How to make a wooden cat shaped yarn bowl, on the lathe

I came across this idea on line and I thought it would be a cool woodturning project. 

So this is my version of it out of a piece of lime tree.

First of all I had to glue three square pieces of wood in order to get the thickness I needed. 

To do that I first used a hand plane to flatten all the pieces. I clamped each piece on my bench, used chalk to mark the area and then with thick passes perpendicular to the grain I flattened the piece. To smooth the surface I replaned it with the grain and less heavy adjustment on the plane iron. At the end I used the side of the plane to check that everything was flat enough.

I glued the three pieces together with wood glue and clamps.

I then found the center of my block and drew a circle inside the square edges.

I used a hand saw to cut the corners of my block, in order to save some time on the lathe.

I mounted the piece on the lathe using a face plate and used a round scraper to turn it true. I then moved to a bowl gouge and shaped the exterior of my bowl. To smooth things out, I used a sharp straight chisel to do a smoothing pass.

After flattening the bottom of my bowl with a flat chisel, I used the skew and a flat chisel to create tenon in order for the bowl to fit my chuck.

I then mounted the bowl on my chuck, and used a forstner bit on my tailstock to remove as much material as I could and establish roughly the depth of my bowl.

I started hollowing with the bowl gouge and then moved to the spindle gouge. When I was getting close to the sides, I used the skew chisel to create relief steps and then used the spindle gouge to smooth things out. 

I used my depth gage to see where my depth was and realized that I could go a bit further. So I used again a forstner bit to reestablish the depth of my bowl. 

I then finished hollowing and roughly sanded my bowl with 100grit.

I used a pencil to draw the cat shape. I then used the fret saw to cut my shape. I also drilled a few relief holes on the back where there was the spiral shape.  

I used my rotary tool with the drum sanding bit to rough sand the lips of my bowl. I then hand sanded the whole thing. For difficult areas, I cut the sandpaper to small stripes and used scrap pieces of wood as sanding blocks.

I drilled the eye holes with my drill and finished the pieces with 5-8 coats of clear glossy spray lacquer while sanding between coats. 

The bowl is ready and I think it came out really nice. 

It will be a gift for my friend Oops Loops who creates beautiful things with yarn.