I’d been wanting to make some pendants that used bamboo and a very dark wood, and I came up with this design (the dark wood was teak reclaimed from an old outdoor chair I got for free on Craigslist):

I bought the bamboo from a reused building materials store here in Seattle, and as I recall, ripped it into a strip about 1/4” thick. After glueing up a large blank, I could mount it between chuck jaws and a live center, turn a long tenon on it, reverse mount it and true it up.

Once round, I used a scraper to shape a pleasing dome profile on the front surface and sand it before parting it off. The dome shape made it pretty well impossible to sand the back on the lathe, and I made enough that sanding them by hand was an unattractive option. Still, I sanded the backs of each until they were smooth, but wasn’t able to remove all the torn out grain from using the parting tool.

I also took the opportunity to go to my scrap bin to build up some random flat blanks and cut out free-form shapes from them to make one-off pendants: