A Carved Cat

Finally, a real original design. I carved this cat, which is not painted yet, from my own sketches to give me a tall skinny cat. It is meant to be a folk art type piece and the eyes will be painted in. It is a simple design, but one that I like. I'll post it when I finish painting it so ypou can see the differences.

In addition, last Saturday I created this small box from cedar. I had issues that I expected using a router with cedar, mainly the tearing of wood chunks at the edges of the wood. Other than that, it looks good and I want to try this same box in a hardwood, which I know will hold up much better with the router. I used the video set from youtube for basic instructions and tried to follow his tips and suggestions. With a different wood, I'd like to try adding the border inlay that was shown, but was afraid the ceder would keep tearing due to its soft nature.

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By the way, the box is 3"x3"x3". The rabbits and lid separation was done on the router, the mitered corners were done on the table saw. Enjoy, and be careful of the splinters.

Folk Art Chicken

This is a folk Art Chicken as described in the Carving Magazine in their anniversary issue. The design came from Dave Disselbrett's article, but I made some minor changes to his design. I didn't like the way that the tail was attached as a separate piece, nor it's shape, so I incorporated the tail in the base design here. That is a fun part of carving, nothing is set in stone, unless you are carving stone of course. This chicken is a tad smaller, to fit with the size of the basswood I had. As I recall it is 1 ½ x 2 x 7, I think. I could be wrong there. I did like the separate wings although I could not see the details used in the original carving, which left me open to interpret the design any way I wanted. All in all, this was a fun and quick project, about 2 hours for the carving and 2 hours for the painting. I've yet to spray a finish varnish on the bird cause the final coat of black on the shoes was still wet. Any way, here it is.

Enjoy, but be careful of the splinters.