The Tray of Blessing – Cabernet Sauvignon

Ever tried hollowing a bowl from a solid block, and wondered how far down you can go before you come out the other side? Want a leaf on the rim that throws a real shadow across your dining table? We carved this tray over eight workshops in a class in Michigan, and I am going to give you the real numbers.

What wood do you use for a carved tray?

Eight quarter basswood, 51 mm thick, which is 2 inches. The tray comes out at 280 mm long, near enough 11 inches, and it is carved full size off the drawing, one to one.

American basswood, lindenwood, limewood. One tree, three names. Soft enough that a sharp gouge slices it instead of fighting you, and soft enough to soak with resin if a spot turns fragile.

Halfway through the back of mine the grain came up looking like maple. I said yes, that is because we carved maple. Then I said no, we did not.

Why is a grape leaf carved on a tray?

Grapes and grape leaves stand for abundance and blessing, and that is why I call this piece the Tray of Blessing. The shape comes off a Cabernet Sauvignon leaf. Five lobes on it, the kind that grows over a real vine.

In class we started calling it the donation tray. Set it by the door, and whatever lands in it lands there because somebody wanted to put it there.

Old grapes are on my mind while I carve one. Georgia and Armenia hold forms of the grape older than almost anywhere, and the best wine I ever drank came out of Georgia. None of that changes a single cut.

Can you hollow a bowl out of one solid block?

Work from the outside in, crossing the grain, and keep a border of about 10 mm, three eighths of an inch, untouched the whole way around. The border becomes your rim, so no tool touches it on day one.

Go down in two passes. The first takes you to an inch and a quarter, 32 mm. Stop when your own edge starts riding on uncarved wood, because pushing past that builds a wall you cannot clean.

Pass two starts with a pencil line 18 mm below the top, a shade under three quarters of an inch. Take everything above it out and the bowl reads an inch and a half deep, 38 mm.

Never raise the handle at the start of a pass. Lift it and the edge dives into a pocket, and you spend an hour cleaning what took four seconds. Keep your bench dogs low too, or sooner or later you hit one.

What does bosting mean in wood carving?

Bosting is the first stage, where you take the mass out and set the whole shape with no detail in it at all. English carvers say bosting. I say roughing out, or hogging out.

Reach for the biggest gouge you own. Mine is a number 9, 20 mm wide, a shade over 3/4 inch. A 9 is a clean half circle, and I call it the pure American smile. Turn it over, pure Russian smile. The 7 is a German smile, shallower, and a 2 is the Chinese smile with almost no curve left. Both stamped numbers mean something, the sweep first and then the width in millimeters.

Treat your tools like soldiers and yourself like the general. You give the order, the tool takes the ground.

Carving makes no dust. All day long you make a pile of expensive chips.

What is a slicing cut in wood carving?

A slicing cut is one where the gouge rotates as it travels, so the edge starts near one corner and escapes at the other. Start on the left of the tool and finish on the right, or the other way round. Both are right.

People set the flute up and push instead. Think about what the tool has become. A wedge. You drive a wedge into the fibers with your whole arm, and the wood crushes ahead of the edge instead of parting for it.

I let the tool do the work, because tired and frustrated both come out of pushing. My hands carry no blisters and no calluses, and I do not need them.

One more move is worth learning early. Carve, step back, carve, step back, half an inch at a time, 13 mm. I call that the back stepping cut, and a molding plane runs the same way. You never start at the beginning. You start at the end.

Should you carve with the grain or across it?

Across the grain, almost the whole way, and especially while you are learning. Run with the grain and your edge picks up a fiber, follows it into a micro crack you never saw, and pops the whole thing out.

Draw the grain direction on your pattern before any steel touches it. Long strokes, readable from across the bench.

I break this rule constantly and you watch me do it. Sometimes there is no other road in, and I go against the grain with an edge sharp enough to slice instead of tear. When the wood starts fighting, stop digging. Flip the piece and come at it from the other side, as many times as you wish. Nobody is timing you.

