I started chip carving over 10 years ago. I had seen that type of carving in some of the carving magazines I read – Woodcarving Illustrated, Carving Magazine and Wood Carving, a British magazine).
I had done some caricature and other carving over the past 20 years or so. I enjoyed the caricature, especially of Santa figures or heads.
I was the last person who I expected to take up chip carving. I don’t consider myself to be very good at details. I can see some details some of the time but miss lots of them too. So one year I was looking at the course catalog for a wonderful place we’ve frequently gone to.
The John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, NC is a great place to study various folk crafts and skills. I had already taken several classes in character carving, hand hewn bowl carving and spoon carving. 2020 has been a rough year for the school. I hope they weather the lockdown and come back in 2021.
This one year we didn’t have a lot of free time during parts of the Summer, so I couldn’t take a carving class. Instead, I took a beginning chip carving class with Wayne Barton as the instructor. I was amazed at how easy it was to learn (for me!). I was also amazed at how much I liked this form of carving. I thoroughly enjoyed the class time and took home some blank boards and small projects to work on. I continued at home and found other patterns and books on the topic.
Six months later I signed up for the advanced class. Wayne had told me I could do the projects they worked on, so I blithely added my name to the class. I expected to be working on a fairly nice and simple lamp base Wayne had developed for his previous class. It didn’t look too intimidating…
On the first day of the advanced class Wayne handed out the pattern template parts for a lazy Susan. The blank for this was almost 20 inches in diameter with a border design and a center design! I went up to him at the first break and said something like, “are you sure I can do this?” He told me to just take it a section at a time and follow his directions.
At the end of the week I had a beautiful looking lazy Susan all carved and stained. I was as surprised as anyone that I’d been able to finish it so quickly (35 – 40 hours quick?) and have it turn out so good.
That’s what got me hooked on the craft. It was fun to do. I would lose myself in the carving stage of things. It took several different tasks from design and layout, to transfer, to carving, to finishing, so I was rarely bored by a long repetitive task where my detail problem would rear it’s ugly head. I’ve continued to chip carve ever since.
Some of the projects I’ve worked on have been quite different than a typical chip carved piece. I’ve found several ideas that have made interesting pieces. I’ll post pictures of the projects as I add articles to this site.