There didn't seem to be any easy way to make a blank to turn on the lathe into an end-grain vessel. You could use square or rectangular pieces fitted together like you would for a turning of a conventional composite vessel but that hardly fits with the round end-grain pattern of your average tree.

Alternately you could start with round end-grain sections and flatten the sides for a tight fit but that becomes absurdly complex when the pieces need to be precisely angled on however many sides (6? 8?) they ended up with.

I decided to emphasize the roundness of the end grain so I could either make one with overlapping logs to completely cover the surface (giving a look similar to the plug coasters) or leave some gaps. I opted for gaps. Of course this wouldn't be my first "leaky vessel" so I wasn't too concerned about that. To make it practical to actually fabricate I started with a solid vessel and embedded the end-grain pieces so everything was solid before it was rounded and then hollowed on the lathe. Of course then any still-present bits of the original vessel needed to be removed; which is the answer to the question: "How did you spend your summer?".

I had a vessel sitting around that I'd turned for a previous project but then set aside since I didn't think the wood grain was interesting enough. Fortunately it was large enough to reshape into the blank for this one.

This was turned from a piece of Manitoba Maple that a neighbour had offered to me after they did some heavy pruning of one of their trees about 3 years ago.

I implemented my usual shape-to-a-profile-drawing procedure which starts by pencilling on some some reference lines like these.

The next step was to cut slots at each reference line to diameters taken from the plan.

In this shot I'm using the outside calipers to guide the cutting. I set them to a bit larger than the desired diameter and lock them in place, then hold them against the wood in the slot and use my other hand on the parting tool to slowly increase the depth of the slot until the calipers slip over the cut wood.

The last step is to remove the excess wood to smoothly connect the bottom of the slots. I usually remove the last bits using a wide scraper as seen here.

This shows the finished profile of the vessel.

I didn't need to be super-accurate in the shaping but just for the heck of it I overlayed the profile from the drawing and it ended up being accurate to one pixel!

The vessel would need logs between 1/2" and 1-1/4" diameter so I gathered a few branches of appropriate size. This group is all from backyard trees.

Most of the branches had uneven ends so I cut them flat to get an idea of what the grain would look like.

I had considered using the native branch shapes (typically slightly oval and irregularly curved) but I tried it out on another test vessel and it didn't look much different from a round profile. What was different however was the effort - it took way, way longer to do since each hole needed to be custom-shaped. So I was happy to stick with nice round logs in nice round holes.

I mostly worked with short sections of branches like this one here. They were mounted to the lathe between a drive spur and live center.

The branch pieces were rounded to one of a few specific diameters. I started with the roughing gouge as seen here and usually followed that with a scraper.

I'd alternate taking a bit off and measuring the diameter until I got to the target value.

This one is a piece of spruce, shaped to a 1-1/8" diameter.

After making a small selection of logs, I thought I'd better determine how many of each size were going to be needed. That meant (figuratively) nailing down the pattern on the vessel. I puttered around on the blank, drawing and erasing patterns until I got one I liked.

I had settled on using round holes and logs but of course they would need to match existing drill bit sizes. I ended up using 1/2", 5/8", 3/4", 7/8", 1", 1-1/8" and 1-1/4".

The pattern consisted of six evenly-spaced spirals and my first attempt to draw them onto the blank suffered from a distressing lack of evenness. I couldn't think of any easy way to mark them evenly so eventually I just did it the hard way.

Hard way =
1. Add thin tape strips and mark the exact circumference on each;
2. Take off the tape, measure the circumference between the marks, divide by six and mark it in six places;
3. Put the tape back on, aligning one mark with the spiral location, then:

4. Mark the wood next to each of the tape marks and finally;
5. Remove the tape and draw on the spirals through the marks.

The blank also received circumferential lines to mark the centers of each of the circles.

When it was all done (except for some missing circles near the top and bottom) it looked like this.

So then all those circles needed to turn into holes into which short logs could be glued.

The vessel blank was mounted in a plywood jig that held the ends and let it rotate. I needed the holes to be drilled perpendicular to the surface so I used a large wooden hand-screw clamp to hold the jig at the proper vertical angle for each row of holes.

The jig let me rotate the blank to align the center of the hole to be drilled right at the top and then the long black clamp was tightened to solidly hold the blank to the jig and prevent any further rotation.

I worked a row at a time so the log overlaps would be consistent. I checked the fit of log ends and then cut them to an appropriate length on a small band saw.

Here the first log piece is ready to be glued in.

I decided I needed more Spruce so on this nice sunny day I chopped another small dead branch off one of our Spruce trees in the back yard. This would yield some smaller logs, probably under 7/8" or so.

I turned a number of logs to appropriate diameters, usually trying for six different species of each diameter.

