John & Joy Moss

We had a full house with 34 attending to watch the dynamic tag team duo, John & Joy Moss. 

They did a great job teaching us about surface decoration, piercing our turned work and how to turn a bowl with a rim thin enough to pierce successfully.  John demonstrated turning a small bowl with a wide rim 1/16” thick and how to turn a potpourri lid for piercing.  Some of the tips Joy and John provided include:

• Always true up the outside of the piece after reverse chucking to insure a uniform thickness.
• Always finish sanding the rim before hollowing since the mass in the middle helps reduce the flexing of the rim.
• Two methods of transferring images to your work for piercing or woodburning are: a) use graphite paper (not carbon paper) which is available where art supplies are sold and b) transfer images printed with a laser printer or copier (not ink jet) using heat from a woodburning tool. 
• Piercing is best done with an air driven dental handpiece like a Powercrafter which goes at 500,000 RPM versus only about 35,000 RPM on a Dremel type rotary tool.
• John likes maple, cherry and walnut for piercing and not so much sycamore.

Earlier in the day the Moss’s held a workshop for nine of the members covering similar content with plenty of opportunity for hands on practice. 

Joy had several examples of her embellished work available to demonstrate different embellishing techniques as shown here.