Carving Hashemi Flowers 41

Yes on end grain, and yes on anything fragile. Moving the handle slightly left and right while the edge advances shears the fibre rather than splitting it, and the chip breaks free without pressure. I know some carvers dislike the idea. I say on camera that it helps, and then I say it again.

Ever pushed a gouge hard into end grain, then watched the wood split ahead of the edge? Did the split follow your line? It never does. It follows the fibre, and the fibre does not care what you drew.

Lesson 41 of the Hashemi flowers panel is twelve millimetres of excavation below one leaf, a twist I nearly abandoned, and a piece I undercut clean off the panel. The wiggle runs through all of it.

What this lesson is about

• A small sideways movement that some carvers flatly refuse to use.
• Tiny passes, no pressure.
• Excavation twelve millimetres deep beneath a leaf.
• A twist I said out loud that I should probably leave alone.
• One piece undercut clean off, and what happened next.

Should you wiggle a gouge as it cuts?

Certainly there, and on any shape thin enough to worry about. My words in the second part of the previous lesson are that some of you probably do not like the idea of wiggling with the tool, and then that it actually helps anyway.

Here I give the reason. Cut wood is showing its cut ends there, and I want to be sure nothing splits on me. That is the whole argument. A wiggle is not a flourish or a bad habit; it is how you get an edge through fibre that would rather break than shear.

What does wiggling actually do to the wood?

Wiggling turns one long cut into a series of short slicing ones. Push straight ahead and the full width of the blade meets the full width of the fibre at once, so pressure builds until something gives, and on end grain what gives is usually the wood ahead of the tool.

Rock the handle a few degrees each way while cutting, and the corner of the blade keeps entering fresh material at a slight angle. Each tiny arc severs a little, the chip has somewhere to go, and the force required drops to almost nothing. That is the same physics that makes a bread knife work, and the same reason a gouge drawn sideways cuts cleaner than one shoved forward.

When is wiggling the wrong move?

On a long clean surface you intend to leave as it comes off the tool. There the wiggle shows.

A blended face, a petal you want reading as one smooth turn, any cut where the tool mark itself is the finish: keep the tool straight and let the sweep do its job in one pass. It belongs where the work is removal rather than surface: undercutting, excavating, and fighting through a corner no eye will reach.

Which tools did this work?

Seven, and the one doing most of the damage measures a single millimetre.

Why take twenty small cuts instead of a few firm ones?

Pressure is the thing that breaks carvings, and it never gives a warning. I barely create any pressure at all, I say, because I understand that pressing or twisting the wrong way snaps this easily.

This trade is real and worth making. Twenty tiny passes take perhaps forty seconds longer than a handful of firm ones. Gluing a broken petal back, waiting for it to cure, and recarving the joint takes an hour and never looks quite the same. Stopping a thin carved edge from breaking is the same arithmetic written out in full.

How far under a shape can you actually get?

Twelve millimetres or so, below this leaf. The number gets said out loud on camera, with the admission that no lens is going to show it.

Cutting that far beneath a shape only a few millimetres thick sounds reckless and is not, because the depth runs horizontally into the panel rather than down through the leaf. It buys a black line that carries clear across a room, the deepest shadow available in relief carving, and the knowledge that if you went further still you could meet a cut coming from the other side.

Is there a secret to extreme excavation?

None, and I say so in those words. Depth and patience, in whatever quantity you have them, and those two make up the entire method.

People expect a tool. No tool exists. An 11 at a millimetre, a parting tool, small passes without number, and the willingness to spend twenty minutes on something no camera will ever record. Push it far enough and two cuts from opposite sides meet, which makes the shape look glued on when the whole thing is one solid board. Nobody will see that. You will know. Undercutting work nobody will ever look at is a whole lesson elsewhere on this site, and this is the extreme end of it.

Can a saw wall become part of the design?

Rounding a wall over is faster than removing it, and often better. A wall runs down one side of this leaf, and there are two ways to deal with it: attack from the back and take it away, or round it over so the leaf appears to wrap around the shape beside it.

I take the second. A wall is flat, vertical and free of charge, and a flat vertical face rounded over reads as a form turning away from you. Removing it would have cost ten minutes and given back a hole. The leftover wood between carved petals is the same habit at the roughing stage.

