About me
Hello, I am Alan Shrebtienko and I am a retired teacher turned woodturner turned penmaker. I've been turning wood most of my life as I turned my first bowl in high school shop class and I've been turning ever since. During the summer of 2016 I came down with a serious illness that left me visually impaired and unfortunately unable to teach. After leaving teaching, I began to focus my energies on my woodturning and On a Whim Woodworks was formed. My woodturning morphed into turning pens but I still like to create the occasional segmented wooden bowl. I’ve put links to a couple of articles giving a little insight to who I am. The Hyphen article is from the student newspaper where I taught physics and chemistry until 2017. The Vision Aware article is a blog post written about a piece I made called Vision Study #1, which was a really inspirational piece that won first place in the annual Insights! art competition and is now in the APH collection.
In 1991, I married my high school sweetheart and we are still happily married today. She is my hero for sure and my biggest supporter. It is definitely her kindness and her belief in me that has led me to this point.