The Five Pedal Flower Bowl
Oh boy! I kind of forgot to share this project on my blog. I wanted to make a new bowl design, and just play with some shapes in Fusion 360. Ahem…I mean, “Fusion”, as they have dropped the 360 from the name, which was a bad idea for marketing, as you now get too many generic results when searching for “Fusion” and you will get a ton of specific results when searching for “Fusion 360”. Oh well!
Like a lot of my projects, I ended up making a set of directions/plans, bundled with the Fusion file and STL model. I actually went above and beyond with this project, and created the project’s toolpaths using CAM in Fusion and also in Vectric VCarve. I know more people tend to use VCarve over Fusion, so I was hoping it would help sell more digital files. This took me a lot of time, as I had to do a test project in VCarve, which isn’t something I normally would do. I released the files (and the video) around July 19th, 2024. In the two months to this point I’ve sold 11 copies at $10 each for a total of $110. I’m not entirely sure it was worth it to do the plans, so I’m not sure if I’ll do it again for future projects.
Get the files here: Digital Files: Five Petal Flower Bowl in VCarve and Fusion.
This concept of “wood and epoxy” just continues along my general theme of doing this style in a lot of other bowls. I call it “drip epoxy”, because it sort of looks like the epoxy is dripped over the wood mountains. I really like playing with epoxy, but it isn’t an eco-friendly material, as it is a plastic. I’d hope that the bowls will last a long time, but in the end, the plastic will never biodegrade, and I do generate some waste epoxy chips that have to be thrown in the trash. So, I have a lot of mixed feelings about using epoxy, and I’ve been moving away from using epoxy.
Overall, I initially made four of these bowls in this style. Three are from cherry wood. One has a deep purple epoxy, another a translucent purple epoxy (just less mica powder), and the final one with a blue-green epoxy.
The fourth bowl is out of maple…but I haven’t gotten around to finishing it. I sort of lost interest in the project, and this made me realize that I should probably just make two or three of each bowl. I usually like to keep one, sell one to fund my other projects, and give the last one away to friends and family. Whenever I make more than three I tend to get a bit bored with the process; I like creating new things, not replicating the same thing over and over again. But, having said that, I do have a fifth bowl that I finally finished; but it is different from the rest of the flock. I’ll share that one in the next blog post!
I have two of them for sale over Corbin’s Workshop in the bowls section; so far neither of them have sold, which is okay by me. I’m planning to build a bit of a stockpile of things I make and do a craft fair next year.
