Thursday, August 19, 2010 Kjaere Venner
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| I made the bowl out of Basswood (Tilia Americana, also known as Linden, which is a light, soft hardwood often used in Norwegian ale bowls and used for carving), and finished it in walnut oil and beeswax. Some Basswood is cream colored, but this Basswood is tan colored, in some ways similar in color to willow. (The wood used in bowls and cups in York were commonly alder, maple, and birch with a few examples from several other wood species.13)
Most medieval bowls were 6” to 9” in diameter.14 The original bowl 8571 in Carole Morris' book was 9” in diameter, but the Basswood log I had was slightly smaller, so I scaled the drawing to 7”, including scaling Morris’s profile drawing to a smaller mechanical drawing to help me replicate the shape and dimensions of the bowl, see the next figure. 
I am really pleased with how this bowl turned out. Basswood dries slowly so, after turning, this bowl has continued to shrink and warp giving it now a very pleasing shape (even more so than when I took the above picture). The walnut oil brings out the beautiful grain of the wood, giving it a slight orangey-brown hue thus making the bowl quite striking. Most of the bowls from York were made from alder.15 To more closely replicate medieval and Viking bowls, I searched for and found a source of alder. In Europe the alder used was black alder, Alnus glutinosa, and grows to 100 feet. In Wisconsin alder, Alnus rugosa, only grows to 25 feet. But in Washington state, the red alder, Alnus rubra, grows to 100 feet. The company Washington Alder, at BuyAlder.com, sells kiln dried alder up to 8/4 thick boards. After numerous emails with them, they found the closest lumber yard who is a distributor of the WA alder in Milwaukee, so I bought 10 feet of 4/4 and 8/4 boards. Here are my first alder turned platters and a bowl. 
The alder turns nicely, kind of between birch and maple. Initially the turned wood is a clear light white that finishes to a reddish brown with walnut oil. In medieval times alder was coppiced, cut at the base every 15 to 25 years, for bowl blanks. That trunk would produce a bowl blank with no or few knots. The alder from WA was also almost knot free, similar to what would have been used for turning by the Vikings and Anglo Scandinavians in York. Of the wood I’ve turned so far, alder is my favorite, followed by maple. Interestingly, that is similar to the distribution of wood found at York. After visiting L’Anse aux Meadows this last June, I turned a bowl to give to the Viking recreators with the Canada Parks at L’Anse aux Meadows. Again using Morris’s bowl 8571, this time I turned it with an 8” diameter. The original was about 8.5” in diameter, and about 2.25” high. My piece of alder was only 2” thick, so I scaled the bowl down to 2” high, which gives a diameter of about 8”. The profile of bowl 8571 scaled to 8” is shown in the following line drawing. 
The finished bowl is shown in the next picture. Download 1.52 Mb. Share with your friends:
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