Carving Hashemi Flowers 48

You can, and I say so mid cut without breaking stride. Listening to this petal, it is no more than a sixteenth of an inch thick. The note under the tool told me that before my eyes had any opinion.

How does a carver know a petal has gone far enough, when the far side is buried under another petal and nobody can measure anything?

Two signals answer that in lesson 48 of the Hashemi flowers panel, and neither one involves looking. One is sound. The other is the petal itself beginning to move under a gouge that should not be moving anything.

The two things worth listening for

• Sound. A thinning wall rings.
• Movement, the second signal: slide a gouge beneath, shift it, and see whether the petal answers you.
• Both arrive at about the same thickness.
• The underside has to repeat whatever the top face is doing, or the piece gives itself away under different light.
• Pink marker survives until the last pass.
• Cuts left rough throw a shadow with a hard boundary, and blending turns that into a transition.

So can you hear it?

Easily, and it is the earliest warning you get.

Thick wood under a gouge gives a dull, buried note, because all that mass absorbs everything. Remove that mass and the same stroke starts to ring: higher and drier, and you feel it as much as hear it. Nothing mysterious is happening. You are listening to a piece of wood turning into a thin plate, which is exactly what a petal has to become. Partway through this lesson I say out loud that you can hear the thickness, and the figure I put on it is one sixteenth.

What is the second signal?

The petal moving when it should be still.

Undercutting here means laying a gouge beneath an edge and shifting it from right to left, which shifts waste without a stab cut. That works until the wood above stops being rigid. On camera I do exactly that, then stop: once I move it, the sides move too, so I cannot carry on. Already too much, is how I describe it. Whether to wiggle a gouge as it cuts covers the technique this warning belongs to.

Thin enough, in actual numbers

Around a millimetre and a half, which older carvers still call a sixteenth.

Thinner than that on a petal already undercut from below and separated on both sides, and you are carving something that breaks while it is being handled rather than while it is being cut. Thicker, and light stops coming round the edge, so the flower reads heavy. What makes the number workable is that it is the same figure a carved leaf wants, so once your hands know it on one, they know it on the other. How thin a carved leaf goes has the same measurement from the leaf side.

Two signals, and what they cost

Should the underside repeat the shape on top?

It has to, and stating that plainly is the most useful sentence in the whole lesson.

My goal, as I put it on camera, is to repeat on the inside whatever the outside shape is doing. A petal that waves along its top face and runs flat underneath is caught the moment anybody turns it over. Following the silhouette with the undercut is also what keeps thickness even, which is what stops one spot going paper thin while the next stays heavy.

Why turn a knife upside down?

To use the back of the edge as a scraper in a place no blade can enter the normal way.

You usually hold a knife one way. Flip it over, present the other edge, and you can clean the inside of a cut the point could never reach from any sensible angle. The result is usually good, and it costs nothing to try. Small tricks like that are what let you finish a surface you cannot properly see. Ashley Iles micro knives take this well, and so do Pfeil and Henry Taylor in the same sizes.

What makes a shadow too hard?

Cuts left exactly as they fell. Each ridge throws its own sharp line, and the flower ends up striped.

Blending gets described that way because the word alone means nothing, and I try on camera. Two cuts meeting at an angle leave a hard rimmed shadow between them, and one softer sweep over both of them takes the hardness out. Not every mark goes: some of them catch light and earn their place, which is the whole reason nothing here is sanded. Concaves and convexes covers what those surfaces are doing.

Do you need an opening between every pair of petals?

Nowhere near. Two of them on this flower sit close enough that no big space cut goes in at all.

Drilled openings are for the joins that genuinely part company. Where two petals lie almost on top of one another, an opening would invent a gap the flower never had. I say in the lesson that we did not make openings everywhere because we did not have to, and looking at the piece now I do not need to add any. The vanishing point cut explains what those openings are for in the first place.

Adding one later

At any point, and without reaching for a drill.

Take a gouge, stand it where the deep point should be, rotate it, and excavate the waste. There is your opening. I mention on camera that these can be added on the go, which matters because you cannot always tell at the roughing stage which joins will end up needing one. The decision stays open right to the end of the flower.

What happens to the pink marks?

All of it has to go. Tidiness is not the point, it is the completion test.

