Site of the Week - Chip Carved Eggs

Gary's finished eggs

Well, this is not exactly a Site of the Week post since it's been several weeks since I've posted at all. It's been a couple of hot weeks and I haven't felt like doing much carving. I have been researching a lot of projects to work on and I decided to order a couple basswood eggs and see what I could make out of them. In browsing Google images for inspiration, I found a number of interesting chip-carved eggs. Although my original intent was to carve some small, egg-shaped Santas (which I still plan on doing) these chip-carved eggs are quite intriguing. This one in particular, called Chip Carving Basswood Eggs by Gary at The Carver's Edge site caught my fancy. The site itself is somewhat underwhelming, with a lot of pages "temporarily closed", but the layout techniques are well worth studying. I might try simplifying some of thee designs for my first couple tries. We'll see how that goes. maybe I'll do a video to document my experience, though it will most certainly not be a tutorial. Stay cool.

The Gnome is a Lady

Well, a customer who purchased one of my gnomes asked if there was a female gnome. I thought about that and realized I have yet to carve a female figure of any kind. So I decided to give it a whirl. I'm pretty happy with the result. Here are photos before and after a coat of paint.

3 Olde World Santas

Here are my Olde World Santas from my previous video, using the corner carving approach made from a blank cut on the band saw jig I demonstrated in my last post. This is a very interesting style of carving that is much more dramatic than most I have seen. Quite a few carvers have tried this one and I've seen a number of very different results. Anyway, here are mine before and after a paint job. enjoy!