Thursday, February 28, 2013

Revamping this blog!!

     I've been putting this off for many, many weeks but here goes! Since my last blog post, I've carved many spoons, kuksas, and bowls; most of these were either sold or given away as gifts. I've noticed that my skills have improved greatly over this period of 7-8 months of silence. Throughout all of this, I've began developing my own kuksa style after having tried out different designs and various carving methods of different carvers. Stay tuned for pictures!! 
     
     The past couple of cold winter months slowed down my production quite a bit so I have been doing a lot of work in the shop with cutting spoon blanks and roughing out kuksas from last years left-over stock. But now with winter winding down to an end and warmer weather starting to emerge, I decided to sharpen up my tools and take a fresh start to carving :). I went out into the backyard woods and cut down a suitable maple tree that had been bent over quite badly from the heavy snows. Then I cut off a couple short chunks and got to work; it feels good to be carving some fresh wood again! Here are some pictures of the progress on the kuksa.

I decided on a beaver-tail style kuksa as I haven't carved one in a while. 

Here you can see the "scalloped" tail of the kuksa.

This is three hours of progress; the kuksa is all roughed out on the outside and now for the inside.
I had to move inside at this point since it was beginning to get dark out with the sun past the horizon.