Why do carvers leave little legs on a carving?

Little legs sawn into the blank hold the tray to its board for seven of the eight workshops, and they come off last. Draw them before you saw the blank out, then keep your tools off them.

Legs earn their keep twice. While the bowl is coming out they hold everything still. Later, when the piece flips over, you clamp on the legs and the carved face never touches the bench.

I say this more often than anything else in a workshop. Those legs stay. Those legs stay. Late on the last day one of mine stood in my way, so I chopped a little off it, and even then the leg survived.

How deep can you carve a tray without going through the bottom?

About an inch, 25 mm, measured off the edges, and that leaves near three eighths of an inch of wood under the bowl, 10 mm. On two inch stock that is my semi final depth.

You cannot see how much is left. You feel it and you count, and you leave at least a millimeter behind.

Stay back from your design line as well. Five millimeters, three sixteenths of an inch, while you rough. Get closer with a curved tool and you undercut by accident, in the wrong place, with no way back.

Never get excited while you are carving like this. I check thickness constantly, and on the last day I still came within a whisker of cutting into my own leaf.

Where does the golden ratio go in a wood carving?

Sixty to forty. Pick a ten inch line across your design. The main point does not sit at five inches. Move it to six, and now the eye likes it, and nobody can tell you why.

Fibonacci sets how many grapes go in a bunch. You do not have to know the word. Pick a count that is neither even nor obvious, and the brain reads it as natural.

Repetition is the law sitting beside it. Whatever detail you carve once, repeat somewhere else at a smaller scale. One lobe here rolls backward, so a second roll went into a lobe on the far side, maybe a third the size.

My clients never ask about any of this. Most do not know it exists, and I never explain it to them. But I remember why I did what I did for the rest of my life. All ten rules live in Principles of Design in Wood Carving.

Why does my carved leaf look flat?

Shadow is missing. You are painting with shadow and light, and every concave you carve hands you one dark line. Concave, then convex, then concave again. Nothing else does that work for you.

A panel that hangs on a wall has it much easier. Light comes from above, so a shallow cut still drops a shadow down the wall. Lay a tray flat and the light crosses it from a window, so you dig much deeper for the same effect.

Which is why I flipped one lobe up off the surface, about 20 mm of it, 3/4 of an inch. That flip gives a shadow no other move will, and a leaf lying on a plate becomes something a person wants to pick up.

Turn the shop lights down and look. Weak darks mean a weak carving, and no amount of small detail saves it. You will not learn to see that from a book, so come and stand at a bench and watch it happen on your own wood.

What are the eye and the pipe on a carved leaf?

The eye is the opening where two lobes part, and the pipe is the raised ridge that runs out of it. Carve the eye in the shape of a water drop, wide at one end and closing to a point at the other.

You never carve a pipe. Hollow both sides of where it belongs, and the ridge standing in the middle is your pipe. Ride a number 2 along the top of your own ridges to soften it, and if a spot fights you, turn that tool upside down and use its back.

Every pipe runs home to one point. Find the center first, and never draw a straight line anywhere near it. A straight line on a leaf is the mistake I see most, and it kills the whole piece.

Exaggerate the pipe. Look at a real grape leaf and you find no ridges like these anywhere. Wood carving is not a copy of nature. Carving exaggerates nature, and the classical rules tell you which way to push.

How many lobes does a Cabernet Sauvignon grape leaf have?

Five main lobes, with five eyes between them. Then you subdivide inside each lobe into three smaller ones, and inside those go a few small notches.

Do the separations last, once the outer movement makes you happy. Change your mind about an edge afterward and every one has to be redone.

Start each separation with a relief cut. Number 11 at 3 mm, flute up, and straight down into the wood. Only then bring in a flatter tool. Skip it, come at a point from either side using a number 7, and you snap that point clean off. Not sometimes. Every time.

Big separations do not need to be sharp. I leave mine soft, because a leaf with saw teeth on it stops looking like a leaf.

