A woodturning collaboration with Carol Rix …

Carol Rix of Nambour, outside Brisbane in Queensland was in Cape Town recently to visit her son, John, and his Irish fiancée, Maria, who are both working here in the IT industry. John had recently come across Waterfront Woodturners, met Ken Turner and put him and Carol in e-mail contact with other. Ken passed on the correspondence to me and I arranged for Carol to get in touch as soon as she arrived in Cape Town. She is an active member of her local club and takes an active interest in the wider Australian woodturning scene.

True to her word, after arriving in Cape Town last Friday, she immediately contacted me early on Saturday morning. We met down at Hardware Center’s ‘open day’ and later went down to the Waterfront to show her around. We visited Izak at Waterfront Woodturners, had a quick lunch and wander around the shops and galleries, particularly those exhibiting African arts and crafts.

As it was a perfect, clear winter’s day we left John and Maria to take Carol up the mountain. The following day, again one of those rare Cape ‘champagne’ winter days, John and Maria took her on a trip around the peninsula and down to Cape Point.

As a history and geography teacher Carol was bubbling over with the excitement of visiting Sir Francis Drake's ‘Fairest Cape in all the World’. She has been teaching her students about voyagers, shipwrecks and geography all her life and here she had the chance to visit the Cape of Good Hope for herself.

As ‘Laidler’s’ luck would have it I had quite coincidentally arranged two day’s leave last Monday and Tuesday. John and Maria were working and Carol was free to join me for a two-day collaboration session in my workshop. What an absolute revelation. It was an absolute blast to have someone of Carol’s talents and bubbly character sharing the usually lonely workshop.



Somehow her enthusiasm and ‘slash and burn’ attitude gave me the push I needed to try out a couple of ideas that I have been brewing in my head for some time. With her ‘provocation’ I did things to a piece of perfectly good ‘Brazilian pepper’ that I would previously have been most reluctant to inflict even on the most recalcitrant bole.

Having explored some galleries of African ‘objets d'art’ and paged through a couple of books I have on the subject we decided to use a Zulu beer pot, 'ukhamba', as our inspiration. These large corpulent clay pots are often decorated with raised warts or bumps called ‘amasumpa’ – definitely ‘easier in clay’. Carol set about turning the ‘amasumpa’ from some maple. I attacked a ‘years old’ relatively dry blank of Brazilian pepper.



Because the piece had a very pronounced bark inclusion that was bound to be one of its primary decorative features we decided that, instead of attempting a traditional Zulu geometric pattern with the ‘amasumpa’ we would let the natural curve of the bark inclusion lead the pyrographic and ‘amasumpa’ elements. Once I had hollowed the vessel, burned the pyrographic elements, Carol had turned about ninety ‘amasumpa’ and the holes to fit them had been bored, all resemblance to my previous woodturning experience ended.

Carol was ‘bent’ on colouring this perfectly good vessel. I hauled out some alcohol soluble powder dyes that I had bought after a visit by Phil Irons some years before. I had only made one or two spectacularly miserable attempts at using them since.

Carol was very familiar with mixing different colours. Once we had dyed the piece BRIGHT red I started getting into the swing of things. Surely the artistic merit of the ‘thing’ couldn’t go downhill from there! Then we added a dash of blue – result purple. Bloody wonderful!



After trying Phil Iron’s drying technique, setting the alcohol soaked piece alight, with moderate success, we dried it off thoroughly with a heat gun.



That done we burnished the surface with an abrasive bristle brush.



We completed work on the piece over the following evenings, except Wednesday when arrangements had been made for Carol to chat to the local club, show them slides of her work and tell them about her latest book – in press. (See later post)

We attacked the piece with a pencil blowtorch. Great for the fine detail! The piece needed to be blackened from the bottom up to reflect it having been ‘fired on a bed of embers’, so out came the bigger blowtorch. Now we were ‘cooking on gas’!

We lightly scorched the piece all over to tone down the bright tones, died the ‘amasumpa’ with black alcohol dye and Indian ink and glued them to the piece.
The piece now had a wonderful leathery, burnished patina.

Applying the Danish oil yesterday evening subdued the colours even further leaving the piece just glowing warmly, with only hints of the former garish colours.

Just as Carol and I ‘completed’ the piece John and Maria arrived for dinner. In deference to them we did manage to end that evening at a reasonable hour and I hope that Carol managed to catch up on some sleep! Oh and by the way Carol even managed to squeeze in a day safari on Thursday to a local game farm about two and a half hours from Cape Town. She saw the big five as well as a range of other game. I’m sure that she’s going to catch up on her beauty sleep on that long flight back to Australia on Tuesday!

I took these pre-final pics just before I left home for Waterfront Woodturners this morning so I could write up this short report and publish it on my blog. I’ll take some decent pics of the piece once it has been properly finished.



This one is definitely a ‘keeper’. I’ll hang on to this as I believe that it represents a definite a step upwards in the punctuated evolution of my turning. In conclusion I can only say that I am thrilled with the wonderful influence that Carol’s visit has had on me, in what seems to have been a very long week.



As a postscript I must add that Carol and I had planned to have a lid on the piece, inspired by a Zulu headrest. However the piece is already rather ‘busy’. Together with the large bark inclusion that has slightly changed the shape of the top we decided to leave the proposed headrest lid for another piece. Watch this space for further developments in this regard.

Gigi is taking Carol for a walk to the top of Table Mountain on Monday but unfortunately I’ll be flying off to Pretoria (again) on Monday afternoon and won’t be back until Tuesday evening by which time Carol will have left for home.

I strongly recommend a visit to Carol’s website.

PS - You can see the pics of the finished piece here