Carving Hashemi Flowers 32

Its corner. Steel that is wide at the cutting end and narrow where it meets the handle leaves both corners off the wood. So I can put one corner precisely where the work needs it. Nothing else along the edge touches a thing.

Ever tried to reach into the angle where two petals meet and found the far side of your gouge biting wood you wanted to keep? Did you end up levering the handle sideways to get the cut out? An ordinary straight blade cuts along its whole width whether you asked for that or not. This one does not have to.

Lesson 32 of the Hashemi flowers panel finishes the first ring on the remaining flowers, straight after the leaf I added at the bench in lesson 31. Small tools, almost no pressure, and a lot of attention on edges that most of nobody will ever look at closely.

What the shape of the blade buys you

• Corner by corner, so a cut lands in a junction without the far side of the edge damaging the shape beside it.
• Sight of the edge as it works.
• Less weight behind the same width, so the tool answers to a lighter push and takes a thinner shaving than a heavy straight blade will.
• Access with a straight tool where a bent one used to be needed.
• Nothing that a beginner has to buy first.

What a fishtail gouge is for

Tight junctions, mostly, and any cut that has to stop short. Taper behind the edge is so sharp that the shoulders never reach the wood, which is why the tool can go right into the angle beside a petal and leave its neighbour untouched.

Mine here is a number 4 at 10 mm, three eighths of an inch, and it did more work on these flowers than anything except the 5. Smoothing, blending, corner cuts, and the odd bit of undercutting on a side too delicate for anything wider. It also lets me see the edge while it cuts, which a fat blade never does.

The name describes it well enough that nobody needs a diagram. Hold one up and the blade really does look like a fish tail, wide and thin at the business end, narrow and stout where the tang goes into the handle. Ashley Iles and Henry Taylor both make them across the sweeps.

Why does the corner matter so much?

Carved flowers are nearly all junctions. Every place where two petals run together is a corner needing a cut that begins and ends precisely, and a tool whose full width bites will always take a shaving out of the shape alongside. Working off a single corner is the difference between a crisp junction and a smudged one.

Watch what my hand does rather than what the tool is. The corner goes down first, travels the length of the junction, and lifts before the shoulder can reach the far shape, and the whole movement is small. Nothing about it needs strength.

An ordinary gouge of the same number and width does most of this job, so nobody should feel locked out. You tip the handle further over and accept that the far corner sits closer to the wood than you would like. Plenty of carvers never buy a fishtail, and they are not missing much until the junctions get small.

Where it stops being optional is scale. On a flower this size the junctions are a few millimetres across, and a gouge that cuts along its whole width has nowhere to put the parts of the edge you did not want cutting. Bigger work forgives a straight blade. Small work does not.

Sharpening one of these is no harder than sharpening any gouge, though the corners want watching. Round them over by accident and the tool loses the very thing you bought it for, so I keep the stone flat against the bevel and stop the moment the burr lifts. That habit came out of the rougher stages, where a blunt edge costs you a whole petal instead of just a poor surface.

Do you need spoon or bent gouges for this?

Hardly at this stage, and I mention it in the video while holding nothing but straight tools. Everything on these first rings came off with unbent blades, because the hollows are shallow enough that a flat shank still clears the rim. Reaching for a bent tool too early is a habit worth not forming.

Bent tools earn their keep deeper in. Once a hollow runs deep enough that the shank of a straight gouge fouls the rim of the flower, a spoon is the only thing that will reach the floor, and I compared the two bends in lesson 20.

The hollows here are shallow because of how the ring was shaped. I swept it outward from the middle with one wide tool in lesson 29, which leaves a gentle bowl instead of a steep cup, and that single choice is what keeps straight tools working three lessons later.

Flipping a straight gouge upside down covers a surprising amount of ground. Hollow face toward the wood, and the same tool reaches under an edge and slices where it could not touch the normal way up, which is the trick that keeps a beginner set going far longer than expected.

Which tools did one flower actually need?

Five, counting the V tool, and no limit worth naming. There is no restriction at all on what sort of gouges go onto a project like this, which I state plainly in the video. Every junction on a flower is a slightly different shape, so the tool that fits is whichever one happens to fit.

That micro gouge is the one people ask about. Half a millimetre across, by the caption that runs on screen, and it takes a shaving barely visible against the bench top. Nothing else in the rack reaches into a deep corner to lift the waste that opens a shadow.

