Five students gathered at the Woodcraft Store in Centerville, OH on March 24, 2012 for a class on the subject of Egg Noggins.  Survivor students in the photograph are (left to right) Edgar Brumbaugh,  Andy Zinmeister, Leonard Ballard, Wendy Beck and Jeannette Hamilton.

Egg Noggins  are faces carved out of a basswood hen egg using only a knife to shape the wood.  Whittle-Carving exercises prepared the students to carve a face in the wooden egg using slicing cuts with the knife.  These exercises included shaping practice blocks of wood with a series of notch cuts to lay in the landmarks of the face using the Rule of Three of Facial Proportions  with a notch cut at the hairline, followed by a notch cut at the eye brow area, followed by a notch cut for bottom of nose nostrils and finally the bottom of the chin. Slicing angled cuts shaped the planes and angles of the face in order to provide a good foundation to receive the detail cuts for eyes, nose, mouth, smile line and ears. The Three Version Face Study Stick was used for the first exercise.

The pictures above give a visual trail of the written description of the second exercise. The second exercise was to mark a grid on a rectangular block of basswood two and a quarter inch long, an inch and half wide and a half inch thick divided proportionally into thirds vertically and horizontally.  Curving lines were drawn on the corners to indicate an oval egg shape which was followed by carving off those corners to form an oval egg shape.  The corner edge of the oval was sliced off to begin the rounding of the oval into the shape of half of an egg.  The grid lines guided the cuts for even rounding of the half egg. Once the half egg is shaped, a center line is drawn with a curving line for the eye brow and a V shaped line for the nose nostrils.  Notch cuts at the eye brow line and the V nose nostrils line opens up the surface to receive continuing shaping cuts to eventually carve a face.  These oval half eggs became a practice piece for each student to following along with the demonstrations of the teacher.

Following these learning exercises, each student chose an Egg Noggin as a go-by for carving their own Egg Noggin for the next phase of learning the art of carving a face in a basswood egg. Examples of Egg Noggin Go-Bys are depicted in the photographs above.

The WOOD BEE CARVER teaches the method, the how-to and learning steps  while it is the student who carves the style.  Each carver carves in their own style. Go-Bys are simply reference study pieces from which a student is guided in the carving of their own interpretation of the project.

Each student applied what had been learned in the earlier exercises and continued to learn as the instructor helped with demonstrations and suggestions in the carving process for each student’s project.

The best kind of learning comes through putting into practice what has been learned.  Each Survivor Student was encouraged to carve as often as possible because “one learns by doing” and “the more one carves the better one carves.”   A carving project is never really completed in that there is always more to carve.

Survivor Students survive to carve another day.