe, and it gives the workshop side room to grow. If you are the sort of turner who learns best by standing next to a lathe and asking questions in real time, that matters more than a slick flyer.

April’s segmented class set the tone for the year

The clearest sign that this club is serious about instruction is the April 12-14 workshop with Tom Lohman. The class was titled Making a Segmented Wood Turned Bowl Using a Gluing Jig, and that title tells you exactly what kind of instruction Lake Superior Woodturners is bringing in: specific, technical, and aimed at making members better at a demanding process.

Segmented work is unforgiving in all the ways turners know too well. Small errors in cutting, gluing, or alignment show up fast once the bowl comes off the lathe, which is why a three-day class built around techniques, lessons learned, fixes for mistakes, and design choices is so useful. Lohman’s background in segmented woodturning gives the workshop more weight too. He has led segmented workshops at major events, including the 2018 American Association of Woodturners Symposium in Portland, which signals that the club is not scraping together filler programming. It is bringing in someone with a real track record.

For anyone trying to move beyond basic bowls or spindle practice, that is the kind of class you want on the calendar. Even if you missed it, the fact that the club could stage it at all says a lot about the level of instruction it is trying to make normal.

June brings Elizabeth Weber, and the workshops are already filling up

The next step in that same pattern is June, when the club brings in Elizabeth Weber for a demonstration and workshops program at the Superior Craft School, again at 1314 Ogden Ave. The notice says the workshops are filling up, which is exactly the kind of detail that separates an ordinary club announcement from a useful one. There is demand here, and the club knows it.

Weber is not a generic touring demonstrator. She is a Seattle-based woodturning instructor and president of the Seattle Woodturners, and she earned an M.S. in civil engineering from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville before shifting into woodworking and turning. That path matters because it often shows up in the work: structure, form, and deliberate design choices rather than just safe crowd-pleasing shapes.

Her recognition from the American Association of Woodturners, including the 2023 Professional Outreach Program Artist Showcase, helps explain why this June event is drawing attention. If you want a better read on how a strong club uses outside teaching, this is it: a recognized instructor, a defined venue, a demo plus workshops, and an entry point that rewards people who move early.

Three board seats open, which says the club is thinking past this season

The last piece of the May notice is the one that keeps the rest of it honest: board elections. Three positions are opening in 2026, and the club says the terms for Susan Van Loon Runnoe, Paul Howard, and Bonnie McDermid are ending. Those are two-year terms that begin after the May member meeting and run until the May 2028 elections, so this is not symbolic housekeeping. It is a leadership handoff with a real timetable.

That is the quiet strength of Lake Superior Woodturners right now. The club is lining up mentoring for skill development, open turning for hands-on practice, outside instruction for deeper learning, and board elections so the organization keeps functioning after the workshop dust settles. If you have been waiting for the right moment to visit, this is it. You would not just be dropping into a meeting, you would be stepping into a club that has already mapped the path from first question to actual improvement.