Is the size stamped on a gouge accurate?

Close, and not exact. One of the tools I used here is stamped a quarter inch and measures a shade under, which I mention on camera because it matters when you are choosing between two sweeps by eye and the numbers disagree with what you are seeing.

Stamped numbers were never precision instruments. They come from patterns that go back a century and more, different makers round differently, and a tool ground and honed for years loses width at the corners anyway. Trust the tool on the wood, not the mark on the blade.

Sweep numbers are the same story. A 5 from one maker is a slightly different curve from a 5 made elsewhere, which sounds like a problem and is not, because you lay the tool on the surface and look at the gap underneath rather than doing arithmetic.

None of this troubled the old shops, as far as I can tell. Tools were ground and re-ground by hand for years, so I doubt anybody measured an edge, and the Grinling Gibbons foliage in the sculpture rooms at the V and A is the proof that it never mattered.

How much pressure should you use?

Almost none, and I mean that literally. In the video I say there is practically no pressure in these cuts, that I do not create any, and that the result comes down to controlling the tool rather than driving it. A sharp edge with a light hand goes exactly where you point it.

Pressure is what pushes a cut past the line. The moment you lean on a gouge it stops being steerable, it follows the grain instead of following you, and on a petal an eighth of an inch thick that means a broken petal rather than a poor cut.

Sharpness is what buys the light hand. A dull tool needs force and a forced tool needs luck, so the strop comes out long before the edge feels blunt. Nobody is born with that discipline, and most of us learn it by ruining something.

Does it have to be a gouge at all?

A small V tool does the same job. Partway through I say so, because the operation being done with a tiny gouge, clearing waste out from under a rim to open a shadow, works just as well with a V tool of similar width. Most beginners already own one.

What you cannot substitute is the size. A broad tool of any shape simply will not fit a narrow corner, and no amount of skill gets round that, which is the one honest argument for owning something very small. The V tool angle matters more than its profile here.

Knives belong in the same conversation. A carving knife reaches deep excavations no gouge handle will clear, and between a knife, a fishtail and one micro tool there is very little on a flower you cannot reach. Bent tools come later, if at all.

Petal thickness sets the ceiling on all of it. One edge on this panel measured a sixteenth of an inch a few lessons ago, about 1.5 mm, and every tool choice from here on is really a question about how much wood sits behind the cut rather than about the tool itself. The petal count and the widths that came with it were both settled back in lesson 30.

Why finish an edge nobody will see?

People look at panels from the side. That is the plain reason, and it took me years to take it seriously. A carving hangs on a wall and gets approached at an angle, so the outline of a flower is read edge on far more often than face on, and a ragged one shows first.

I undercut as far as I can reach on flowers for that alone. Not for the front view, which barely changes, but for the line the edge makes against the shadow behind it, and a sharp clean edge there is worth more than an hour of work on the surface facing forward.

Some of the inside stays rough on purpose. Another layer gets glued in over it later, so I do not chase the parts that will be buried, and I said out loud that one cut went deeper than I meant. It stays. Relief work is full of such places.

What are micro movements?

Tiny waves cut along an edge. I hit the outline with the corner of a 5 in several places to break the line up, called them microwaves on camera and then corrected myself to micro movements, and either word describes the same thing: an edge that is never straight for long.

Scale is what makes them work. A wave big enough to notice on its own looks like a mistake, while a run of them too small to count reads as texture, and the difference between the two is roughly a millimetre. Old carving is covered in them.

An acanthus leaf carries the same treatment along every lobe, and so does a petal, which is why the habit transfers. Once your hand knows the movement you stop thinking about it, and the edges of everything you carve start looking alive rather than sawn.

Where this leaves the panel

First ring finished on every flower, ridges left standing, nothing sanded. The next lesson starts the same work on the flowers that have not been touched yet, which is lesson 33, and the tool I reach for there turns out not to be the one I expected.

I like the ridges. Every facet throws its own small shadow and the flower shifts as you walk past it, which a smooth surface simply cannot do, and that opinion is the reason I gave up sandpaper on work like this years ago. You are free to disagree with me.

Restraint is the last skill. Do not overdo it, I said, twice, and the version of this flower that got three more hours of refining would be worse rather than better. Knowing that is worth more than any tool in the rack, and it is the real subject of lesson 24.

All 49 lessons of this panel sit behind tuition at the school, carved in basswood, the lime that every panel course here uses.

Shall we carve?