52 Weeks Of Carving - Week 20 - Practice Peony Flower

I used a bit of scrap Tulip to try a different type of flower a bit more like a peony.  

Just a practice piece so only really messing around. Background roughly lowered. 

 

The piece feels a little "scratchy" and normally I would spend some time tidying it up, that said the shape is okay and I like the undercut centre ball of petals. I'll try and practice this one again this week and keep going until I get it looking better and I can carve it quite quickly. I have some more tulip coming this week and I wonder about carving a few toolboxes as the trumpet shaped flowers are getting much easier to carve! 

52 Weeks Of Carving - Week 19 - Flowers

 So this week has been quite a good one for carving and I managed to get a project completely finished (unfortunately whilst not wanting to start a big project as I was supposed to have a delivery of timber).

I won't show a picture of the completely finished piece as it's for a project I'm working on but I'm quite pleased with how these flowers came out and I enjoyed layering the leaves around it. Tulip turned out to be a great wood for this project, not too heavy and takes detail brilliantly. 

Hopefully you'll see the project fairly soon! I have something else to put on the blog this week  - an article I wrote for this months Furniture and Cabinet Maker Magazine. 

Now I'm not sure what carving to tackle next week - any ideas?

52 Weeks Of Carving - Week 18 - Flowers And Leaves

 Very late writing this one up - I slipped with posting last week but I have the perfect excuse as to why I didn't get any carving done. 

I'd left it until Sunday to spend a bit of time carving, but my younger daughter was feeling pretty ill when she woke up. In fact she was so ill, and had symptoms we recognised from last year, that we decided to take her to A&E. Luckily it was easily sorted with a course of antibiotics, but by the time we got back the last thing I wanted to do was go into the workshop after spending most of the day in a windowless room. 

A fair excuse I think.

So I've done a bit of practice carving for a piece I'm planning on making next to make up for any carving missed. 

I wanted to do some more ornamental relief carving, but wanted to do something that wasn't necessary a formal design, but a bit more free flowing.   

So I decided on carving out some simple leaves and flowers, making it up as I went along. Flowers in place first then adding the leaves in. 

It's not finished yet, I need to lower the background more and add in some branches, but I might leave it there and start on the proper piece now. I also need to make sure that I give the leaves a bit more flow and although I'll probably leave it heavily tooled I'd like the flowers to come out a bit smoother. 

52 Weeks Of Carving - Week 17 - Carving Mallet & Celtic Weave

This week I did try to start to carve an Aztec style face in some poplar and struggled with my carpenters mallet a bit. I decided it was time to make a smaller, turned, carvers mallet.

I have some branches of pear and know this is a good wood for mallets so set about with the froe making it a close enough size to mount on the lathe. As the wood is green it turned easy. 

As I haven't done much on the lathe lately I snatched the wood when using the skew chisel and fetched it off the centres before I'd had chance to finish it. 

In all honesty what I'm going to do is use it for a bit as it is, turn another one tomorrow (I have plenty of this wood) and then season that one properly. This one can be used for a while then discarded when the other is ready. I'm annoyed at myself for such a simple mistake! 

I decided to try out the mallet with a simple and quick Celtic Weave. 

 I printed off an outline and stuck it to the off cut of tulip I've been using to practice on. This piece isn't my tidiest work, but took me 12 minutes to do, so ideal as a practice piece and something I might try to do a few times to get faster at and to try to carve cleaner. It would be ideal to decorate some of my seed boxes I make to sell, or on the side of a tool box. 

So a good craft week - good to get back on the lathe, something I need to do more, and good to practice smaller bits in between projects. 

Little Cupboard

 Build and fitted this little cupboard unit for a regular customer this week. Nice little job - I was worried as they'd sent me the measurements to save a visit - luckily it all fitted nicely.