Carving Hashemi Flowers 14

A carved ribbon is four movements, repeated. It climbs, turns over on its edge, runs back the other way underneath, and comes out again. Carve those four in order and the twist appears on its own. Students look at a ribbon and see something impossible, and it is one of the simplest shapes on the panel.

Ask a room of carvers what frightens them on an ornamental panel and somebody will say ribbons.

I understand why. A ribbon crosses over itself, disappears, reappears at a different height, and every part of it is end grain from some direction. But the shape has no secret inside it. Workshop 14 of Carving Hashemi Flowers is a whole session of ribbon, and the tool I use most is a number 7.

The four movements in order

• Climbing out from underneath, on its way up.
• Then it rolls over.
• Running back the other way, hidden behind whatever it has just crossed.
• Out into the light.
• And the same four again further along.

Why does a ribbon look harder than it is?

Your eye reads the finished thing, which has crossings and shadows and a couple of places where it vanishes behind foliage. All of that arrives at the very end. While you are carving, a single stretch the width of your palm is the entire problem, and a stretch that size is a hill with a turn on top.

Take the band a palm at a time, carve each one as its own small hill, and let the joins look after themselves. The crossings arrive as a consequence of those hills, never as a separate problem you have to solve.

Where does the twist begin?

Hollow the inside first. I dig a hollow at the point of the turn, using a number 9 gouge at 10 millimetres, and I take it deep before I shape anything on the outside. The hollow is what makes the flip believable. Shape the outside first and no wood remains to hollow with.

After the hollow comes the main movement of the whole length, then the edges, then the undercut. In that order every time, and the order is more important than the tools.

Which gouges does a ribbon actually need?

The stage	My choice	Why that shape and no other	The usual trouble
Hollowing the inside of a turn	No 9 gouge, 10 mm	Deep half round, and it gets under a curl fast	End grain all the way
Outer curve	No 7 at 10 mm	Takes the whole curve at once	Rolling off
Reaching beneath an overhang nothing else enters	Spoon gouge, No 8	Handle stays clear	Hard to aim, so it wants patience
Dividing two shapes	Short bent V at No 12	Reaches a shadow line no straight V can	A chipped corner
Facets	No 3, sixteen millimetres, nearly flat	It flattens	Removes plenty in one go
Final edges	A number 12 knife	Faster than any gouge on something narrow	Nothing, if sharp

The number 7 does perhaps half the work. Everything else is there because the number 7 could not reach.

Why do you change tools so often?

A ribbon has to be approached from every direction there is. The band goes over, so half of it faces away from you, and on any one length I will carve from the front, rotate the panel, carve from behind, then come at it from the end. Each of those positions wants a different shape of tool, and I am not being fussy when I put four gouges down in a minute.

Whether the handle says Ashley Iles, Henry Taylor, Pfeil or Dockyard counts for far less at this moment than whether the shape reaches. Several makers appear on my bench in this session and I choose between them by geometry alone.

Trying tools costs seconds. Forcing the wrong one costs the band. I have said the same thing about picking a sweep against a drawn curve, and on a ribbon it goes further, because the right sweep in the wrong geometry is still the wrong tool.

What is a short bent V tool?

A V tool with a dip in the shank so the edge sits below the line of the handle. People call it a spoon V, and the word spoon properly belongs to gouges, so I use the other name. It lets you drop the edge into a hollow while your knuckles stay above the rim.

On a ribbon it does one job better than anything: the separation line at a crossing over foliage. A straight chisel shape simply cannot get in there once the leaf is finished. Sharpening one is its own subject, and sharpening a V tool covers the straight version first.

When has the tool gone dull?

The wood tells you before your thumb does. If you feel resistance, if it feels like the fibre is being pushed rather than parted, the edge has gone, and no amount of extra pressure will fix it. A sharp gouge slices end grain with almost no force. A dull one bounces off it. Two makers are named on screen during this workshop, an Ashley Iles at a quarter inch and a Dockyard at an eighth, and neither of them forgives a tired edge.

That is the test I actually use at the bench, and it beats stopping to inspect an edge, because it costs nothing and it happens continuously. There is a whole course on sharpening in the school, but the diagnosis is this simple: resistance means stop.

On a ribbon it matters twice over. Pressure is what breaks a band that is down to a sixteenth of an inch, and a dull tool is a machine for generating pressure.

How thin does the band go?

An eighth of an inch while I am shaping, and under a sixteenth by the end in places. I say the number out loud in workshop 14 because I want it in your head as a warning and not as a target.

My gauge for it is light. Look through the thin part, and any brightness coming back means material is still there to take. That trick answers how thin a leaf can go better than any caliper, and it works on basswood particularly well because the fibre is pale and even.