In this shot I have enough to get started and there are some more branches waiting their turn on the lathe.

I wanted the log overlaps to be consistent around the vessel but working from just one end would take quite a while since the glue needs to dry - ideally the better part of a day - before drilling the overlapping log hole.

I compromised by working from both the bottom and the top, letting me do at least two levels in a day (with six holes in each level).

The vessel was rotated to align the center of the next hole to be drilled at the top, usually with the aid of precision straightedge like this one.

The last holes to be drilled in the main spiral pattern were largest ones at 1-1/4" diameter and being in the middle of the pattern, overlap both of the flanking logs.

The top collar of the vessel needed to be solid so it received extra 1/2"-diameter logs all around. Here I'm tapping in one of the last collar pieces.

Once the main pattern was done I started adding extra pieces to bridge the spirals with an eye toward increasing the strength for when the surrounding material is removed.

It was a couple of weeks of drilling holes and inserting logs. There turned out to be 150 holes so I was pretty happy to be drilling number 150.

~Aside~
So back in the day when you activated the turn signals in a vehicle, a clever circuit would blink them on and off regularly, accompanied by an audible click that (unless you were a senior) would indicate the signal lights were on. The flasher operation was dependent on the electrical current drawn by the bulbs and a burned-out bulb could sometimes be detected by a different click rate. However with today's LED-based turn signals that classic flasher wouldn't actually work.

It occurred to me when I had my last car that the clicking I hear must therefore actually be synthesized, although the sound was a very convincing tink-tonk, tink-tonk. This was emphasized in my current car where in one instance I had the turn indicator on and when the system read out a text from my connected phone, the clicking stopped. I wondered if I had cancelled the turn indicator accidentally but the clicking came back when the text readout was done. It was a bit disconcerting.

Interestingly, this means that the sound need no longer be synchronized with the turn signal flashing. I checked once using a reflection of the turn signal in a nearby sign to see if the lights flashed in synchrony with the clicking and in fact they did, however the blinking turn signal arrows on the dash board "marched to a different drummer" as it were.

The last logs were glued in and when those had dried the vessel went back onto the lathe.

The surface needed to be rounded and I was concerned about splintering the edges of the logs so I thought I'd try the skew chisel to even them out.

It sort of (slowly) worked but it wasn't happy about the uneven surface or the hard end-grain wood. Skew chisels are much more at home with side grain than end grain.

My next try was a high-grind-angle gouge that usually cuts very well. Fortunately that was the case here too and there was very little problem with splintering or end-grain tear-out.

Once the logs were all cut down to the level of the surrounding wood, out came the sandpaper to smooth everything off.

After sanding with 150, 220 and finally 320 grit, the outside looked fairly respectable.

Then it was on to the hollowing.

First I cut off the extra wood on the mouth of the vessel then set up the 3-wheel steady frame and started working on the inside.

Yes, in fact those are roller-blade wheels.

One problem with my shop-made 3-wheel steady seen in the previous photo is that the frame and top wheel extend above the turning and for an inch or two of the hollowing, obscure the laser used to guide the cut.

Fortunately I had a new type of steady to try out thanks to a birthday and a generous mother-in-law. The white one seen in this photo would prevent vibration of the vessel without covering the top of it.

At the time of this photo the hollowing has progressed only an inch or two into the vessel as indicated by the laser spot location.

With the little round carbide cutter set to an appropriate position, the laser is aligned so the dot is offset by the desired wall thickness.

The black wood on the little jig doesn't reflect much of the laser light which makes it easier to see the exact dot position.

A not-unusual occurrence when hollowing is to have the tool jerk to the side due to some anomaly in the wood or cutting angle (or perhaps evil spirits?). This can result in cracks in the mouth of the vessel except this vessel is particularly brittle so the effect was a bit worse than a crack.

Fortunately I was able to find all the pieces - seven of them in this instance - and they also fortunately went back together fairly well.

In this shot the pieces have been glued back in place and the joints are held together with a "binding tape" which is similar to masking tape but a bit stretchier and with a stronger adhesive.

To guard against damage, the vessel top was reinforced with several layers of conventional masking tape to hopefully give it some resilience to any future knocks.

But clearly the vessel was too clever for me. When cutting near the bottom it exploded again, coincidently into another seven pieces.

You will note however, that the reinforced top is still in great shape.

Yah, so same glue-it-back-together deal as last time, just on a slightly larger scale. Here I've already glued a few of the smaller pieces into some of the larger pieces.

Once again I managed to find all the significant pieces except that one was a bit distorted and didn't want to go back in place. This left an unsightly hole (rather than a slightly-less-unsightly crack) so I decided it needed a better fix. I broke out the whole log and replaced it with a new section as shown here.

Here is a shot of the inside of the vessel once repaired.

