Sixth Week: The weekend

As I mentioned in another post, I signed up for a weekend woodcarving class at Lie-Nielsen Toolworks to be taught by woodcarver, Mary May.

I got to the classroom at about 8:45 Saturday morning, picked a bench up front, and waited for the class to begin.

Mary May is a very personable lady.  She seems happy to be teaching.

We began our first project, a couple of dogwood blossoms.  Because I had not expected to do woodcarving while in Maine, I didn't have my roll of woodcarving tools with me.  So, I had to borrow a set of tools.  There were several problems with that, most of which didn't become apparent until I actually started to carve.

After transferring the carving pattern to a piece of mahogany by tracing through carbon paper, the first thing we did was use a V-chisel to outline the image.  That was the first difficulty I encountered.  To my thinking, the V-chisel in the set of tools I was using was too big.  Mary lent me another one which was smaller, but it was a badly used chisel and every bit as hard to use as the first one.  But, I persevered and did the outlining.

Mary demonstrates some carving techniques

The next activity was to "lower" the background.  This was done with a curved gouge, and the result is in the photo:

My progress after the first few instructions. 

During the day we continued to work on different sections of the image.  Here's what it looked like at the end of the day:

I hope you can see that there's a lot of progress.  A lot of the details are becoming clearer.  The two leaves are pretty well done, and I've started working on the two blossoms.

We quit about 5 pm and several of us drove south to a restaurant in Damerascotta.  Tom Lie-Nielsen and his wife Karen joined us, as did Mary May, about a half-dozen of the students, and one of the Lie-Nielsen people who was assisting Mary.  

FYI, I had Fish and Chips, and drank Guinness.  I enjoyed myself.  

Today (Sunday) we continued working on the same carving.  I didn't quite finish by lunchtime which was when we switched to a new project.

The project as far as I got with it.
One petal on one of the blossoms still
needs to be carved.

After lunch we started a new project.  This one was totally different.  It was a fan.  Full of straight lines.  We did half of them so that the fan leaves were convex, and the other half as concave.  I had some trouble with the concave leaves, particularly where they merged at the center.  I could have done better with a smaller gouge to do this part.

The initial layout

My interpretation. 

All in all this was a fun activity.  I found that I was able to totally immerse myself in the carvings, to the point of tuning out all the noise in the room.  I'll have to get back to carving again when I get home.