Spring Daisy 4

It’s stained!

After some sanding and more cleanup with the chisels, I tackled the stain … all Minwax. I didn’t want to paint the carving, but wanted some distinct separations of the various parts, so I used 4 different stains. The ‘sky’ is straight danish oil (natural) and kinda looks like curly maple. The end grain in the leaves, petals and stem took the stain differently, but I really like the variation in the stain. It has an aging effect. I know that basswood is generally painted as it really doesn’t have very interesting grain, but I like playing around with ideas that shouldn’t work and making them look interesting.

Another angle

This is just a shot from another angle. Please excuse the flash and glare, but it’s night and I don’t have the advantage of sunlight.

A Head Shot – Pun intended!

What do you think?

Spring Daisy 3

The carving is cleaned up and the button is textured, so I’m going to start the staining process. No, I’m going to use some 220 paper on the flower first. I’m wondering about the leaves … do they need to have some veins placed on them? Are they too plain without detail? Will veins give more movement to the leaves? Or are they better as they are? This is where I really fall apart in carving. What do you think?

 

 

 

As for the button texture, I used a trick Mark Yundt taught on a forum. The small circles are made with a nail set. Does a neat job, doesn’t it? How does the blossom look to you? Do the petals flow as a group and as individual parts? Does the button look natural or is there too much detail?

Spring Daisy 2

I’ve worked more on the forms in the flower and now it’s time to get down to the fun part – cleaning up the surfaces. I really like the horizontal lines the 9 gouge leaves and I think I’ll make it part of the carving. I’ve cleared out the marks on the bottom of the carving trying to represent the ground behind the flower. I used a 5 gouge to remove the peaks and then used a 2 gouge to flatten the background more. I left the unevenness as I thought it looked more natural. A 12 was used to create the line between the “sky” and the ground. I like the looks of this side, so I think I’ll try it on the other side as well.

Okay, so I done the other side of the ground and put in the “sky” / “ground” divider. Need to work on the horizontal lines on the right side. They shouldn’t be running up following the ground line. My oops! Looks like I need to put more wave in the ground as well, make the right side look more like the left. I guess it’s back to the 9 gouge and then the 5 and then the 2. But – it’s coming along. Still worried about the button though. Looks like it was dumped into the petals kinda making a big splash and pushing petals outward. Kinda like a splash of water ….

The blossom of the flower looks good except for the petals from 11:00 to 1:00. Too many curls to the right. I didn’t copy the drawing correctly. After carving the form, I got carried away and didn’t follow the original sketch as I should have. Got in a hurry – the mistake I make most often.  I’ll see what I can do to fix that. I’ve still got a lot of wood left to work with.

Spring Daisy 1

Carol’s favorite flower is the daisy, so what better flower to carve? I went through three sketches until I got a design that I liked. I am very fortunate to have an accomplished artist for a cousin. Ed Smith was kind enough to critique my sketches and input his wealth of knowledge into them. As a result, the last sketch was fine with me and I put it on a chunk of bass wood.

I learned the following:

1. Too much ‘S’ curvature can make a form look weak.
2.  Odd number of items are generally more appealing than even number. (i.e. the leaves)
3. The space between the leaves should be proportional. “White space” is my friend.
4. Too much detail is distracting to the focal point of the sketch.

I started roughing out the flower with a 9/10 gouge, working up to a line I carved around the flower using an 11/3 (to show me my stop point.)

I thought the 9/10 left a nice pattern on the background. It makes a nice textured surface that doesn’t distract the eye from the focal point of the flower. I’m going to try to incorporate this texture into the carving, rather than make the background smooth. I may have to soften it a little with an 8/4 or so.

You can see the space I left around the flower parts. I guess I could have carved a little closer to the line, but I’m having too much fun removing wood and getting to the basic forms of the flower.

One point that both Doris and Mark make about carving is that the form should come before the details. This was a problem for me until Doris explained that the form is what you would get if you were to lay a piece of plastic over the part you are trying to carve. This is the form that you need to carve before going on to the details. Mark explains it as being able to carve a robin’s form, paint it black and then have people ask why you painted the robin black. In essence, he states that the carving should be recognizable in it’s basic form before putting in any details.

