Making a Hand-Hewn Wood Dough Bowl (Part 1)

The goal is to go from this:

...to something like this:

Yes, it seems somewhat of a challenge, but I am feeling up for the task. This is especially true because the days are rainy, cold, and unfit for pretty much any outdoor work!

I have been doing a lot of tree felling, so I have a LOT of wood on my hands. Some of this wood will end up as either beams in our future house or milled into siding, cabinets, or such things. The lower quality stuff will be cut up as firewood. However, I have a lot of short little stumps that are quite big around. With this stuff, I have decided to try and make some large hand-hewn wooden bowls.

Some people refer to these bowls as dough bowls as people would often kneed their dough in these large bowls. You can also use them as a centerpiece for the table or hold produce of various sorts. All-in-all, they are very large and heavy-duty bowls that also have an air of rustic beauty to them.

Step 1: Split the stump in half.

This can be done in a number of different ways depending on the tools you have and the size of the stumps. I usually use a combination of my hatchet and my splitting maul along with my wooden mallet. However, this is not really a post on how to cut a stump in half. Just know that it is not that difficult, so don't let that deter you from trying it. Actually, it is the easier part! When you finish, it will look like this:

Stump conquered by my hatchet and mallet.

Step 2: Use an ax to get the bowl roughly shaped.

If you wanted to use power tools on this, you could get the bowl VERY roughly shaped using a band saw. That would really take a lot of time off of this (and help get things square right away). As I do not have a band saw, I just decided to go with the good ol' ax. And believe me, it takes a lot of chopping!

I just choose to remove all of the bark from the one side first so that I could get a better idea of what I was working with.

You will end up with a big pile of bark chips (I saved these for use as fill for a walkway).

Once you get all of the bark off, the next step is to really roughly shape the bowl. At this point, you should have a good visual in your mind for what you want to the bowl to look like eventually. Then you just remove all the wood that doesn't conform to the image in your mind. Easy, right? ;)

Anyway, I wanted it slightly sloped on the two ends that were flat. Thankfully, the other sides are already rounded because the stump was round.

Eventually, you should get a nice-looking bowl (at least from what will be the outside). Mine looks like this:

Step 3: Shape the outside of the bowl with "finer" tools.

The ax is a pretty crude tool. However, it is awesome for taking out a LOT of wood all at once. Delicate or finish work? Not so much. So, once you are done taking off the majority of the wood on the outside, you need to switch to something else that will take off less wood and really let you shape the bowl perfectly. I used a saw rasp. It is a lot faster than a normal rasp but still gives you enough control that you won't take off too much material in one pass.

At this point, you should have a very heavy bowl that is not very good at holding anything, yet.

Continued later...

I will take you along for carving out the inside of the bowl in a couple days. Until then, craft on!