Why exaggerate the veins on a carved leaf?

A vein in wood has to read from across a room, and a real one does not. Every separation on this leaf is a micro pipe, the same eye and pipe rule working at the scale of a millimeter or two.

Put a number 9 down and slice toward the center line. Deep where you start, shallow where you finish. Not everywhere. A few spots, and the whole leaf wakes up.

Sometimes the far end of that concave drops downhill, and then the groove is no longer a groove. Movement, and its own shadow.

Look close at the facets your gouge leaves behind. They already run like veins, which is why I do not sand this piece. Sanding takes off the one thing that came for free.

Should a carved vine pass over or under a leaf?

Decide which one goes over and which one goes under, then slope the end of the vine so the eye reads it as going somewhere. A vine that stops dead reads as a mistake.

Think in depth as well as width. Ten millimeters of width, 3/8 of an inch, wants about 10 mm of depth around it, or the vine looks painted on.

On this tray the vine crosses low, and the stem comes off it, runs above the leaf, and dies under one lobe. Part of the leaf sits over the stem and part under it. More work, and worth it.

Keep every vine crooked. In a hedge there is not one straight inch anywhere on a vine.

I redesigned this piece twice while the class watched. One student asked what you do when you make a mistake. You redesign, and then you make something better than the thing you had planned.

Can you carve a hole right through a leaf?

Airborne means you have carved right through, so daylight travels under the piece and comes out the other side. One small hole under a stem, and the whole leaf lifts off the tray.

Work from both sides. Never make the hole from one side, because you blow out the far face. Start with the 3 mm number 11, flute at about eleven o'clock, then walk around and come back at three o'clock. Finish with a half millimeter.

Where the airborne cut goes matters more than how you make it. Long grain holds. Short grain snaps, and short grain is exactly where a beginner wants the hole, because that is where it looks best.

Then look from low down, from the side, with a light behind it. A hint of light under a leaf is worth more than an hour of detail on top of one.

What keeps a thin wood carving from breaking?

Leave more wood than you think you need, then carve the last of it away so the edge only looks thin. The handle end of this tray keeps a full 10 mm of meat, 3/8 inch, and still reads as paper thin from above.

Ten millimeters back from the edge, ease down toward a knife edge. Nothing at all gets weaker, and the whole piece looks lighter. Pick it up and you feel solid wood. Look at it and you see a leaf.

For work that really is fragile I brush on penetrating epoxy. TotalBoat, because most brands go yellow with age and that one does not. Satin lacquer over the top, or it looks like plastic. Wood hardener does nothing. Superglue holds five years and lets go.

Trays live on tables, and a panel on a wall is a different animal. On a wall I would undercut this leaf until it floated. Set it on a table, though, and I stop early, because you have children, and cast iron gets broken too.

What changes when you carve the back of a tray?

Take it off the board with a flat number 1 gouge, working in along the grain, then clamp it face down and hollow behind every lobe. Never lever from the middle.

Clamp it upside down so the work points away from your face, and leave the flat bottom of the bowl alone. That untouched spot is what lets a tray sit still.

Everything else goes. Keep a rim of 10 to 11 mm, three eighths, and undercut under the lobes and leave about 3 mm, an eighth of an inch. On the front you carve from the outside in. Back here you go from the center outward, and it feels wrong for a minute.

A lot of the waste came off this side with an axe. A sharp axe is a tool like any other. Chainsaws scare me, the cheap ones with no automatic stop, held close to a man's face.

Nobody will ever see this side. Tilman Riemenschneider carved the backs of his altars in the fifteenth century anyway, and once they went up nobody saw that work again. Asked why he bothered, he said people will not see it, but God will. I met his last living descendant, a woodworker in South Carolina, and the line ends with him.

Did wood carvers ever make real money?

Grinling Gibbons did. He got a royal title for wood carving, he was paid well, and he ran a big shop. Riemenschneider grew rich from carving too. Chippendale never could pay his men properly, because the rich men who hired him did not pay enough.

