South Puget Sound Woodturners packs June with mentoring, trembleur demo

South Puget Sound Woodturners is doing June the right way: not with a single sit-and-listen demo, but with a month built around doing. Mentoring sessions in Kent, the North End, and Westend keep the bench time flowing, while Kathleen Duncan’s Tremblers demo and piercing workshop give the club a sharp project focus. For anyone trying to move past easy spindle work, this is the kind of calendar that actually fixes problems.

June starts with hands-on support

The club’s June calendar is strongest where it matters most, in the repeated chances to get in front of a lathe with someone else watching your work. Kent mentoring sessions, North End mentoring sessions, and Westend Sawdust Sessions run throughout the month, which means there is more than one place to bring a rough blank, a tricky cut, or a project that has stalled. That matters because turning progress rarely comes from a single big reveal. It usually comes from a short correction, a better suggestion, or someone showing you a cleaner way to solve the same problem you have been circling for weeks.

That structure gives the month multiple entry points. Newer members get a place to ask the basic questions that can feel too small for a formal demo. More experienced turners get peer feedback and enough repetition to keep current projects moving instead of letting them collect dust on the bench. The club’s calendar reads less like a list of meetings and more like a support system with a spindle gouge in hand.

Kathleen Duncan’s June demo has a real project in it

The featured club meeting is Wednesday, June 18, with a 5:30 social hour and a 6:30 meeting start. That meeting is centered on Kathleen Duncan showing members how to turn Tremblers, or Trembleurs, which gives the night a specific making challenge instead of a generic stage demo. The board minutes also separate her June program from the workshop that follows, which is a useful clue: this is a planned teaching sequence, not just a one-off appearance.

Duncan is a good fit for that kind of focus because her work already lives in the difficult end of the spectrum. Other club listings identify her as a demonstrator known for piercing thin-walled pieces, and her own material points to trembleurs, thin finials, and pierced natural-edge ornaments. She is also listed as a member of the Cascade Woodturners Association, Southwest Washington Woodturners, the Pacific Northwest Woodturning Guild, and the AAW Board. In other words, she is not bringing a casual demo topic. She is bringing a body of work that lives right where structure, delicacy, and patience meet.

For turners, that makes the June 18 meeting worth showing up for even if you are not ready to make a trembleur yourself. You get to watch how a delicate form is approached, where the risk points are, and how much of the success comes from the decisions made before the tool ever touches the wood.

The June 19 workshop is the real stretch opportunity

The next day, June 19, South Puget Sound follows the demo with Kathleen Duncan’s workshop titled Build your piercing system and learn to use your new piercing system. That pairing is exactly what experienced turners are always looking for: see the idea, then build the tool path while it is still fresh in your head. A board that schedules the demo and the hands-on class back-to-back is making a clear argument for retention and skill growth.

This is the session for members who want to move beyond straightforward spindle and bowl work and start adding surface texture and embellishment with intent. Piercing changes the conversation on a piece fast. It demands a steadier hand, better planning, and a willingness to work slowly enough to keep the form clean. If the meeting is about understanding the look, the workshop is about getting your own piercing system together and learning how to use it without tearing up the rest of the piece.

That makes the workshop especially useful for turners who already have the basic cuts but want a new lane. It is not entry-level in the usual sense. It is a chance to stretch into the kind of detailed work that separates a competent blank from a finished object with real character.

The month keeps turning after the demo

South Puget Sound does not let the calendar peak on one night and then go quiet. The June 20 Sawdust Session keeps the momentum going, and the club describes those sessions as a place to come together, work alongside one another, learn new skills, or improve old ones while helping newer turners solve problems. That description fits the whole month. The mentoring sessions build confidence, the meeting gives a focused project, and the workshop turns that project into usable technique.

That sequencing is what makes June stand out. If you need help keeping a current project on track, the mentoring sessions are there. If you want to watch a specialist handle a delicate form, the Tremblers meeting gives you that. If you want to build and actually use a piercing system, the workshop does the heavy lifting. The month is not just busy. It is arranged so the next step is always within reach.

A local calendar with national context

There is also a bigger backdrop here. The 2026 AAW International Woodturning Symposium runs June 4-7 at the Raleigh Convention Center in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the American Association of Woodturners is marking 40 years of the symposium. AAW calls it the biggest and most attended woodturning event in the world, with the industry’s largest tradeshow, plus galleries, exhibitions, and auctions. Kathleen Duncan’s schedule reflects that overlap, since her event listings show the symposium in Raleigh June 4-7 and South Puget Sound in Puyallup June 18-19.

That is part of what gives South Puget Sound’s June calendar its edge. It sits in the middle of the broader turning season, but it never loses sight of the bench-level work members actually need. June is worth showing up for because every piece of the month points to a different fix, a different technique, and a different way to keep turning with purpose.