Beside the Stream

Peggy Potter started painting bowls years and years ago.  This is the official story: Miss Peggy Sparks married Sparky Potter, and they raised three children on a hillside in Vermont where Sparky made signs and Peggy taught piano and painted bowls.  And nothing has changed in the long years since then except that one of the kids became a rock star, Peg no longer teaches piano, and both of their businesses have gone international.

This is the story of Peggy’s bowls:

There is a mill in Granville, Vermont that is one of two mills in the United States that makes extra large wooden bowls (the other is the Holland Bowl Mill in Michigan).  The Granville mill machinery is a hundred and fifty years old–the mill sold its first bowl in 1857–and these solid old-time bowls are made from the trunks of large maple trees.  Some of the bowls are perfectly clear all the way through.  And some of the bowls have color streaks, and are sold as seconds.  Peg takes the seconds, paints them, and seals them with layers and layers of food-safe varnish.   

She first preps the bowls and paints the bottom, and then she paints the inside,

adds a nice trim and gives it four to six coats of food safe polyurethane, depending on the wood and the color.  And then she calls it done. 

Peggy makes a heckuva nice bowl.