Alan Leland

Alan has been working with wood since 1976 when he began working for This End Up Furniture Company. After 19 years making crate style furniture, he started his own woodworking business in1996. At first Alan’s main focus was on making custom furniture and doing some woodturning for craft shows. Eventually his interest and enjoyment of woodturning took over as he began to do more architectural turning and his interest in turning for craft shows grew. Alan’s work is primarily functional in nature due to his furniture background, but with an artistic flair due to his keen eye for shape and form.

            Alan's six session plus woodturning curriculum with its companion woodturning lab manual titled “Let’s Go For A Spin,” which was developed to complement his weeklong turning classes at the John C. Campbell Folk school and elsewhere, has received high praise from his students and his fellow woodturners. His manual is full of fun and interesting projects and chock full of helpful suggestions for teaching woodturning. An early version of his manual is available online free to members of the American Association of Woodturners on their web site at www.woodturner.org. He has since rewritten many of the handouts and added more photos to aid in understanding the processes described in the handouts.

             Alan has been a member of the American Association of Woodturners since 1994. He is an active member in several of his local woodturning chapters including the Woodturners Guild of North Carolina, the Carolina Mountain Woodturners and the Chapel Hill Woodtuners. He is also an active member in the Triangle Woodworkers Association. Alan has demonstrated at many national and regional woodturning symposia. He has demonstrated and taught workshops for many woodturning clubs across the United States and Canada. He enjoys teaching classes of 1 to 3 students in his studio and often hosts workshops highlighting internationally known woodturners in his studio. His students praise his patient, skill and technique based teaching style. Alan is known for his three legged 24” tall stools with their crisp turnings and his Hollow Globe ornaments with their elegant delicate icicles. A few of Alan’s ornaments are included in Dale Nish’s latest book titled “Woodturning Ornaments.”