In this article I’ll show some of my chip carved ornaments as well as some of the Santa ornaments I’ve carved over the years.
I’ll explain some of the sourcing for the designs, what materials I bought or prepared myself, and how I finished them.
With any luck, I’ll include embedded photos of the various ones I’ve done. As you will see, I’ve done a range of patterns incorporating chip carving features.
My earliest ornament designs were taken from a book, The Best of Woodcarving Illustrated, that showed a couple of snowflake patterns among other chip carving projects. Inspired by this, I came up some of my own. This is a very geometric design with radially symmetrical sections of the snowflake pattern. It’s straightforward in its layout, but it demands following the design very closely.
I repeated this idea with slight variations over a few years. I don’t know how my family felt, but I’d grown tired of the design and it’s repetition. I switched to Santa ornaments for a couple of years. It was a lot of work making 12 of these to give away. They were much more visually appealing than the snowflakes. Here are a couple of basswood eggs carved into Santa ornaments.
I found a carver, Mark Gargac, who had an interesting looking elf/Santa head that also used a simple cut blank as the starting point. I liked both the idea of the carving, the interesting, pierced beard of the ornament and the simplicity and price of the blank. Remember, I needed a dozen of whatever I was going to make for everyone. Here’s one of my Gargac-inspired Santa ornaments.
I also took a class at the John C. Campbell Folk school during this time. It was taught by Wayne Shinlever, a talented caricature and Santa carver, as well as a very good instructor.
It takes much more time to carve, stain and paint a Santa ornament that it does to carve a chip carved ornament. as a result of this workload, and the desire not to repeat one or two designs too many times, I returned to chip carved patterns. I was determined to change the designs enough to make them visually interesting.
I’ll share some of my other ornaments from over the years. Some are chip carved, some are caricature Santa heads, others are holiday related items. Some aren’t even carved ornaments.