Woodworkers find beauty in pieces

Ray Searcy puts a wheel of cedar on the lathe and starts to turn it, his chisel scraping off shavings from the splintery edge and sending them flying toward his denim shirt and safety goggles.

The cedar's sweet perfume explodes into the little shop. Its dusky maroon color rises to the surface and this ordinary piece of timber becomes the envy of every plank of poplar and maple stacked against the wooden walls, every fleck of sawdust covering the hanging hammers and concrete floor.

They need not be jealous. Their time will come.

Wood whispers to Ray Searcy and Helen "Taffy" Sides DeCuzzi, makers of lustrous, multi-hued bowls and platters and contributors to this month's Books and Brushes at Lenoir-Rhyne University.

The subtle purples and reds and blues are muted in the boards they buy or get from friends. It takes a turn on the lathe and a careful chisel to uncover the color and the grain that makes the SnS Woodworking bowls as much art as they are tableware.

In the shop by Ray and Becky Searcy's shaded Lake Norman cottage in Sherrills Ford is an unfinished bowl with a bright, almost scarlet striped bottom of box elder. Inside, in Becky Searcy's hutch, is a finished platter of spalding, or spalded, maple with wavy blue-gray streaks painting what looks like the mountain landscape you'd see in winter driving to the house.

DeCuzzi holds the plate up to a window and points out the tiny pinholes she and Searcy left there purposely. It's a tribute to the worm that got into the wood and created the color.

She says when they're picking boards to buy and putting them together for a bowl, they look for the character God left in the wood for them to find.

"That's part of the fun in what we do, to cut in and watch the beauty come out," says Searcy.

He and DeCuzzi started working together about seven years ago to refinish furniture in their houses.

When they ran out of furniture, they made end tables and other small pieces, along with old-fashioned toys such as rolling wooden ducks and trains.

"We'd refinished all the furniture we could refinish," says DeCuzzi. "Ray said, 'OK, sis, our next project is we're going to turn bowls."

(Searcy calls her sis but the S'es in SnS Woodworking stand for Searcy and Sides, not Searcy and Sis.)
DeCuzzi took one look at a lathe and turned her partner down — until he started working on it. "I want to do that," she remembers saying when it started spitting sawdust.

With her polished French tip nails, DeCuzzi doesn't look a lot like a woodworker. But even fresh from the salon and dressed for a meeting in a crisp brown button-up and silky matching scarf, she can't stop herself from picking up a dusty 14-inch wheel of wood.

"Do you know how rare it is to get a piece of wood — solid, just one piece — this size," she asks, smiling at it like a proud mother admiring a pretty child.

Searcy says they started selling their work because they had to find somewhere to put it. Both their houses have plenty. All their friends and family members had a bowl or a plate or both.

DeCuzzi's husband, Andy, says they make about minimum wage when you consider the 10-step process and the 40-plus hours it takes to go from start to finish on a piece.

In the summer, they're in the shop four days a week. Other seasons, its two or three days.

When they aren't there, Searcy and DeCuzzi are thinking about what they'll do the next time they are.
It's like unwrapping a present from Mother Nature every time they step inside.

"We put this stuff together in here and you really don't know what you're going to find," DeCuzzi says. "We can't stop looking for it."