One story about Gibbons is worth knowing. Look closely at his work and you find pea pods. A closed pod meant he had not been paid for that piece. Once the money came he went back, opened the pod, and carved the peas inside. He kept many pieces going for one room, so the pods were his ledger.

I like that more than I can explain to you. A man kept his books inside the carving, and you can still read them.

How do you carve a bunch of grapes in wood?

Aim for a triangle where the grapes meet, never a square. Put four together so their corners form a quad and you have made a point no tool you own can reach.

Draw them big. Start each grape about an inch across, 25 mm, and it finishes near three quarters of an inch, 19 mm, once cleaned. Small grapes stop looking like grapes.

Use only the corner of the tool. A number 7 at 14 mm, pointed at your drawn line, all the way around the bunch before you deepen anything. Never outline first using a flat tool. Furniture makers do that, and then they stand there holding the damage.

Really good carvers who teach for a living still struggle with grapes.

The middle of a grape gets finished with a toothpick. Press the side of one into the center and it leaves a clean dot, and the same toothpick burnishes the rim of it. Mine snapped, which turned out useful, because a broken one takes a mallet and drives the dot deeper. People ask what tool made that.

Which cuts make a carved border on a rim?

Two pencil lines and two cuts. The first goes about 5 mm in from the edge, three sixteenths of an inch. The second sits a millimeter and a half inside that one, a sixteenth. Keep the gap even and check it twice.

Take the corner of a number 2 and angle it out toward the edge, following the line like a knife. Only the corner, and not deep, especially on end grain. Then set a number 9 at 10 mm on the outer line and slice down to meet it. The chip lifts out. If it does not, leave it, go back with the number 2, and open the first cut again.

Your tool has to be sharp for this. I stropped mine in front of everybody first, for a reason.

Graham was hunched over his rim while I drew mine. I asked if he was all right. He told me this is me happy, those exact words. I told him I saw him happier yesterday.

Scott said the border running around the rim looked like chip carving. Nothing is cheap about carving, I told him. Chip carving is mostly geometric and came along later. What runs around this rim is older, organic, and follows a curve.

What is a tendril, and how is it carved?

A tendril is the thin curl a vine throws out to grab hold of something, and on this tray it finishes about a sixteenth of an inch thick, 1.5 mm. A few spots go thinner than that.

Outline it with an 11 at 3 mm, a sixteenth deep, and leave an eighth of an inch of space to work in. Blend with a number 7 at 14 mm, presented at 45 degrees, in tiny cuts. Slow motion. The whole thing looks simple until you start one.

Rest the tool on your middle finger and use it as a fulcrum. Half a millimeter of steel and one finger, and the tool goes exactly where you send it. Work like this and you are training your character to be patient.

Every tendril has to come from somewhere. Leave it floating and it stops being a tendril. Somebody across the bench ended up with a snake, and the man beside him got a worm. I told them both so, and we agreed a worm crawling out of the tray to eat the grapes would be perfectly honest.

Can a beginner carve this tray?

Start somewhere flatter, then come back to this one. Three things get asked of you, and not one is talent. A sharp edge. A slicing cut. The patience to leave a shape rough for a whole day.

Never held a gouge? Put your hands on First Cuts for Beginners. Sharpening sits under every other skill, so Carving Tool Sharpening comes next, and All About Tools tells you what to buy before you waste money on wrong steel. Grapes return in Carving Grape Onlay and on the vase with grape leaves. The lessons map lays the road out in order.

People want to know who is teaching before they ask what it costs, which is fair, so here I am.

So there is basswood on your bench, two inches thick, and a drawing of a Cabernet leaf on top of it. Where does the first hollow go? Come and find out at the bench, and by the fifth workshop you will stop asking me and start telling me. Shall we carve?

The whole course is The Tray of Blessing. Eight workshops, twenty five videos, filmed at the bench with the class asking questions.