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Bowl Antique

June 3rd, 2010 admin 1 comment

Bowl Antique

Decorating With Painted Dough Bowls To Enhance Rustic Style

The wooden dough bowl is a true representation of items used in a typical Native American home. In the northern part of Mexico, high in the mountain regions, the Tarahumara people have primitive lifestyles and live in humble dwellings.

They support themselves by making handcrafts to sell like the wooden dough bowl. I have always loved the colorful baskets, weavings, jewelry and other hand-crafted items fashioned by this Tribe. It is fascinating that although the women make most of these hand-crafted items, the Tarahumara men enjoy working with wood and make incredible works of art using crude instruments and tools.

Like the wooden dough bowls, they also carve wooden spoons, figurines and traditional game balls to use in tribal foot races. These items made of wood have a simple, unpolished beauty, heightened by the characteristics of the wood.

You will also find it intriguing how the wood dough bowls are created. The making of the wooden bowl is started by hand chiseling a piece of pine wood taken from a fallen tree trunk. Indian log bowls are made by dividing the trunk in half and then roughly cutting it with an axe.

The wood is then chiseled into a bowl like shape with a machete or large knife, giving it that unique, rough and primitive aspect. This traditional style is the same way that antique dough bowls have been crafted throughout the Sierra Madre for centuries.

As you learn about these intriguing Native people, you will discover that the wood dough bowl is a very useful item in the Tarahumara home. It is used to hand-grind corn and wheat to make hand-made tortillas, an important part of the Tarahumara diet.

They then start by crushing the kernels into a stone bowl called a metate. The dough bowl is used to catch the flour at one end of the metate as it is ground by hand. Water is then mixed with the flour in the bowl and hand-made tortillas are made from the mixture.

Although still used by the Tarahumara Tribe for kneading dough and cooking, today dough bowls are made available to buyers for Native style decorating accessories and as Indian art for collection.

You will love using dough bowls for many things. They work wonderfully as collectibles, fruit bowls, and when used with rustic decorating items. They are also great when used for art projects when a blank canvas is needed for beautiful paintings and other Native American style art.

Dough bowls, painted with scenes of the southwest, are very unique and are a wonderful way to create western style in your interior design. A painted dough bowl creates a beautiful main feature for any primitive style room, cabin, lodge or ranch style home by adding the natural warm colors unique to southwest artwork.

You can buy log dough bowls online and in various stores that sell rustic and American Indian style home decor products. It is easy to create genuine Native style in your home, or to give your room an authentic rustic look by decorating with a Native Indian wooden dough bowl.

If you like the timeless culture and American Indian values, you will love having a piece of their beautiful artwork as part of your home decorating. To add true Native culture to your home and produce a look that is definitely unique, try adding a genuine native style wooden dough bowl to your home decor.

About the Author

Craig Chambers is the director of Mission Del Rey and offers free information online about painted dough bowls for use in home decorating. For more information visit http://www.missiondelrey.com