Carving Hashemi Flowers 27

Carve a bowl shaped hollow into the layer below, drill through its middle, and set the separately carved flower on a dowel or a screw hidden inside that hollow. Nobody standing in front of the finished panel sees a joint, because the fixing sits under the part that gets carved last.

Ever looked at a high relief panel where flowers stand two inches proud of the ground and wondered what holds them there? Did you assume a single enormous block? Almost nobody carves it that way, and the reason is arithmetic rather than skill.

Workshop 27 of Carving Hashemi Flowers is where the second of three layers begins, and where I lay out the three ways this has been done and pick one.

What holds a raised flower on a panel

• A hollow socket carved into the piece below.
• A peg of wood, or a screw, running up through the middle of that hollow into the flower above.
• Glue on a hollowed back.
• A separately carved centre, set in last of all, which buries the fixing for good and leaves nothing to find.
• Nothing visible.

What are the three ways to build a second layer?

Three of them exist as far as I know: solid, applied, or socketed. The high relief work I have studied in old houses uses one of those three. Choosing between them happens before you buy timber, because each one needs a different thickness on the bench.

Approach	What you actually do	Cost
One solid block	buy stock four inches thick, sixteen quarter, and carve every layer out of that single piece before fixing it down	timber
Applied	carve every flower and leaf on its own, then glue each one down	a visible joint wherever two pieces meet
Socketed	hollow a bowl, drill it, dowel the flower in and cap it with a separate centre	planning

Applied work is genuinely beautiful and has a long history. Carving one flower on its own, complete, and then placing it on the ground is how a great deal of eighteenth and nineteenth century ornament in the great houses was made, and there is nothing second rate about the method.

Why not carve the whole thing from one block?

Cost, mostly, and then waste. A three layer design like this one would need stock four inches thick to hold the tallest flower, roughly 100 mm, and every square inch of that block which is not a flower becomes chips on the floor. You pay for solid timber and carve most of it away.

Weight is the other problem nobody mentions until the panel goes up. Four inches of solid basswood across a large area is a heavy thing to hang, and a layered panel with hollow backs weighs a fraction of it while looking identical from the front.

What exactly is a socket?

A bowl carved into the surface where a flower will sit. Every flower has layers of its own, with the first ring of petals falling backwards and downwards before the rest turn up, so the middle of a flower is naturally a hollow, and that hollow is exactly where a fixing can hide.

So I dig the bowl, drill through the bottom of it, and run a peg up into the flower from beneath. The centre of the flower then gets carved from its own small piece and set down over the whole arrangement, which leaves a panel that reads as one solid carving.

Direction matters as much as position. Before any hollowing I mark on the blank which way each flower faces and where its centre lands, because a flower turned wrongly ruins a composition in a way no amount of fine carving repairs. That decision sits with design, not with technique, and it is made on paper long before anybody picks up a gouge.

How many layers does a design like this need?

Three, on this panel, and the number comes from the drawing rather than from ambition. Layer one is the pierced lattice and its acanthus, already finished. Layer two is the flowers and foliage that stand on top of it. Layer three goes on after that, and each one is a separate board of a thickness decided by the tallest thing standing on it.

Both drawings exist as downloads for students, which removes the guesswork about scale that ruins so many reproductions. Copying a carving from a photograph means inventing every dimension you cannot see, and the parts you invent are exactly the parts that make it look wrong. Work from a drawing whenever one exists, and from the design course when it does not.

Did old carvers really use screws?

They did, and it surprises people every time. Grinling Gibbons, the greatest of the great carvers, used screws in his work and had no difficulty with the idea at all. Stand in front of his foliage in the V and A and ask yourself how those flowers are held on.

A dowel of oak or beech is older and quieter, and it is what the eighteenth and nineteenth century shops mostly reached for. Either works. The only rule is that the fixing must end up under something that gets carved afterwards, so that nobody meets it.

Purity about this costs beginners a great deal of time. A joint hidden under a flower centre is not cheating; it is how the trade has always built anything that stands proud of its ground, and refusing to do it means carving a four inch block for no gain anybody can see.

How does a flower get built in layers of its own?

Petals do not all face the same way, which is the thing that makes a carved flower look alive. The outer ring usually falls backwards and downwards, away from you, and the rings inside it turn progressively upward until the very centre stands proud. Understanding that before you carve tells you where the wood has to be thick.

It also explains why the socket idea works at all. Because the middle of a flower is naturally the deepest point of the form, a hole drilled there is already hidden by the shape the design wanted anyway. Nothing is being bodged to accommodate a fixing. The fixing is being put where the flower was going to be hollow regardless.

