Today’s Follow Friday is woodturner Temple Blackwood, who was featured in the Show Us Your Shop section of our July 2013 Highland Woodturner.
Temple started his own woodturning company, Highlands Woodturning, over 40 years ago, and it has been going strong ever since. At Highlands Woodturning, Temple offers custom turning in addition to teaching classes and hosting open shop time in the shop he and some friends renovated from an old garage/shed in 2009, which is located in Castine on the beautiful Maine coast.
The story behind the creation of Temple’s shop is quite unique: “After my first wife, Julie, died in 2007, I travelled north to visit our coastal farm and our oldest son in Penobscot, Maine for the summer (as I did every summer with her there since 1968). In Maine, I reconnected with Julie’s long-time childhood friend, Victoria in a wonderful way, and decided that instead of building a shop and apartment for myself on the farm with my son and his family, I would be well-advised to marry Victoria. Her home (a genuine Austrian Chalet that she and her first husband brought in containers from Austria in 1988 and constructed on her family property about a mile from my son’s farm) is magnificently built of locked dovetails. The next winter while I was still working in Maryland, I was able to buy the property next door. With my brother-in-law and friends, I began renovating (built-over) the old garage/shed to create my new shop (still a work-in-progress) for Highlands Woodturning to move into as I retired and moved permanently from Maryland to Castine, Maine in summer 2009.”
Temple specializes in creating heirloom furniture and has made a wide variety of infant rockers, stools, and benches, among other things. He was nice enough to create the one seen below for Sidney, the granddaughter of Highland Woodworking owners Chris and Sharon Bagby, and future Highland Woodworker.
A stepstool/bench created just for Sidney by Temple Blackwood
If you have any questions about his pieces or methods, feel free to email Temple HERE. You can also view his website HERE.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————–Fridays on the Highland Woodworking Blog are dedicated to #FollowFriday, where we use this space to further highlight a woodworker or turner who we have featured in our monthly e-publications Wood News or The Highland Woodturner. Would you like for your shop to appear in our publications? We invite you to SEND US PHOTOS of your woodworking shop along with captions and a brief history and description of your woodworking (Email photos at 800×600 resolution.) Receive a $50 store credit redeemable towards merchandise if we show your shop in a future issue.