11 Sep Custom Great Bowl O’ Fire Firebowl with inset flames

When my friend Brian decided to get a firebowl, he sent me a direct message on Twitter saying, “I want a big fire bowl. Can I get something special? Not price, I mean an artistic flourish.”

I sent back a message asking if he had anything particular in mind and he responded, “No, I want whatever you think. Do it, ship it, and I’ll happily pay for it. You obviously don’t know how much I love your work. I really dig the flames, so do something around that theme.”

With free reign to do whatever I wanted around a fire theme, I decided to try an idea that I had been toying with in the back of my mind for quite some time… Cutting outlines of flame shapes withing the flame designs of the Great Bowl O’ Fire. The idea being that the fire would show through these cutouts and achieve an effect of depth that might more closely mimic a real fire. Here’s a video of how it turned out.

After the test burn captured in the video above, I decided that the lines of the inset cutouts weren’t thick enough to really show up as well as I wanted when lit, so I recut them to let a greater amount of light through. I didn’t get video of the new cuts before I shipped, but you can make out the shapes pretty well in the slideshow of “in progress” photos below.