I would typically smooth off the fine warbles in the surface using a wider cutter but given the vessel's explode-y history I decided to move directly to the safer process of sanding.

I used a jig that I'd previously made for sanding the inside of vessels and started at 100 grit sandpaper.

In this photo you can notice the better-late-than-never masking tape reinforcement on the vessel.

When I got sick of sanding the inside was satisfied that the inside surface was perfect, I declared it done and pulled it off the lathe for the next stage of it's life: finishing the bottom.

The first step was to cut off the wooden mount.

The vessel bottom was still the original maple and while technically end-grain, it hardly matched the discrete-log look of the rest of the vessel - so then a bottom log was going to be needed.

I turned this short log from a larger branch of ornamental crab. It was sized to just fit into the inside walls of the bottom logs.

A large rubber-gripped chuck was used to hold the vessel top for turning and I went back to the three-wheeled steady to provide support. Here the bottom is ready for some work.

Off-camera: The excess maple was removed from the bottom, a hole formed and the bottom log glued in.

The bottom log had been made extra-long so the live center could stick into it and I would have space to flatten the bottom.

So then it was a matter of removing the extra wood on the bottom which is starting to happen in this shot.

The bottom was given a narrow outside foot and here the bottom flattening is being completed.

When done, this still leaves the conical center "stem". Off the lathe, that was cut off with a hand saw and the residual stump sanded smooth to complete the bottom.

There! Lathe work done and the danger of it flying apart again significantly reduced. Now I just have to avoid dropping or crushing it.

I implemented my usual hold-the-vessel-for-carving setup which consists of pinching the bottom using a long clamp and a dowel. This avoids any compressive forces on the vessel body. A collar that snugly fits over the dowel is sized to hold the inside of the neck to keep the vessel stable against sideways forces.

Like that.

Masking tape (green in this case) was used to help achieve a snug fit of the dowel and collar.

OK - so then all of the original maple needed to come out. That consisted of removing it from each of the 42 areas framed by logs.

The first step for each area was to drill some starter holes as shown here.

The miniature jig saw was used to cut between the holes and then the resulting oddly-shaped piece was pulled out.

That left thin sections on the edges of the logs to be removed.

I mostly used a small straight chisel to cut or pry off the remaining maple.

A small knife was handy for the corners.

At this stage I only worried only about the maple but there was usually a layer of hardened glue left behind that would need to be removed more carefully later.

The maple at the very bottom was cleared away as well.

...and the top holes were blocked by the holder so they needed to be done out of the vise.

Eventually all the holes were cleared out and that left a well-ventilated vessel and a small pile of oddly-shaped cutouts.

While the vessel was at this point free of the original maple, there was still a layer of dried glue on the edges of the logs, so obviously that was going to need some cleaning up.

Removing the glue was a hunch-over-with-magnifying-glasses kind of process.

The little strip of green tape on the vessel helped me keep track of which row I was working on.

There were the tools of choice for glue removal - mostly what I had used for the maple removal as well.

To keep them sharp, they were touched up with the honing belt every 10 or 20 minutes of work.

I went hole by hole and tried to slice off only the glue layer, although the softness of some of the logs caused more material to come off them than was strictly necessary. After the slicing, the sanding tools came out and the edges were cleaned up with 220 grit and some custom-made sanding jigs.

Once all the holes were cleaned up, only a few details were left.

One was a circle for my initials. The bottom log is pretty dark so for better contrast I embedded a lighter log, sanded it flush and used a felt pen on that.

And of course no project is complete without a final round of hand-sanding.

I did a bit of interior sanding to ease any sharp edges and then re-sanded the outside to 320 grit.

Oh, and Riders won 39-32 over Argos that evening with a last-minute kick return for a touchdown.

That was it for the woodworking.

I had originally planned to use Danish oil for the finish but since I had none on hand, I tried out some alternate finishes while waiting for myself to get off my butt and go and buy some. That eventually happened but based on the test results, I ultimately stuck with the Danish oil.

From my past experience in making hole-filled vessels, I reused a previously-successful technique of dipping the vessel for complete coverage. This shot shows a Zip-Lock bag with a nice pool of Danish oil into which the vessel is dipped a few times before being wiped off.

The Danish oil needs to be wiped off after it soaks in for a half-hour or so. That's easy enough to do to the surface but it took some poking to get to the sides of the logs.

As usual, the wood is significantly darker after receiving the finish. This photo was taken just after the first coat was wiped off.

After three coats of oil, I declared it done.

You can see some small reddish logs in the neck. These are Sue's favorites and I believe they are from Juniper branches.

The bottom is a single larger log (plus a smaller embedded one for the initials). This is probably Ornamental Crab.

Photographic proof of actual hollowness.