Hey, Rake!

I left home yesterday for a two-week business trip, and I’m already missing my workshop. (Okay, so I’m missing my wife and kids, too!) Maybe this is a chance to update the blog with some recent work.

With a functional (if not yet painted) tool chest, it was time to pick back up on a neglected project: my hay rake table. I know, I started this project well over a year ago. Let’s just say the cobbler’s children may finally get new shoes this fall.

The hay rake stretchers came together relatively easily. I was pleased with the way the legs came together with the stretchers.

The base is now nearly complete. I need to complete the scroll detail at the ends of the top bars that support the tabletop, and join those to the legs.

I’m tempted to embellish these scrolls with more detailed spiral carvings, since they already suggest the volutes of an Ionic column. I’m really torn here: I’d been looking forward to adding carving to my work, and the minimal carving to define the scroll went very quickly. I worry a bit that an overtly Classical reference would seem a little out of place on an Arts and Crafts piece. It could work, especially in the context of the volutes on a Windsor chair.

What do you think? Stop with the scrolls as they are, or continue to carve a more intricate volute?

In the home stretch.

The stretchers assembled.

Dry-fitting the legs to the stretchers.

Dry-fitting each mortise and tenon joint.

A closer look at the hay rake stretchers.

Drawbored mortise and tenons may be my favorite joints to make.

These “top bars” need to be joined to the legs.

A sharp plane iron leaves a mirror-smooth surface.

Beginning to lay out the scrolls.

Ready to carve this turkey.

I like the logic of this design.

The red will be wasted away; the pencil will be carved.

I refined the scroll shape with a block plane and spokeshaves.

Another shot of the scroll.

I carved the concave space here with a 3/4″ No. 3 carving gouge.

Scroll carving up close.

A Process for Composition

English woodcarver and educator Chris Pye has written several books and online guides to woodcarving, including his Woodcarving Fundamentals.   (If you’re not interested in woodcarving specifically, stay with me here.) There and elsewhere he describes the woodcarving concept of “bosting in”, the stage in which the carver establishes the relationship among the various elements of the carving, before carving any details. 

To ‘bost’ means to create the main forms, three-dimensional masses, and planes of a carving; and placing them, with their inherent motions and directions, all in correct relationship to each other. 

Chris provides the example of a student attempting to carve a human face.  According to his process:

Before the iris goes in, the bony shape of the skull, the muscles, the egg-like lump of the eyeball and so on, these must be formed, bosted in. The shape, dynamics of the head must ‘read true’ – that is what the bosting is all about.

I like this example.  It’s both familiar and immediately illustrative of the concept.  What he describes here is not working from a blueprint.  It is an approach to creating that engages the senses and skills of the creator throughout the process.

“Bosting in” falls within the larger process he describes in his book, Elements of Woodcarving.  This process begins with roughing out the waste, followed by bosting in, followed by modelling individual elements, and resulting in detailing. 

Chris has stated that he would like to retain the term “bosting” as a specialized term within woodcarving.  I think he’s on to something more broadly applicable in the creative process, so I’ll use the more generic term “sketching”, which he says is the original meaning of the word.

This strategy of “sketching in” – establishing the masses, planes, and movement of a piece – works in many different applications. 

I see it at work in Jim Krenov’s The Fine Art of Cabinetmaking, in which he describes composing a cabinet from the starting point of a coopered door.  “Since I have gotten into such work, the prospect of returning to it each time I find a ‘beginning’ in a plank or planks is ever more exciting.”

As a writer I’ve used a similar process, leaving myself sketches of an idea that needs elaboration, while establishing the overall flow and movement from one idea from another.  During later passes through the piece of writing, I’ll come back and elaborate on each of these sketches, gradually giving definition to the whole.

I’ve even used this process as a software engineer, roughing out the various components, sketching the basic movement of the application, and gradually working it down to finer and finer detail.