A friend of mine who has been a woodworker for over 60 years acquired this bowl recently  It is about 16 inches in diameter and approximately 4″ deep.  It has a repeating pattern around the entire lip of the bowl.  The pattern is make of tiny lead brads embedded about 1/8″ deep.  As you can see from the pictures there are hundreds of them.  Several of these brads have fallen out as they weren’t in there very far to begin with.  About every 2″ the pattern is interrupted by a piece of copper that had three prongs holding it into the wood (about an 1/8″ deep also).    These pieces are all missing with the exception of three.  All that remains of them is a little wad of copper smaller than a dime.

A couple of cracks have been repaired a long time ago by putting long square steel stock in the form of a staple through the bowl on each side of the crack, bending it over on the bottom side and hammering it flat on the inside.

My friend feels it is too highly adorned to have been used for anything other than decoration.  He came to this conclusion based on the two lines through the center to break up the open space and the lip is slightly undercut creating a shadow line under the lip of the bowl.  He also feels that it may have been done with mechanized equipment just because of the size of the bowl and the quality of the turning.

He has no idea from what country it may have originated.  I really liked the pattern around the lip.  That was the primary reason for the photos.  Otherwise I would have taken better pictures with something to provide a little bit of scale.

If any of you guys have seen a pattern or a bowl like this feel free to offer up an opinion of its origin.  Otherwise, enoy the pattern.  I thought it was interesting (and a lot of work).