One more reason the method earns its place: repair. A flower fixed on a dowel can be taken off and recarved if it is damaged in fifty years, and a flower carved out of the solid cannot be replaced without recarving the panel around it. Part of why so much historic carved ornament is still standing. Build it so the next person can fix it.

Weight and movement matter too. Wood keeps moving with the seasons for as long as it exists, and a panel built from several thinner boards moves less violently than one enormous slab, since each piece is free to breathe slightly against the next. Lime is calm about this, which is one more reason the panel courses all use it.

What stock does a second layer need?

Eight quarter, which is a shade under two inches once it comes off the planer. Mine finished at one inch and fifteen sixteenths, and the piece is 13 inches tall by 7.25 wide, which in metric is about 330 mm by 184 mm. Those numbers come from the drawing rather than from the timber merchant.

Both layers of the pattern exist as downloadable drawings for the course, so nobody has to scale anything off a video. The third layer comes later. Three layers altogether is what this design asks for, and the tallest flower decides the thickness of each one.

Fitting is also how you find out how much flower you actually have. Once the back is hollowed and the piece lies down properly, I can see exactly how much material is left above the first layer, and that tells me which flower can afford to be the tall one and which will sit lower. The wood decides the hierarchy as much as the drawing does.

Why work the back before the front?

Fit decides everything here. The second layer has to sit flat on the first, and the first layer is anything but flat. It is a carved surface with bands and leaves standing up all over it, so the underside of everything above has to be hollowed to clear them, and roughly half of the thickness behind each flower comes away before any shaping starts.

Nobody sees that hollow, which is precisely why people skip it. Then the panel gets looked at from the side, as every panel eventually is, and a gap between the layers shows as a shadow that should not be there. Fit first, carve afterwards.

How deep it goes surprised me on this one. Nearly an inch and a quarter of waste had to come out of the back of a single flower before the piece would lie down properly, and I checked the fit against the first layer three separate times while getting there.

How do you remove that much waste safely?

Across the grain, with a big gouge, and slowly near anything narrow. A number 8 at one inch handles most of it, a number 9 works equally well, and for really heavy removal a number 7 at three inches is not too large. Working along the grain goes faster and splits things.

That is not a theoretical warning. Partway through this session a piece let go exactly where I had predicted it might, and the only reason it did not matter is that there was still plenty of material left to work with. Predicting the break is not the same as avoiding it.

The outline itself comes off a saw before any of this. A jigsaw did mine, and a bandsaw or a scroll saw does the same job, which leaves narrow necks between shapes that are weak until the carving supports them. Those necks are where a gouge along the grain finds a split waiting.

Sawing comes before all of it. The outline of every second layer piece gets cut on a saw, and I used a jigsaw for mine, though a bandsaw or a scroll saw does the same job more tidily. There is no virtue in carving away wood a blade would have removed in twenty seconds, and every hour of my life I have spent proving otherwise was wasted.

What the saw leaves behind is the hazard. Narrow necks between shapes, the places where a stem joins a flower, come off the saw with no support at all, and they stay weak until the surrounding carving builds strength back around them. Look at the blank, find those necks, and treat every one of them as a place not to lean.

What about holding it while you dig?

Clamps and the bench, since nothing delicate exists yet at this stage. A solid blank being hollowed is the easiest holding problem in the whole course, and it is worth enjoying, because everything that follows gets steadily more awkward as the wood gets thinner.

One small confession about that bench. The dog holes in it do not go all the way through, because the top is only two inches thick and I did not want to weaken it with a grid of holes right through. Possibly I am being overprotective. A bench you have to rebuild is a week lost either way.

Want the whole build rather than the summary? All 49 workshops come with tuition at the school, and this page is where a beginner starts. The first layer of this same panel is covered in the workshop before this one.

Layering is how high relief has always been built, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. Stand close to Baroque foliage in any good collection and look for the seams between flowers. They are there. Somebody just put them where the light does not fall, which is a skill in itself and one cabinetmakers share with carvers.

A note on glue, since somebody always asks. The back of each piece is hollowed until it lands flat, which is what gives glue a real surface to work on, and the dowel is there to locate the piece and take shear rather than to hold it down. Get the fit right and the joint is stronger than the wood beside it. Get it wrong and no amount of glue in the world saves the panel, which is the same rule as every other joint in woodworking. Tools will not rescue a bad fit either.

Anyone carving alongside this course should know that this workshop is mostly heavy removal and very little delicacy, which makes it a good session to attempt early. Nothing here is thin yet. Nothing breaks if you press. Enjoy that while it lasts, because the next layer brings back every problem the first one had, in a smaller size.

Shall we carve?