Does a subdivision have to be planned?

Hardly ever. Looking at a leaf in the second part I say there is a natural tendency to make a subdivision just there, and the word tendency is doing the work.

A carved shape starts telling you things once it has a form at all. Any dip in an edge wants to become a bay, and every high spot wants to become a lobe. Those suggestions come from the shape you already cut and from the grain running under it, and they are usually better than what the drawing said, because the drawing was made before the wood had an opinion. Cut the ones that ask twice. The pencil line that never survives cleaning is why the drawing stops being in charge so early.

When should you abandon a detail you planned?

When the wood has run out, and that judgement happens with a tool already in your hand. I look at a three millimetre wall in the second part, decide to put a twist in it, start, and then say maybe I should not even try, because too little is left.

Then I find one narrow enough to fit and do it anyway. Both halves were correct. The first tool was too big for the wood remaining, and the answer was a narrower tool, not a smaller ambition. Give up on a detail only after checking whether anything thinner would fit.

Why does one small detail change a whole piece?

Mostly because it is the thing nobody else bothered with. My line while cutting it is that every little bit of detail like this makes a piece look unique, and unique is doing real work in that sentence. Whether carving is really just hollows and rounds covers what the small ones are made of.

A carved flower follows rules anybody can learn, and every one of them is in a book somewhere or in the sculpture rooms at the V and A. What separates two panels carved from the same drawing is a handful of small decisions: a leaf that turns back on itself, a wall rounded instead of removed, a subdivision that follows a natural tendency in the shape rather than a mark on paper. None of them takes more than a minute. All of them are yours.

What happens when you undercut too far?

A piece comes off in your hand, which is exactly what happens to me at the end of the third part. I say plainly that I undercut too much.

There are two repairs. Take the whole shape out and redo it deeper, or find the piece and glue it back with a drop of super glue, which is what I do here. Neither is a disaster and neither is rare. What to do when a carved part breaks covers the repair properly; the lesson here is only that it happened to me on camera and the panel was fine.

Why is a tiny shape harder than a big one?

The grain does not scale down with your ambition. Working two berries here I point out that the grain runs across them, and that anyone trying it will find that area challenging.

A big shape crosses several grain directions and averages them out. A shape the size of a pea sits entirely inside one direction, so half of its circumference is pure end grain, where the tool tears rather than slices. The fix is the same as everywhere else in this lesson. Come at it from several angles, take almost nothing each time, and wiggle the tool through the worst of it rather than shoving. We like those challenges, I say, and I mean it, because the alternative is a panel with nothing small on it. Carving a small flower without breaking it runs on the same rules.

Why check the back of the panel so often?

Every undercut is removing wood you cannot see from where you stand. Constantly I have to check and double check the thickness of the material on the backside, and that sentence is not padding.

You are working from the front and thinning from behind. Those two surfaces approach each other, and no instrument tells you how close they are except an eye on the panel edge and a thumb on the shape. Lift it. Turn it over. Hold it against a window if the shop is dark enough, because thin basswood glows and the thin spots light up first. Then carry on, and do the whole thing again in five minutes. How thin a carved leaf can go is the limit all of this is creeping toward.

Does patience count as a skill?

Patience is the one this lesson actually teaches, and I did not learn it at a bench.

I spent winters at minus forty with no heat, sleeping in prison clothes and waking covered in frost. Whatever that does to a person, it makes forty seconds of extra care with a gouge feel like nothing at all. Patience is not a nice quality in a carver. Patience sits between clean excavation and a petal in two pieces. It is also the only part of this craft that costs nothing at all to learn, which makes it the cheapest skill in the workshop and the last one most people bother with.

Where this leaves the panel

One leaf wrapped round a wall that used to be sawn flat, a deep black line under another, a twist the size of a fingernail, two berries, and one repair that will never show. The grain won a couple of arguments and lost more of them.

All 49 lessons sit behind tuition at the school. The panel is basswood, the American lime every panel course here uses, carved with Ashley Iles, Pfeil and Henry Taylor tools, and the small ones here come from the Peter Benson collection. A honed edge is what makes a wiggle work at all. Read who decides how finished a commission has to be beside this one.

Shall we carve?