Carving Hashemi Flowers 18

Carving is not a speed trade, and every minute saved still matters. Speed comes from picking the largest tool a space allows, from one confident pass instead of six timid ones, and from shifting the clamp instead of working around it. It never comes from pushing harder.

Anybody who commissions carving eventually asks how long it will take, and then works out what that costs.

The question is fair and the honest answer is the one I give on camera in workshop 18: every minute I save means I get paid sooner, and carving is still not about speed. You wish it were. Carving refuses.

Where the minutes actually come from

• The biggest tool a space will take.
• One travel, not six.
• Shifting the clamp before it ever gets in the way of a stroke.
• A sharp edge.
• Knowing the order well enough that nothing gets carved twice.

Is a bigger gouge really faster?

On open ground it wins by a wide margin. A one inch number 7 in lime carries a whole curve in one sweep where a quarter inch tool leaves a dozen facets that must all be taken out again later. I start almost every area of this panel with the one inch, and the answer is set out properly in whether a bigger gouge is faster.

Then the ground stops being open. Inside a hollow that same tool cannot arrive at all, and reaching for it regardless costs more than it ever saved, usually as a bruised edge you afterwards have to carve away.

Knowing which situation you are in is most of the skill. The rest is having both tools within arm's reach so the swap costs nothing.

Why does a smaller tool sometimes go faster?

Less fight. On end grain a wide gouge meets the fibre across its whole width at once, and you feel it in your shoulder before you see it in the cut. Something narrow takes a smaller bite, meets less resistance and keeps travelling. The tool feels sharper. It is not sharper; it is asking less of itself. The tool feels sharper, which it is not; it is simply asking less of itself.

So the choice is not big or small, it is what the space and the grain direction will actually accept, reassessed about every third cut. I change tools constantly across a short stretch of work and none of it is indecision.

Which part of the work	Quicker	Why
Open ground	One inch number 7	One sweep replaces a dozen facets you would otherwise remove later
End grain, anywhere	Something narrow, five to ten millimetres	Less fibre meets the edge at once
Separations	The V tool	The chip gains an open flank
Narrow band edges	A knife	Nowhere to put a gouge handle
Working behind something finished	A back bend, with its goose neck	Shank geometry, never sharpness

Read that last column twice. Every one of those decisions is geometry, and not one of them is effort, and that is this workshop's whole argument compressed into a table.

What is a single pass, and why chase it?

One unbroken cut down the whole length of a shape, with no stop and no second bite. I say in this workshop that my goal is a single pass all the way down, and when it works the surface behind the tool is finished: no facets, no ridge line where two cuts met, nothing to blend afterwards.

The saving is not the cut itself. What you gain is everything you then avoid doing. blending the ridges a gouge leaves is a real job with real minutes in it, and a single pass simply skips it.

It fails more often than it works. When it does fail I take the ridge out and try again longer, rather than patching the join.

Does a mallet make you faster?

On waste removal, yes, and it is one of the few honest shortcuts on the bench. A mallet gives the same depth of cut every blow without your shoulder supplying it, which means an hour of roughing leaves you able to do a second hour.

On a pierced panel it stops being an option and I put mine down for most of these later workshops. Every blow travels through the whole piece and arrives at the thinnest bridge, so the argument in why a mallet gives control about control reverses once the wood turns fragile.

What survives is the very light tap. Twelve ounces, barely swung, for a separation cut in solid ground. Anything heavier belongs to the first week of a panel rather than the fourth.

Can you hurry an undercut?

Never, and this is the clearest line on the whole panel. An undercut removes the material that holds the shape up, so every pass makes the piece weaker than it was, and the last few passes are made on something that will not survive being wrong.

Which is why undercutting comes last. Everything above it has to be settled first, because going back in afterwards means working beside an edge that now has nothing behind it.

What happened when I stopped paying attention?

I broke an edge, on camera, in this workshop, while explaining something. My own words afterwards are that I should not have done that, that we have to be really careful, and that it is hard to be really careful while talking.

The damage was small and the lesson is not small at all. Attention is the actual resource here, not time, and anything that splits it costs you more than a slow tool ever will. a slip that became a detail covers what to do next, which is usually less dramatic than it feels in the moment.

Does sharpening slow you down?

Sharpening is the single largest time saver on this bench and it looks like an interruption. A sharp edge cuts under its own weight; a dull one needs force; force on openwork produces the breakages that cost hours.

Against the grain the difference stops being about speed at all. I say in this workshop that the tool absolutely must be really sharp when working that direction, and I mean must, not should. sharpening is the whole subject.

