Tom Voegeli Leads Segmented Turning Night in Mount Vernon

Northwest Washington Woodturners is turning May into a compact skills festival, and the center of it is a segmented turning night with Tom Voegeli on Thursday, May 21, 2026, at Mount Vernon Christian School Auditorium. The club’s calendar stacks demonstration, peer review, and hands-on follow-up into a single late-month run, giving turners one place to pick up segmented turning ideas and then keep building on them.

Voegeli will lead the featured presentation on segmented turning, with the meeting page outlining a path from getting started and best practices to building a masterpiece, avoiding mistakes, and choosing the right tools of the trade. That matters because segmented turning lives or dies on layout, glue-up accuracy, grain choice, and clean execution, and the club is making those details the point of the night rather than an afterthought. The meeting will also include show-and-tell, so members can bring their own work into the room, along with Critique Corner, which opens before the meeting for feedback on finish, form, balance, and embellishment. Members who bring work will also receive a free wood raffle ticket, adding a practical incentive in a hobby where good stock is always part of the equation.

The learning does not stop with the May 21 meeting. Northwest Washington Woodturners has a Sawdust Saturday set for May 23, followed by a three-day Matt Monaco class sequence on May 24, 25 and 26. Monaco’s classes will move from goblets to a fine-detail end-grain box with finial and then into advanced skew work centered on finials and tops. The class descriptions emphasize tool control, sharpening, burnished planing cuts, shearing and scraping, which signals a real progression from club demo to shop-floor execution.

The May calendar fits the club’s larger purpose. Northwest Washington Woodturners says its goal is to provide a forum for turners of all skill levels to exchange knowledge, ideas and information about safe woodturning. It operates as a volunteer-based organization supported by member dues and offers discounts for families, shop teachers and students. The club also runs mentoring across its region, with volunteers who help with tool and equipment selection, shop layout and turning technique. Voegeli is listed as a board member-at-large, tying the featured presenter directly to the leadership behind the schedule.

The segmented focus also connects Mount Vernon to a broader national network. The Segmented Woodturners chapter of the American Association of Woodturners says it was founded in 2009 and now has more than 500 members. In late May, Northwest Washington Woodturners will give local turners a direct line from segmented design to critique, then into a run of advanced instruction that can leave them with better bowls, sharper details and more confident tool handling.