With me it was a spur of the moment thing at the end of a rather traumatic few months of family stress involving my 98 yr.old mother.
All my life I have been in the situation where if you wanted something you just set to and made or built it, it was the norm in our family, be it a new garage, barn door, gate, new house extension, kitchen cupboard, driveway etc. personal labour is cheap.
Having retired early and spent 10 years or so generally extending, building, pathing, etc. the living space was DIYed to the limit and I was getting more than a little tired of being a good neighbour to one and all.
I had bought one or two attractive but functional pieces of turning whilst out and about and one day whilst collecting my thoughts when the trauma subsided I looked at one of the pieces and thought, well if he could do it, surely I could.
This resulted in the purchase of a cheap lathe, followed by the more than equal expenditure of essential bits and pieces to get started.
Then came the horrible thought that I had no idea what to make, lets face it the table lamp made at school is still around somewhere and you can only absorb so many bowls etc..
For a few weeks due to other commitments the “lathe” sat in all it’s glory with the odd bit of wood mangled nearby and a reluctance to admit that it was a bit intimidating, which was daft really as I was making micrometer grade tools in my teens using far more sophisticated machines.
Then it happened, a piece of spalted beech that had been given to me was mounted and an hour or so latter
This was the result
The unstinting encouragement from members of this forum for my amateurish outpourings proved a lifeline, to say our lives have been transformed is not an exaggeration, we have travelled to areas of the British Isles we would not have contemplated, met people here and abroad and made friends anew, got involved with numerous projects and have a full calendar for months ahead as a result, sometimes of a tenuous nature, but nearly always because I started turning.