Marker goes over the waste I intend to remove, then I carve until none of the colour survives. When the pink has gone, that area is finished by definition, and nothing is left to argue about. The same marks show me where a rim still has a flat on it. Using a knife to chase the last traces off an edge is most of what happens in the closing minutes of this lesson. One thing does escape the test: a vanishing point deep inside a join will be hidden entirely once the blank is glued into its socket, and I say as much while carving it anyway. What a wall is on a carved petal is the problem those marks are pointing at.

Why connect two sides right through?

Light. Once the two openings meet, it crosses the flower instead of stopping inside it.

Near the end I undercut hard from one side, find that I am all the way through, then do the same next to the first cut and bring everything to the opening I just made. I did not have to. It gives a lot more light and shadow play, and the cost is cleaning, and cleaning, and cleaning again. Relief carving lives on that trade: every extra hour of cleaning buys a little more shadow, and shadow is the only thing that makes carved wood look deeper than it is.

Does every petal get the same treatment?

Every petal on a flower like this is something different, and I say I cannot tell you much more than that.

One gets a big curl up top and stays plain lower down. The next one gets a concave through the middle purely for the sake of it. A third I leave almost alone, because its neighbour is already busy. What you can take from watching is the reasoning rather than the sequence, since the sequence will never repeat. Letting the wood decide which way a petal curls is where most of those decisions came from.

How many tools does one flower need?

Less than people expect. Six or seven sizes do the entire flower.

Numbers eight and six carry most of it, and I note on camera that my number six is marked six but feels like a seven, which happens with old steel. An eleven at one millimetre and again at half of that does every deep join. A number four handles curling. A small knife takes for everything else. Carved in lime or basswood, with sharp edges, you have the whole kit.

Same, but not the same

A phrase I catch myself using in the first few minutes, and it governs the whole hour.

Two neighbouring petals both start from somewhere deeper inside, both grow outward, and both get the same treatment in principle. Carve them identically, though, and the pair reads as a repeat. So the second one begins a little further in, or leans a degree the other way, or keeps a shallower hollow. Exactly the same, maybe, but not as same. A flower built from matched pairs looks manufactured no matter how good each pair is. How many petals a flower should have counts the structure underneath that.

Where does the waste inside actually go?

Half a millimetre at a time. Or, at the end of a session, a puff of compressed air.

Every deep join fills with small chips that are already severed and simply clogged in there. They make the carving look far worse than it is, and beginners panic at the mess. The eleven at half a millimetre picks most of it out. For the rest, an air compressor blows the lot clear in a second, which is what I do rather than poking at it. The one thing you must not do is lever them out against an edge. Keeping a carving clean as you work is the wider habit.

Taking wood off a neighbour to buy room

Certainly, and on one petal here nothing else gets you a movement worth having.

Looking at the top of the flower I decide I want a concave running one way and a curl the other, then realise there is not enough material left to carve either properly. What I need is more real estate up there. So I remove some of the upper petal instead, which gives me the wood to work with, and the petal I sacrificed loses nothing anyone will notice. Thinking of the flower as one budget of wood, rather than as a set of separate petals with separate claims on it, is what makes that move obvious.

Should a petal be busy all over?

Plain low down and busy up high works better than movement everywhere.

On one of the last petals I deliberately keep the lower half quiet and put every curl into the upper edge. The reason is simple enough: the bottom of a petal disappears behind the ring below it once the flower is assembled, so detail there is invisible work. The top edge is what a viewer sees from every angle. Spending your effort where it shows is not laziness, it is aim. Who decides how finished a carved commission has to be is the same calculation with a client in the room.

Is there one right tool for a cut?

Rarely. A lot of different ways exist to do the same task, and I say so on camera rather than pretending otherwise.

Separating two petals here usually goes through the eleven at one millimetre. A sixteen V tool does the identical job, and on the last petal of the lesson I reach for it instead, purely because it was nearer. Where a number nine is called for, a small number eight gives the same result. What matters is the shape the edge leaves behind, not the number stamped on the handle, and a carver who owns half the sizes I own will finish the same flower without much trouble at all.

What this lesson leaves you with

A ring of petals finished thin enough to pass light, joins that go dark at their lowest point, and one place where the light now passes clean through the flower.

Look at the carved foliage in the V and A sculpture rooms and notice how much of it you can see daylight through. Holding a carving too fragile for a vise is the problem this thinness creates next.

Shall we carve?