I made a bamboo ring from a bamboo plywood sample not long ago, and was pleased enough with the results to want to try a few other approaches to the material. So I cut some blanks to experiment with.
The bamboo is from bamboohardwoods.com, and we have cabinets made of their sheet bamboo plywood. Strong, attractive, sustainable stuff.
Immediately after cutting these blanks I remembered that boring out the central holes is challenging enough without cutting away all of the clamping surface of the workpieces. Oops. I used a large crescent wrench and some battens to hold the blanks during boring, but still had trouble keeping them quite centred.
The 7/8" blanks are bored at 5/8", and the 1" blanks at 3/4". The big ones will be mens' thumb rings, but the smaller ones can be reamed out to typical ring sizes. Wikipedia has a good ring size chart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_size.
I happened to have a chunk of 5/8" dowel lying around, so I wrapped it in coarse sandpaper, stuck a blank on it, mounted it between centres, and trying turning the blank.
The cross-laminated bamboo turned poorly, with lots of tearout, so I finished with a scraper to clean it up before lightly sanding. The result is attractive, if a bit muted:
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