I started at the bottom of the carving and worked my way to the top. It just felt right to do it this way and besides, I got some practice in the grain structure of the wood before I took on the blossom of the flower.

1. The leaves are roughed out with their basic form, but still need some work.
2. The stalk is pretty much defined, but can be pushed more. I need to take the background down some.
3. The form of the blossom is fair, but I’m having trouble with the ‘button’ in the center of the petals. It doesn’t look right and I can’t figure out what I need to do to get it where it should be.

Well, I’ll keep on removing wood and creating more of the forms of the petals and see where that takes me on this journey.

Stay tuned for the remaining splinters!

Basket twist door handles

A friend in West Virginia, who owned a Mexican restaurant, wanted to replace the steel doors at the entrance and exit to his building. After looking at a few models, he selected fiberglass doors with a ‘wrought iron’ insert. They looked really great and he asked me to make the door handles. I suggested basket twist handles for the 4 doors and he agreed. Now I talked my way into 8 of these things!

I went to our local recycling center and bought 1/4″ steel rod and 3/4″ square rod to make the handles. I cut the 1/4″ stock to length and put 5 of them together. The 3/4″ stock was cut to length and a .174″ shoulder was turned on one end. The purpose of the shoulder was to allow alignment with the 5 bundled rods.

Rod bundle and shoulder

View of the shoulder

A friend wire welded the rods to the square stock and I formed the weld and rods square to match the square stock. I heated the square stock and put in a twist on both ends. The basket was made by heating the rods, twisting CW (viewed from the top), reheating and untwisting. The basket formed very easily without the need for downward pressure to open it up.

Basket twist with square stock

The rest of the handle was extruding the ends of the square stock to allow for mounting to the doors. Here is a view of the outside doors:

Exterior doors

Closer view

After cleaning the handles, multiple coats of rust proofing oil base paint was applied. The doors set and the handles installed. A fun project that I learned from!

Thanks for looking.

Carving chisel collection

As I have said, I learned to enjoy carving through my Grandfather. He was mainly a whittler, but he did have a set of inexpensive carving tools. They were made in Japan back in the 1950′s. He mainly carved aromatic cedar from fence posts he had sawn into slabs. Well, when I started into carving with a real interest, I purchased a few ‘palm’ type chisels from Woodcraft – from their discontinued table. I figured I wouldn’t spend a lot of money on tools if I couldn’t carve worth a hoot. Later, I found out that this was a mistake! Kinda like any tool – get the right one for the job and things go a lot easier.

I tried to carve a few items using the palm tools, but I found that my wrist and hand started cramping in just a few minutes worth of carving. I managed to finish the projects and was overjoyed with what I could do – carving wise. Now, it wasn’t great artisanship, but I liked it and that’s what matters.

I set out to learn more about carving and joined a couple of forums. I quickly learned that most carvers do the same thing over and over again. And after doing the same Santa figure or face many times, they still look the same. This isn’t a problem if you wish to carve Santas all the time, but I wanted to be able to carve anything I set my mind to, and this meant to me that I wanted to learn basics not how to carve a santa, elf, ornament or what ever. I wanted to learn what a carver does to bring a carving to life.

While on one of the forums, I stumbled onto a couple of great carvers – Doris Fiebig and Mark Yundt who were in fact teaching the basics of carving to folks on the forum. For instance, here is a link to one of those lessons. Here Mark shows the basics of flow, form and creating graceful lines in an object. As I read more of the posts from Doris and Mark on the forum, I also dug into their blog and found that the site is a wealth of knowledge.

Granted, Mark tells it like it is and has the authority to do so. He makes his living carving. I know everyone has their favorite choice of tools, but when he stated the reasons for using full length chisels instead of short or palm chisels, I was sold. The problems he stated as opposition for using them, I had experienced – except running one into my hand! You can check out his discussion on full length chisels here.

As a result of reading their blog and seeing the results of their efforts, I went to Woodcraft and purchased a set of Pfeil carving chisels. Here is my meager collection:

There are 14 chisels in the collection. I purchased 12 originally and added 2 more later. These tools are ready to use right out of the original pouch! Extremely sharp, so be careful how you handle them – and don’t ask me how I know this! My favorite tools from this collection are the following:

These are the 2/5, 2/12, 5/8 and 5/12 not in order presented. Two other tools I use are the 11/5 and the 12/4. These are used to outline shapes while roughing out the forms. I don’t use a router to hog out waste in a carving – yet. I’m still novice enough to enjoy removing it with a chisel and enjoying the time spent with the wood.

