Lots and lots of of shavings!

I know it doesn’t look like much in the thumbnail picture, but the pile of shavings that came out of our most recent swan carving was almost three feet high and four feet square!  It never ceases to amaze me how this huge volume of wood shavings can be produced from a swan that only measures 32″ long.  And only about half of that distance is hollowed, since we don’t cut into the tail section, and the wings on this particular swan don’t get hollowed out at all.

In the ‘old’ days we did this work with a hand drill and an adze, but now we clamp the ‘body’ of the swan to be hollowed into a cradle and then use our large drill press – with an equally large forstner bit.  The drill press takes all of the elbow grease out of the initial work, but we still need to go in with hand tools and clean the area out smooth.  The tricky part is not getting too deep in any one area and creating an issue with any of the detail carving still to be done.

So, after the hollowing, and the carving, and the sanding, and the painting we get this:

That’s it for now.  I’ll be back later with a show update and an possible newsletter sighting!

Jac

Wow.  Feels like just yesterday we were having drinks poolside in Nantucket and now it’s October.  The calendar pages really do flip faster as you get older.

And speaking of older – (nice transition huh!)  here is an older work that we were recently asked to do again:

This is part of our ongoing effort to replace older, not-so-good photos with newer, better pictures.  We’ll have some more soon, as we get ready for the next marathon of shows.

Speaking on which – our next show will be in Boston on Halloween weekend, followed the very next weekend in Greensboro NC for the Saltbox’s 35 year celebration show (graphics here soon – as soon as I can .jpg some .pdf files) then followed the next weekend with the Wilton Historical Society Show.  That’s right – three shows in three weeks.  A first for us.

After that we take a break until Thanksgiving, when we’ll have a Christmas Open house here in the showroom on the farm.  Joining us will be Debbie and Donnie Rogers and possibly a few others – we’re still finalizing some details.  Then we’re all clear until the first weekend in Dec. for the Merion Cricket Club show.  That one is a benefit show with proceeds going to charity.

I’ll have all the dates and graphics put up on our News Blog page soon.  I really should add a Show Schedule page but we’ve already got enough going on with the site, I really don’t want to add any more.  If I keep going I’ll need to issue the visiting ISP’s balls of twine so they can find their way back out.

More later, got to go carve a couple of swans.

Jac