Woodturners of all abilities will find plenty to challenge them in this guide to creating delightful and beautiful adornments. Using just a lathe and ordinary or laminated wood, you can produce a whole range of jewelry from the 12 step by-step projects that include:

• Earrings
• Rings
• Necklaces
• Bangles
• Brooches

Learn how to decorate your turned pieces with such techniques as staining, dyeing, and inking; inlaying with wire, beads, wood banding, and gemstones; and using paints, inks and powders.

Hilary Bowen was born in Dorchester, England and moved to Southampton in 1973 where she studied psychology before embarking on a career in teaching. She first started woodturning in 1991 and shortly after joined the Hampshire Woodturners Association.

Hilary has a long-standing interest in jewellery-making involving a variety of media and techniques which include complex beadwork, pewter-casting and silver-smithing. It is not surprising that her interest in jewellery-making and wood-turning would lead her to combine the two, to create earrings, bangles, brooches and other similar items.

If you are looking for a new range of projects for the lathe, Woodturning Jewellery could be the helping hand you need to learn the basics. Armed with this information, your imagination becomes the only limiting factor in this interesting form of turning.

The use of photos throughout the book, and especially in section 3, is very clear and leaves the reader with no questions on how the techniques are accomplished. I think that anyone wishing to pursue jewelry making will find Ms Bowen's book a handy guide.

Anyone who has some woodturning experience should enjoy this very well written book. The book does a very good job, step by step, on design, turning procedures and mounting the turned wood pieces to the jewelry findings with many high quality and very close-up photos of the different stages of each project.

Very well written and thought out, it includes chapters on design and also various finishing techinques. Any turner is bound to learn at least a few new tricks from this book.

For the turner who has never entertained the idea of turning jewelry, this book would stimulate the creativity and provide an overview to the many techniques. The British terminology makes for interesting reading, i.e. Colour (Color), Pillar Drill (Drill Press), Timber (Block of Wood) and makes one realize that woodturning is universal, not the terminology. $22.95 seems a bit steep but I think the last chapters especially would benefit most woodturners. I would buy it.

I found the chapter on Design very interesting because it discussed how Form and Function should complement each other and how Ms. Bowen looks at nature for inspiration. A great find for all skill levels.

The first part of the book includes a chapter on the concepts of design, covering form, function, proportion (including the golden rectangle), balance and delicacy. This will be a good help to those of us that are not natural born artists.

There are a few shortcomings to this book as it applies to new turners. Mike Darlow's 'The Fundamentals of Woodturning”, also from Fox Chapel, covers tool handling in much more depth and is recommended reading for all turners, novice to expert.