carving

“To practice any art, no matter how well or how badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.” Kurt Vonnegut

let there be spoons

I’m beginning to see the shining light of these encouraging words as I stumble forward on my new journey. The momentum has taken over and I have no choice but to follow my self like a moth to the light. I might be cut and bleed but I won’t be burnt by that to which I’m drawn.

My past year has been relatively quiet on the blogging front as other interests have successfully lessened my screen time. That is not to say that I didn’t often think about writing about what I was doing. No, it just didn’t feel right, yet. Now is that time.

handmade woodness

I have always been into wood. Wood feels good. Either I was carving walking sticks or a bit of relief carving and I knew and felt that that was something I should become more serious about, but never did. Other things occupied my life and a long while elapsed without wood. Then a couple of years ago I got into it again with an evening sculpting course. I loved that and recognized a new like, however sculpting didn’t have the hook nor I the talent I wanted to combine and my enthusiasm wore and then waned.

my first ugly duckling spoon

It was through the various Youtube channels and whatnot that I one day came across a spoon. A simple wooden spoon. Someone had made it and that someone demonstrated how to make one. I can do that I thought to myself and before I knew it I had laboriously and rather in-expertly crafted my first functional wooden. It was Magnolia wood, wasn’t pretty but it was usable.

A few months passed and I began to collect bits of wood, larger pieces, branches and log sections as I read up on and watch this or that youtube clip on how to work green wood into usable things. This new spark of curiosity caught and had begun to glow warm. And it’s heat increased my desire to learn more, try more and do this.

early efforts and means

As with first steps for any venture I soon learned what would help me along and soon fell head over heals in love with Swedish steel and touted wizards of wickedly sharp blades. Mora, Gransfors Bruk, Svante Djarv and Hans Karlsson now make up my Swedish heavy metal team. A truly special bit of hardware comes from Wales by the one and only Nic Westermann who forges superbly crafted bowl blades among other edged goodness.

basic joy & happiness kit

Nic Westermann TWCA cam and Finishing blade goodness

It took a little while to finetune my desired kit, discover my direction and learn what it meant to feel the passion but I think I’m on the right track. Wood simply makes me feel good.

warped and twisted lessons

And it is confirmed every time I spend time making chips, making a mistake, creating something beautiful, seeing a form develop, smelling the sweet near almond like smell of fresh cherry wood or the scent of apple when roughing out new spoon blanks. It is an intoxicating endeavour.

coffee sips get cold when making chips

Seems every waking moment is filled with only thoughts of wood, where to get it, what to do with it and spending time doing just that. It’s a happy thing and I’m thankful for feeling that way. Joy is in the simple things.

vivid juniper surprise

At this point of the journey I’m not as skilled as I want to be but I’m on my sloyd way. Sundry wood stock is stacked in the shop, metal edges honed to this side of fear, the good wood releases new forms that function and chips are flying.

pear spirit sipper

Wood is good. May your hands be strong and your blades wicked sharp.

Wood. It’s everywhere. It’s all around us. I’m looking at some right now. My feet are firmly planted on some too. I like it. I’ve always liked wood. That’s an ingrained thing. Wood makes me feel good.

I’ve always done things with wood, carving walking sticks or carving other things. But many years ago I put the more serious carving aside. You just know.

Perhaps you dear reader have experienced something similar with your toolbox of human talents and creative skills. You sense it and you can’t really ignore when something within you refuses to be abandoned, when the pilot light of creativity remains alight. Time goes by but the thoughts, ideas and dreams keep coming. And so it was. And so it is. And so I returned to the tools, the feel and the wood.

A dear friend was instrumental in this return and I am thankful for that. I simply joined the wood sculpting course he was in an the rest took and is taking care if itself. The feeling of relief a sure sign that I was doing the right thing. That I was doing what I should be doing. That it was good to touch the wood and to reconnect with the familiar. I began with a warmup piece, creating in a larger scale the same spiral lines I usually use on walking sticks, this time on a birch log. I still need to finish that one, it is roughed out and ready for finishing work it was a warmup piece and remains a work in progress.

When the wood feeling firmed up, I bought tools and will buy more tools

A second piece began to take shape and is leading me along an unfamiliar path which is intriguing and a bit frustrating at the same time because it is drawing me out of my comfort zone.

And then I found olive, or it found me. Actually a largish chunk of olive trunk wood. Wow. What a find. The possibilities …

top view with wet core

The piece was wet wood, freshly cut when I put it in storage for observation and to let it dry out. Over the next few weeks I peeled off the rough bark, giddy with impatience to expose the fantasy shapes, twists, hollows and bulges that are this piece of wood. Ok, so olive wood is fairly rare in these southern parts of Germany. Finding a piece like that not an everyday occurrence and no, I didn’t find it digitally although a few of my carving colleagues in the course found and bought olive wood pieces online. I am fully aware of the coolness of this score. The trunk is approx. 45cm in diameter and 65cm tall and I guess that the tree must have been close to 60 years old when it succumbed to the worms that were working their way through the centre core.

peeled with mirror

rough start

It is one thing to begin a piece. It is another to finish it. And yet another to turn a project into firewood. THAT is not an option and so I bridled my excitement and only then laid tool to the wood when the moment felt right. But once I began the project grabbed my by the neck with such intensity and urgency that the first 60 hours few by.

roughed out

smoother

chiseled and riffled

roughing out

roughing out

opening at bottom

impression

exposed and finishing

hollow

So far I’ve whacked away at the piece with carving tools letting the mouthwatering olive smelling chips fly. I’ve spent days in an intensely focused meditative state with long thin riflers in nearly cramped gloved hands creating shapes, rasping lines and following as best I can the dictating flow of the myriad emerging flowing grains and contrasting dark/light patterns that make this wood so unique. And to satisfy my most irritating perfectionist urges, countless pieces of paper parted from sand in varying grades, shimmied to and fro, back and forth, across and with the grain to render by hand a nearly baby bottom smooth finish.

riffling

shapes

lines & grain

interior view

smoothed surface

At this stage of the project I can see at least 60 hours into the future and perhaps beyond but there is not real rush and I have no deadline other than to create something interesting, something that takes the eye on a visual journey … into the olive wood and I have the finished piece also firmly in mind, yet open to changes as fluid as its grain. The openings into the core of the piece drawing the eye inward, the colorful grain triggering day dreams. All that said, a photo of the finished piece will be added as an update. Das Holz ist der Weg