Try and do this with a lathe

Having moved to New Hampshire and having a lot of time on my hands, I have gotten back into green wood carving. My dad tried to get me into it when I was younger, but I never really took to it (didn’t have the patience). I got very into knife making instead.

Though, since I moved and haven’t had the opportunity to set up a new forge yet, I turned back to carving, and now that I am a little older I quite enjoy it. It is very therapeutic to go into the woods after a storm and find some trees that have been blown down and harvest the wood I need to carve. Or if someone is having a tree cut down, sometimes I’ll get lucky and get some of that. Needless to say, it is very fulfilling to take a piece of wood from a log to a spoon, bowl, cup (traditionally called a Kuksa), or ladle. It is even cooler to see all the different woods from the majestic apple to the mighty pine go from a tree/log to a family heirloom to be treasured for generations.

The process of carving is a lengthy but enjoyable one. Everything is completely hand carved with hand tools only, not power tools of any kind are allowed near my carvings. The only exception might be the chainsaw to cut the tree up. For the bowls I start with a full log that gets split, the grab my carving axe to take the bark off and true up the split side of the log. After that its lay out and hollowing the bowl with my adze. After a couple hours of walking away on the inside of the bowl, I can move to gouges to clean the inside up, then I get to move to the outside o the bowl. That means I take up my carving axe and go to town chopping off material and splitting some off where I can to make things a little easier. Once I get things down to thickness it gets cleaned up with a drawknife and put in a paper bag to dry slow for a few weeks. After its fully dry I take it out and clean the oxidized surface off and take down any high spots I might have missed. After all of that come the part that it the most fun/satisfying. Oiling the bowl. Its always amazing to see the oil bring out the grain of the wood and make all those beautiful color pop.

These are two black cherry bowls and a hemlock bowl.

 

Images with the red lines are already sold, and I do intend on selling the rest. I will put them up for sale either later tonight or tomorrow morning.

Small white pine bowl with an overall length of 9 inches. The branch these came from was 67 years old when it fell in wind storm.





From left to right are a black birch, 3 black cherry and a sugar maple ladle.



Ambrosia birch and black birch serving spoons.



Apple and black cherry eating spoons.


Paper birch eating spoons.

 

Thank you for sharing your handiwork. Enjoy the pictures!

 

Beautiful stuff Bear6 You and my dad could probably talk carving for hours. He's almost 81 now and uses no power tools to do his. Do you do any figurine type stuff? Here’s 2 pics of things within my sight.



These are made for grandkids.

 

Those are impressive & would require a lot of patience & foresight as well.

Thank you for sharing.

Do you ever work on Osage ?

 

He and I would probably get along very well, but I myself have never tried craving figurines. Those are some absolutely beautiful examples you posted.

 

Thank you for the compliment. As for carving osage, I've never tried it. I don't exactly have good access to that up here in New England. I've carved apple bowls and a hawthorn bowl, but I imagine that osage is probably a bit harder than those. If you are asking tp test the waters of getting something made and you have access to some, I'd be more than happy to carve something for you is you send some my way, and you might not even need to pay depending on what I carve and how much wood you send.

 

That’s a very generous offer.

I was just curious as to how it worked up with hand tools.

Now you have the hamsters in my head spinning the wheel.

I do have access to Osage, I shipped some Osage out to Connecticut once in a firewood swap.

Let me think on your offer. We are still harvesting so it will likely be after Thanksgiving before I have much free time.