#treetoart

[littlebeardesigncompany]

Custom cedar and tiger maple earrings coming up!! Shipping out this week. #nowaste #woodworking #findaway #earrings #resourceful #cedar #tigermaple #maple #wooden #unique #hickorync #ncmade #ncmaker #art #treetoear #treetoart

[parisamoi]

La Sculpture au Bois

Since I have now gone from 18 hours of class and 15 hours of work each week, two only 14 hours of class total - I decided to take a class in Wood Carving or Sculpture au Bois. For two hours each Monday I get to work on carving out any image I want - only one for the semester - and at the end I can take it home with me. 

After years of playing violin I thought my hands were strong enough to handle this stuff. I thought wrong, holy moly...wood carving isn't just hand strength. It's the ability to use your entire body's force and scrape off just the smallest shred of wood, and then do it again, and again, and again...until this

(courtesy of google commons)

Becomes this...

(woodwork by Aalmark LLC)

Not an easy task.

Today we just worked on carving a long rectangle into a piece of oak wood, and then a circle. My friend from Australia, Michael, joked that we were making ash trays. On that note, he told me that in Australia the rates of cigarette smoking are extremely low because by law the packaging cannot have any defining feature, just the name of the brand. It also must say that cigarettes cause cancer and death. Finally, here's the big difference, all of the cigarette boxes must have a gruesome photo of the results of smoking as well. I thought about putting an example here, but they were all pretty disgusting so here's a link instead if you want to read about it in USA Today: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2012-08-14/australia-logo-cigarette-pack-ban/57059912/1

Anyways, I'm loving the wood carving class thus far. When I have some pics to share of my progress I'll post them here, but I haven't decided if I'll reveal what the final image will be...I might be surprising someone with it as a gift! For now, I'm in the libraries of Sciences Po chipping away at an article for my course, Institution Scolaire et Enjeux Democratiques (Educational Institutions and Democratic Issues). Bisous! xx