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Feature article
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Retired engineer turns nutty idea into art
By Fred Sauceman
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Howard Atwood doesn’t eat walnuts. Instead, he turns them into art.
The retired Lockheed-Martin engineer starts scouting out walnut trees in the North Carolina counties of Buncombe and Henderson in late summer. By the end of the fall each year, he has collected some 10,000 walnuts.
He says most people don’t know what to do with black walnuts, since they make such a mess in the yard. Some of his neighbors, who have heard about his hobby, deliver walnuts to the back door of his shop.
When Howard Atwood looks at a walnut, he doesn’t think fudge or cookies. His mother and wife punch out all the nut meat for baking. Howard, on the other hand, values the part of the nut most people throw away.
Walnuts vary in size considerably, and Howard says their size determines what the interior of the shell will look like. Some have only two small ribs across; some have two small ribs vertically and horizontally.
Those typically discarded shells are transformed into decorative bowls in the spotless workshop of Howard Atwood.
Last year we were walking through one of the shops at Asheville’s Grove Park Inn, where I spotted a walnut bowl, unaware of its creator.
“I knew you were going to go for that,” my wife said.
In addition to the Grove Park, Howard sells out of his shop in the northern Buncombe County community of Barnardsville, through the Weaverville Art Safari and at the Grove Arcade in downtown Asheville.
Although Howard has seen pine needle baskets with a slice of walnut shell in the middle, he’s never come across any bowls quite like his.
He learned the craft from Luke Griles, a retired Presbyterian minister from Burnsville who had learned it 40 years ago from a lady in Arkansas, who had learned it from a relative in Missouri.
“When Luke was in ill health, he tried to pass on the process to his children, but they felt it was too time-consuming and too delicate,” Howard says. “Luke was concerned that no one else would know how to make these bowls after his death.”
Luke Griles died in 2005. Howard remembers how he cleaned his walnuts in an old wringer washer.
Howard applies the precision of his aircraft maintenance training to the art of bowl making. He dumps the walnuts into the back of his pickup and leaves them there for four weeks. Then they go into a wire mesh wagon and the hulls are blasted off with a power washer.
The nuts soak in five-gallon buckets for a day or so and are washed again. Drying takes a couple of months, and the nuts are usually ready to be cut in February.
Howard cuts them using a three-bladed table saw and a specially designed oak block that assures even slices and uncut fingers.
“And never stand behind the saw,” Howard cautions.
The sawing yields two quarter-inch slices and two end caps.
“I haven’t yet figured out what to do with the end caps,” Howard adds.
Seventy-nine-cent metal bowls from Big Lots!, 39-cent plastic funnels, and used plastic butter containers from upstairs in the Atwood kitchen function as molds around which the walnut shells are aligned.
Walnuts are sorted by size with a sizing block. Howard’s coding system would mean nothing to anyone else, but to him, a four is “great big” and a 15 “little bitty.”
“There is a wide variety of holes to give you the lacy effect when you use 30 or 40 walnut shell slices in a bowl,” he says.
When the gluing is complete, Howard sprays the bowls with three coats of polyurethane and polishes off the rough surfaces. From fall walnut gathering to completion, it’s about a four-month process.
Most of the bowls are used for decoration. Some serve as nut bowls. Howard’s mother transforms others into candy dishes by inserting plastic containers. Larger ones become bread baskets.
“I can make walnut bowls at my own pace and make them mine,” Howard says.
Nothing is wasted. Broken walnut pieces are used as “fit-ins.” He has a category called “recycled” with remnants of bowls he or a customer has dropped. Those pieces are used as windows in birdhouses. One of Howard’s birdhouses is built completely out of walnut shells.
Howard Atwood is both painstaking craftsman and creative artist. In the four years he has been making walnut bowls, he has handled thousands of walnuts, but, like snowflakes, he says each one is unique.
For information on Howard Atwood’s black walnut bowls, call 828-626-2867; write to 125 Horseshoe Trail, Barnardsville, N.C. 28709; or e-mail hlatwood@earthlink.net.
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Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — from Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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