Woodworking group gets started
She started with a gouge, portable lathe and block of wood. Some 20 minutes later, Linda Van Gehuchten of Sarver was rubbing mineral oil into a beautiful bowl amid a pile of shavings.
"Isn't it fun to make a mess?" she asked a group of 12 hobbyists assembled Nov. 3 at The Art Center on Main Street.
Van Gehuchten's demonstration marked the first meeting of the Butler Area Woodturners club, where attendees also displayed items for show-and-tell.
Spread out on a long table, the items ranged from fancy ink pens made of wood and acrylic to salad bowls crafted from burls.
Blocks of raw wood were among coveted prizes for the evening's raffle. The woods consisted of maple, purpleheart and cherry — a favorite due to its lack of knots.
"Cherry is especially nice," Van Gehuchten said later, describing how Pennsylvania is home to prime examples of cherry.
Van Gehuchten, 58, has been making things on a lathe since graduating from college with a degree in furniture design.
Along with selling wares at the Center for the Arts in Pittsburgh and other places, Van Gehuchten teaches at the Society of Contemporary Craft in the city's Strip District. She also participates in ArtsPath, an arts-in-education program funded by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
Although Van Gehuchten already belongs to a national woodturners group and to groups in Pittsburgh and Indiana County, she started the local club as an option for woodworkers outside those communities.
"It's only like 15 minutes for me to drive," said Jack Brown of Middlesex Township, the club's treasurer and secretary.
Ken Hertzog of Brady Township is another craftsman who likes the location, having stopped commuting to meetings in Pittsburgh.
"It was almost an hour and a half drive to get where some of the meetings were," said Hertzog, who makes items like pens, kaleidoscopes, yo-yos and bottle stoppers.
Hertzog has done lathe woodworking for about six years, but he said the club welcomes newcomers to the hobby.
"They can just come in from the ground up," Van Gehuchten agreed. "That's the whole idea for our club. They see different techniques and they can learn."
Van Gehuchten said attendance at the first meeting — up to 16 by later that evening — stemmed from word of mouth, distributing flyers and posting blurbs in newsletters.
She wasn't surprised by the turnout. Van Gehuchten said since her initial exposure to woodworking in high school, lathes have become more portable and tools now allow for faster completion of projects."A big part of it is sharpening the tools," she noted, explaining properly sharpened hand tools negate the need for physical strength.Priced at hundreds instead of thousands of dollars, costs for the "mini lathes" also have fed the growing interest.The Butler Area Woodturners is a chapter of the American Association of Woodturners, which had 1,510 members at the end of its first year in 1986.Linda Ferber, office administrator for AAW, said the group's current membership exceeds 13,500 people spread among 325 chapters."This is the largest we've ever been, the most membership we've ever had," Ferber said. "It has been growing at a small rate, but it has continued."Ferber, too, attributes the pastime's popularity to the time frame for doing projects."The first time you stand in front of a lathe with a teacher, you can make a project — so it's a fast, easy type of activity," she said.Van Gehuchten said many demonstrations at the group's monthly meetings also will focus on attainable goals.With meetings set for the first Tuesday of every month, the Dec. 1 meeting will feature a demonstration by Brown on making Christmas ornaments.Although the meeting officially begins at 7 p.m., Van Gehuchten said novices arriving at 6:30 p.m. can try out the lathe themselves.
<B>WHAT: </B>Butler Area Woodturners club monthly meeting<B>WHEN: </B>Doors open at 6:30 p.m. with meeting beginning at 7 p.m. Dec. 1<B>WHERE: </B>AABC Art Center, 344 S. Main St.
