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your OOPS! We all make mistakes! No matter how careful you are, no matter how much time you take on each carving stroke, sometime, somewhere, you will make a mistake. The knife will slip or the grain will pull your stroke off the pattern line or a high area will get broken. Just because a mistake has been made does not mean that the project needs to be scraped, there are several options for correcting miscuts in your carving. The first thing to remember in relief carving is that it is your final work that is important not the pattern lines that you traced. The design pattern is a guide or map for the finished work, when your project is completed none of the tracing lines should be visible. If you have strayed slightly from the pattern line, continue your stroke in a smooth flow back toward the tracing. Most patterns adjust easily to variations in the original lines of the design. Avoid sudden changes in your stroke in an attempt to return to the guide line, this will only accent the mistake. Make your carved line the new design line and continue on in your work. There are three main reasons for your carving stroke to pull off the pattern line. First, you may be trying to carve to deeply with one cut. Deep cuts into the wood blank are not as controllable as repeated shallow strokes. Trying to take too much wood with one stroke will cause you to force the cut, bearing down too hard on the knife. If you find yourself gripping the blade too forcefully, stop the cut and remove the knife. Begin the stroke again where you left off but this time use shallow strokes to finish the line. A second reason for pulling off the pattern line is the wood blank itself. If you are working with a wood that has a well defined grain line the knife blade will want to follow the fiber in the wood. Butternut is a wood with a strong grain line and deep cuts tend to pull the knife along those lines, as will Oak and Sassafras. When your pattern crosses a grain area or when you will be carving across the grain ends, use small shallow stop cut strokes to establish your working line. As you work with a piece of carving wood be conscience of where the grain flows as compared to where your next cut needs to be. This avoids many mistakes. If you are working on a very intricate pattern, once you have traced the design take a moment and highlight your possible problem areas with a red pencil. Later, when you are deeply involved in the carving process these red marks will flag areas that need special attention. The third and most common reason for mistakes in carving is using a knife that has lost it's honed edge. Unsharpened knifes are the biggest cause for both mistakes in the carving and cuts on the carver. To make a cut, the unhoned knife must be forced through the wood fibers. The more you force the more likely the knife blade is to slip from the pattern line and even slip from the wood. This can be damaging to the carving and dangerous to you. Begin each carving session with a few moments of knife sharpening, this simple habit will avoid numerous mistakes. Sometimes slips in the carving can remove large pieces of the wood that if left out will alter the design drastically. If possible stop the cut before the entire sliver is removed. A small drop of white wood glue can be placed under the chip and the area put back into place in your carving. For small chips use the end of a toothpick to place the glue under the wood sliver. Hold the chip or sliver onto the wood blank with steady pressure for several moments to set to glue. Allow this area to dry overnight before you continue any carving work. Although most white wood glue set within one half hour of application the bond is not strong enough for working until the next day. When the glue has dried overnight, carve and scrap away any excess glue. Careful removal of the glue is very important especially if you will be staining the carving, white glue does not accept coloring or dyes. Do not use either a 'super glue' type bonding agent nor a plastic model cement for repairs, neither will give you a bond strong enough to continue carving. And with the 'super glues' you are more likely to bond the chip to your fingers then you are to the wood blank, further causing you problems. Hot glue as used by many arts and crafts persons will successfully glue two pieces of wood together but can not be carved after it has dried, since cutting into this type of glue tends to pull out the entire glue strip. If the area has been completely cracked away from the wood blank, once the glue has begun to set use cellophane tape to hold the chip in place overnight. The tape acts just like a small clamp, insuring that the chip will remain in place under pressure for better bonding. If the area is free floating, as the edge of a leave that is extended away from the wood block, you may need to add a peg to the gluing process. Just the same way that you would dowel pin a joint together in woodworking, a round toothpick can be cut down to become a pin for carving. Cut the toothpick so that you have a miniature dowel rod that is appropriate to the problem area in the carving. Use a soft pencil to mark the chip where the dowel will be placed. Go over the mark several times to build up the graphite from the pencil. Now put the chip in place on the wood blank and gently move it back and forth over the joining area. This should transfer some of the pencil mark from your chip to your blank to insure accurate holes for the mini-dowel. Use the bench knife to drill the receiving holes in both pieces. Place a small amount of glue inside each hole and along the surface of the two joint faces. Put your dowel into place in the chip then ease the chip into place on the blank. Use tape as a clamp to secure the area overnight. Be sure to clean up any excess glue from the surface of the blank for better finishing. One Carver to Another: As one carver to another, please be reassured this is part of our hobby. Many times I have worked very hard on some carving that has latter become very interesting pieces of fire place kindling. RETURN TO CLASSIC CARVING WOOD INDEX PAGE Article Courtesy of Classic Carving Patterns
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