Smoky Mountain Woodturners to demo offset napkin holder June 16

Ron Comtois’s offset napkin holder was the kind of demo that gives a club meeting a pulse. Smoky Mountain Woodturners put the practical project at the center of its June 16 meeting, pairing a household object with the offset technique that forces a turner to think about layout, centering, balance and clean, safe cuts at the lathe.

The club listed the meeting for 6:00 PM and said it was broadcast on Zoom as well as held in person. SMWTS sends meeting-link information by email and also posts it on the event page, which kept the session accessible for members who could not make the drive. That hybrid setup fit a club that has spent more than 30 years meeting in East Tennessee and says it still welcomes visitors and prospective members at every meeting.

Smoky Mountain Woodturners was founded in 1993 and originally met at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. The club says it now has about 65 members and meets on the third Tuesday of each month, with show-and-tell, teaching and member participation baked into the program. That makes a project like Comtois’s napkin holder a natural fit: it is compact enough to finish in a meeting, but specific enough to show the difference between a simple utility piece and a more refined turning.

Ron Comtois is not an outsider being brought in for a one-off appearance. SMWTS board minutes and president’s blog posts identify him as a recent club leader and active participant in club programming, and the show-and-tell archive already includes a July 2025 submission from him titled Napkin Holder - Cherry. The club’s 2026 newsletter also singled out the June 16 program as “Ron Comtois: Offset Napkin Holder,” which reinforced that this was one of the month’s main draws.

The demo also lined up with the safety-minded approach the American Association of Woodturners pushes across its learning resources, including guidance on PPE, lathe speed and safe instruction at the lathe. For a club audience, that matters as much as the finished form. An offset napkin holder is small, useful and easy to picture on a kitchen table, but it also gives a demonstrator room to show exactly how a tricky setup stays under control from roughing to final shape.