Why not carve the whole ribbon from the back?

The back is easier and I deliberately save it. My vise rotates and flips, so I could go round and clear the waste behind the band far more comfortably, and in workshop 14 I say plainly that I am choosing not to yet. The wood behind is holding the band steady while I shape the front.

Take the support away early and you are carving a shape that flexes under the tool. Leave it, finish the visible face, then flip and clear. Working the back of a pierced panel has its own reasons, and this is a different one: support, not appearance.

Carving the length nobody will ever see

You still carve it, and you carve it so nobody sees the join. Where the band runs behind a leaf and comes out the far side, the two visible ends have to belong to one object, which means the hidden length between them must exist in the wood even though it will never be looked at.

I carve that connection under the leaf with the bent V and then lose it in shadow. Let the two ends drift out of line and the eye catches it at once without knowing why, so the band reads as two separate scraps. Get it right and nobody notices anything at all, which is the usual reward in this trade.

The same demand explains why I undercut the grain side harder than the face. A shadow line is what hides the join, and a shadow line is undercutting, so the two jobs are one job here.

Everything comes off and nothing goes back

Everything is subtraction and nothing comes back. A carver adds nothing except glue, so every cut is a decision that stands, and on a ribbon the cuts arrive fast because the shape is small. Overdo the hollow by a millimetre and the flip above it has nowhere to sit.

I put it less politely on camera: overdo it and you are screwed. The practical guard is to stop before the shape is right, look, and then take the last shaving, which is how a slip that became a detail gets avoided rather than repaired.

Micro wiggling, and why it works

A tiny lateral shimmy with the edge already in the wood. Rather than pushing the gouge forward, I rock it a fraction left and right and let it work its own way in, which severs the fibre without ever loading the band. It looks like almost nothing on camera and it is the difference between a clean pass and a crack.

Slicing does the same job on a longer cut. Rotation and slicing together are most of what I do in this workshop, and there is a full explanation of the slicing cut if that phrase is new.

Do you hoik the waste out?

I did, once, on camera, and I named it while doing it. Hooking the chip out with the tip is what the English call hoiking, and the trouble with hoiking is that on a fragile band it levers against the very thing you are trying to keep.

Inside a volute there is sometimes no alternative, and then you hoik gently and accept the risk knowingly. That is not the same as doing it out of habit forty times an hour.

Should a ribbon flip, or just curl?

Flip, if the panel is going on a wall. A curl that merely rolls over reads flat from six feet away, where a band that genuinely turns onto its edge and passes underneath itself throws a hard shadow, and in high relief that shadow is what carries across a room.

Which is why I take the extra hour. The same argument sits behind carving shadow into relief and behind every acanthus that gets undercut rather than rounded off.

What if you carve a section and dislike it?

Leave it and go somewhere else. I carved a volute in this workshop, looked at it, said I was not sure I liked it, said it again a minute later, and then left it alone and moved to the ribbon. It was still bothering me when the camera stopped.

Nothing about that is failure. A shape you dislike at four in the afternoon often reads correctly the next morning, and if it still does not, you will have a clearer idea of what to do than you have while you are annoyed with it. moving around a design is the general version of this.

My own words on the recording are that something bugs me and I cannot name it. Leaving a fault named beats fixing it wrong.

Does the glued up height matter for a ribbon?

The height is the whole reason a band can twist at all. This panel is built from a blank glued up for height, and near the end of the session I say so on camera: the glued on piece is high, and that height is what gives me the movement. A leaf can live in shallow stock. A band that passes under itself cannot.

Go and look at ribbon work in the V and A furniture collection, at the frames in the Getty rooms, or at Grinling Gibbons drops with ribbon passing behind a flower. The depth is what makes them read, and the depth came from the blank.

What to try on your own bench

Draw a band across a scrap of lime about 40 mm wide, and put one crossing in it where the ribbon passes over itself. Carve the hollow first. Then the shape, then the edges, then the undercut, in that order and no other.

An hour will do it. The confidence that comes out of one honest twist carries into every ribbon you ever carve after it, which is a strange return on a scrap of wood and a single afternoon. All 49 workshops of Carving Hashemi Flowers are inside the school, with the ribbons beginning here.

Shall we carve?

One thing I noticed rewatching this session. Near the end I clean the facets with a knife rather than a gouge, and the reason I give on camera is simply that the knife is quicker here.

Quicker matters more than it sounds on a band this narrow, because every extra minute is another minute of steel moving beside something that can break. Speed becomes a safety argument, not a lazy one.

Next workshop the panel comes out of the vise entirely, because by then it is too fragile to hold the way I have been holding it.