The Eastern Woodland Carving Club hosted a carving class in Converse, Indiana on April 23, 24 and 25.  Fifteen students learned the basics for carving only with a knife in the Whittle-Carving style.  With good humor, delicious lunch meals and eager enthusiasm each student enjoyed all the various exercises and lessons of learning to slice with the cutting edge and open up a block of wood with notch cuts and three cut triangle chips.

Other lessons stressed being able to see the proportions of the face while carving first the basic form as a good foundation before carving in the details.  Carving to basic form is like baking a cake and with details representing the icing.  Applying icing to a half baked cake ruins the cake just as carving in detail before the basic form is carved will ruin the carving.

The first lesson upon which all other lessons were built upon was carving a ball out of a square using the simplest definition for carving:  “Carving is shaping a piece of wood  with a cutting tool by rounding square corners and flattening round surfaces.” Using square blocks of wood the exercises included carving a Worley No See-Um, a Whittle Folk Monk, a face practice block and a Poke Bust.  As the final hour on the third day approached the eager students were still hard at the tasks and were able to smile for the group photograph.

Each student concluded that the “more one carves the better one carves,” and vowed to continue learning each time a carving tool would be put to wood.

The fifteen students who survived included Jeff Moore, Charles Price, Esther Brosher, Marleen Higginbotham, Jill McDaniel, Chuck Leming, Randy Hurst, Bob Alexander, Jane Paterson, Jack Shelton, Larry Piety, Russ Kelly, Jay Kokena, Jim Stewart and Wayne Laucis.