The two small tools in the pouch are from my grandfather’s collection and the only flat chisels I use. They are a left and right hand skew for reaching into tight corners to remove that last bit of wood. One of these days, I might get a full size skew, but I think I’ll make my own on the forge – just to do it because it’s fun. I might even try my hand at one of the gouges!

Thanks for looking ….

A Breakfast Tray

A breakfast tray

My wife purchased an old slab of ship lapped oak from a shop in Buckhannon, WV. It was probably a door from an attic in a house, and she wanted to make a table out of it. I didn’t want to disappoint her, but the wood wouldn’t lend it’s self to a table top – too warped and cupped. I talked her into letting me disassemble it and make a breakfast tray for her.

The wood was taken apart and sorted for usefulness. I ran the good pieces through the table saw cutting off the ship lap and ripping out the center groove. Each piece was then run across the joiner to get the back flat and straight. The next step was to plane the boards to thickness – not an easy chore as the oak was very hard. Light cuts and many passes later, the 7/8″ thick boards were 5/8″ thick and the front and back parallel. Each board was run across the joiner to establish a square edge. The next step was ripping the boards for gluing. The basic panel for the tray was glued up and set aside to dry.

Wouldn’t you know it, the panel warped – rats! I repositioned the clamps to try to bring the panel back to flat, and had a little success. I thought I could work with what I had.

Then the sides for the tray were cut along with the end pieces. After routing the handles into the end pieces, finger joints were cut into the sides and ends. Here is where the process stopped for a while as I wanted to place an inlay into the panel. But how to inlay into such hard oak? I thought that I couldn’t possibly get some leaves into that oak, so I decided to inlay a square piece of poplar with a router and clean up the corners with a hand chisel.

Okay, I thought, that will work. Poplar is easy to work and I can get some cherry, walnut and yellow heart and make a few leaves. Bear in mind that this is my first inlay. I had read up on some techniques for inlay, and the only option available to me was to carve the shapes of the leaves into the poplar. I was able to cut the leaves with a small band saw I had, trace the form on the poplar, cut the form into the poplar and use a router base on a Dremel tool to level out the inlay.

I test fit the leaves into the poplar and everything looked good, so I glued them and used bricks as weight to press the inlay while drying. After a day, I peeked at the inlay – it had worked! (Much to my surprise!) Next step – inlay the poplar. I traced the poplar onto the oak and routed out the inside, finishing with chisels. Yep, good old flat wood chisels. I didn’t have any good carving chisels at the time only some palm chisels. I learned quickly that they aren’t all that and a bag of chips! Really hurt my wrist and hand to work with them. I got real tired in a hurry.

Okay, I test fit the poplar and it looked good. I used a cabinet scraper to level out the leaves and then glued and weighted the poplar inlay into the panel. After a day, I took a peek. Not bad, looked good and once again, I used the cabinet scraper to level everything out. Pretty easy to do and no sanding dust messing up the different woods. But – it didn’t look right. Needed something else. Hmm …. yep, a walnut inlaid band would set it off.

So I went to work cutting out a track for a walnut band. I tried to miter the corners of the banding by hand and missed a little, but it still looked good. Glued and weighted the banding and waited a day. Now for the assembly … the moment of truth!

Inlay with walnut band

Believe it or not, I was able to glue the finger joints together (two ends and one side) so I could insert the panel and glue the last side into place.

Assembled tray

Well, I still wasn’t satisfied with the tray – it needed legs. I know, I didn’t think too far ahead. Oh well, I started on a way to put legs under the tray and came up with the following:

Legs collapsed

Legs extended

After a few coats of danish oil, this is the finished product:

Tray – legs folded

Tray – legs extended

Now for the bad news. The first time I got to use this tray, I made my lovely wife breakfast, took the tray up to the bedroom and set it across her lap. She was very surprised! She was really surprised when our young pup jumped up into the bed with her and knocked over her coffee – spilling it all over the new tray and the sheets! What a way to christen the tray!

Thanks for looking!