Wednesday, May 09, 2012

Making Things 2: Wood is Good!

For ages and ages, I've had a bit of a yen to try woodcarving.

I remember looking at books of whittling and carving projects as early as high school. These days, I look at Bob Easton's blog and find myself thinking "Jeeze, I want to try that!" I said so one time in a comment on his blog - I think it was around the holidays one year and he'd posted these photos of these charming little caricature ornaments he'd made for friends, and I just had to say "Oh, I wish I could do that!"

 He was actually very encouraging - I think this was shortly after I'd done my first claymations, and he'd seen my characters and said something like I clearly had a good sense of working in three dimensions and that I should give it a try sometime.

 Well, I didn't and I didn't and then I didn't some more.

Woodcarving always appealed to me, but it also seemed a little intimidating and it wasn't particularly something I just wanted to launch into unsupervised. I play with clay on my own, but with clay, all you need is clay, not special tools, and more to the point, slipping up with clay doesn't generally involve pain, blood, or (god forbid) an unplanned trip to the emergency room!

 But Chris Raab from Tuktu Paddles comes and does paddlemaking workshops at Sebago from time to time, and on Sunday the 6th, there was finally a workshop on a day when I didn't have any conflicts - so I have finally gotten to try woodcarving, and I really enjoyed it, and although I can't say for sure that it's actually any good until I've actually used it, the paddle I carved under Chris's direction certainly LOOKS like a very nice hand-carved paddle!

 Click here if you'd like to see my Flickr gallery of the day!

4 comments:

Joe said...

Very cool!

bonnie said...

Thanks, Joe. I was starting to wonder if my comments were broken!

O Docker said...

I was going to say you did pretty well for girls, but thought better of it.

bonnie said...

BA HA HA HA HAAAAA!

Thank you for finishing my day with the best laugh I've had all day. Awesome. Thanks!