We were visiting friends who had just had a large cypress felled. Some had been turned into fantastic carvings by a man with a chainsaw, some went for firewood, and this piece was thrown in the bottom of the hedge because he couldn't work out how to split it, and luckily didn't have a chainsaw. It took me a while to figure out how to mount it on the lathe, and then I roughed it out with the chainsaw and set to. It's left quite a bit thicker than I normally would have done as there were a few shakes and I did want a bowl rather than an explosion! It went back to them as a memory of their tree.