Hollow form with finial

Wow! I dream of being able to turn this. This shape of lidded boxes and segmented turning of small boxes is why I started. Well done!

The top also looks like the “space needle” in Seattle which I can see from where I work. Any hints on how to do this? Was this all glued up as one piece before turning? Or individual parts turned, glued together, and then put on the lathe to center. ??

Do you have any pics of how you chucked up and Turned that finial?

Sorry for the delay in responding - having had time to get back online in a while. It is 4 separate turned pieces; foot, body, collar and finial. Foot is attached to body with small tenon and glue. I drilled the hole in the collar, turned a small tenon using calipers to fit the opening in the vessel, turned the top of the collar to match the angle of the vessel and the finial, undercut the bottom of the top of the collar a bit, and glued it. This one was custom made but I usually turn a bunch of collars with variation in widths (but same size holes and tenons) at once from a longer piece (nowadays usually ebony). I had ended up with a lot of small pieces after I cut the wood for some platters and bowls, including pieces with a range of color due to the sap wood, so decided to try to put them to good use. The finial is actually darker on the other side - I wanted the two-tone look to the finial and the foot. I was able to make 3 or 4 of these in different shapes and sizes with the contrasting body and finial, largely out of what was left over. In the end, while the larger pieces were nice - we still use the 16 inch shallow bowl as our fruit bowl - I liked these pieces more. Waste not want not!

@Robb Nielsen Robb, I don't have any pics but I should have mentioned that if you have access to videos in your local AAW chapter Mike Mahoney has a video about hollow forms where he makes collars, and Cindy Drozda has several DVDs that show you how to make hollow forms with finials, separate feet, etc. I'm sure you can also buy them online. I'd also recommend Pinterest where you can find pics of lots of interesting pieces. I have an album there or whatever it is called for finial pieces - many of the "finials" aren't finials in the traditional sense but just interesting things you can add to the tops of pieces. As I mentioned earlier, I once did 50 pieces with 50 finials as part of an experiment - I was originally going to do 100 but by the time I got to 50 I had worked a lot of it out and was starting to get bored. I started with some small pieces similar to what Cindy did in one of her videos, and then just kept trying different things: feet, collars (many of the original ones didn't use collars so I tried all different sorts of way to match up the finial with the body), different styles, lengths, shapes of finials; also adding texturing and coloring, etc.. I figured since they were experimental, I might as well try as many different things as possible. Occasionally I screwed up a piece that would have been ok if I had left well enough alone, but for the most the early pieces were small, made of ordinary wood and not all that great anyway. By the time I was getting to 40 or so, some of the pieces were worth keeping, or at least giving away as gifts.