Small bowls

I’ve recently been trying out the idea of little dishes, I have always admired people who can make many spoons in the same pattern and keep repeating them but that just isn’t me. I love the fact that every one of my carvings is subtly different, they all have their little quirks, mistakes and unevenness. I prefer my carvings to have character and to be totally unique, which is probably why I feel a stronger affinity for carving bowls which tend to entail more thought about form and grain structure than spoons.

So, with that in mind I recently took a small piece of yew log and cut three segments out of it, the idea was to carve three differently shaped dishes out of the same piece of wood. Partly my motivation was to see if I could get three dishes from the same piece of wood and thus save on wood and partly to see the grain pattern changing from one dish to another depending upon shape.

I love Yew, it is such a lovely wood and despite being what most people classify as a softwood it is actually very hard and takes a beautiful finish straight from the knife. All of the Yew that I have available is very well seasoned and so the techniques used to carve it are different from those used for green wood.

I chose to try a simple and largely symmetrical dish with upswept ends, a heart shaped dish and a leaf shaped one.

Another of my preferences regards abrasives, I don’t like using them on my carvings and so recently I have started to try out burnishing instead of sanding. With these dishes I have used a scraper to get the finish as even as possible and then burnish over the remaining facets and tool marks. This leaves a polished appearance without sanding away the tool marks. I like the effect and so far I’m loving these little dishes. I’m really looking forward to trying out this method on more and I already have a couple of dishes in Cherry on the go, one is a simply dish with upswept ends and the other is a bird form dish using a smaller branch as the bird’s tail. I’ve still got some work to get the bird dish to a state that I like enough but so far it is working well.