How much material should be left behind a cut?

About half an inch, on this panel, between the back face and the bottom of a deep separation. I check it constantly, because a V cut that keeps going is a V cut that arrives somewhere it was not invited.

Rushing is what makes that happen, and it happens on the pass where you stopped counting. A groove that took four passes gave you four chances to look at the remaining thickness. A groove that took one gave you none, and the difference between those two sentences is an entire panel.

Where does the grain change under you?

At the marriage line, where two directions meet inside one piece. I point at mine in workshop 18 and there is nothing to be done about it except know it is there and change the way you approach from either side of it.

Carve straight through a marriage line at speed and the tool that was slicing beautifully suddenly tears. That is not bad luck. The wood changed direction and you did not, and the only remedy is to know where your marriage lines run before you start a long pass.

Why does a knife beat a gouge at the end?

Room. Along a narrow edge there is nowhere to put a gouge handle, and a number 12 chip carving knife, a straight chisel edge on a handle, goes in at any angle you like. In this workshop the last cleaning of the day is a knife, purely because it is quicker there, and an Ashley Iles gouge sitting six inches away stayed on the bench.

Quicker matters more than it sounds, because every extra minute is another minute of steel moving beside something fragile. So speed can be a safety argument as well as a money one, and it is the only form of hurry I will defend.

And the surface after that?

No sandpaper. Never on work like this, for reasons set out in whether to sand a finished carving and in whether to sand an acanthus leaf. The traditional alternative is a plant rather than a product. what carvers used before sandpaper smoothed edges with a dried stem of Dutch rush long before anyone glued grit to paper, and the silica in its skin does the work.

I keep a piece rolled onto a paper tube on the bench, and it lifts the raised fibre without rounding a single junction. cleaning up without sandpaper has the full method.

So how long does a panel take?

Longer than anyone hopes, and the honest number is useless to you because it depends on the design, on how deep the modelling goes, on the wood, and on how often you stop to teach. This panel has taken eighteen recorded workshops so far and it is not finished.

What I can tell you with certainty is where the hours go. Not into the big acanthus shapes. They go into the last fifth, the undercutting and the cleaning and the relief details a photograph barely shows, the part no estimate ever allows for.

What order actually saves the most time?

Depth first, detail late, and undercutting last of all. Put that sequence on a card above the bench if you have to. Carve a detail early and you will be protecting it for the rest of the panel, which slows every cut anywhere near it and usually ends with the detail damaged regardless.

The sequence that works is rough the whole area to its levels, establish the main movements, subdivide, then detail, then undercut. planning the layers first sets it out properly. Skipping around inside that order is the most expensive habit I see in students, and it never looks like a mistake while it is happening.

Rework is the whole cost. Every hour lost on this panel went into carving something twice, never into carving it carefully the first time.

Should a beginner try to get faster?

Not directly. Chase accuracy and the speed arrives on its own, because almost all lost time is repair work. Chase speed and you get repair work, which is slower than carving carefully was in the first place, and far less pleasant.

The one exception is tool handling. Learning to rotate a gouge as it travels, to slice rather than push, is worth practising as a skill of its own, and the slicing cut is genuinely faster as well as cleaner.

Is there a case for going slow on purpose?

Every time the piece can break. By workshop 18 this panel is a set of thin bridges, and I am removing barely any material on some passes at all, which looks absurd on film and is the only reason the thing is still in one piece.

There is also the plain pleasure of it, and I will not pretend otherwise. A good hour at the bench with a sharp tool is not a cost to be minimised. Grinling Gibbons worked in a century with no electricity and no power tools at all, and the V and A shelves are full of the result.

What to try on your own bench

Time one small area twice. Carve it at your usual pace and note the minutes, then carve a matching area deliberately slowly, pausing completely and looking properly before every single cut.

Count the repair time in both halves of that experiment. That is the number that matters, and almost nobody measures it.

My expectation is that the slow one finishes sooner, because the fast one needs fixing. All 49 workshops of Carving Hashemi Flowers are inside the school, and this is 18.

Shall we carve?

One last thing about the money, since I raised it. Speed has never been what makes a carver a living, and hurrying is a reliable way to ruin a good piece.

The ones who make a living do it on work people want to own, which is a different problem entirely, and the answer to that one is depth and patience rather than minutes. basswood costs what it costs. Your hours cost what they cost. Charge properly, and then carve at the pace the wood allows rather than the pace the invoice would prefer.

Next workshop the berries begin, and they are small enough that speed stops being a question at all.