 Welcome back to Whittling for Beginners. Whittling with Salty. Last time we were finishing up working on carving the ball in a cage, and we're going to finish up that project right now. Remember I said that we have to clean out all of the corners before we do very much work on the ball. And this is just like the work that we did before when we started carving the cylinder in the cage. Whenever you do any interior carving, leaving posts on the corner or something like that, always clean out the corners first because that will make the rest of your work a lot easier. You have a kind of a place to work to a gauge, kind of a target area, so to speak, because we're a little ways away from our carving project itself so we don't have to be terribly careful about what we do. We always have to be careful. You know, at all of these corners we can see through your stab cuts because if you're working with a pocket knife you can't rock them back and forth like this because the knife will go closed on you. You just have to put down pressure on the knife. That just takes a little bit longer, but otherwise it works pretty much the same way. You can begin to clean things out in more corners. It's amazing how many corners there are on a piece of wood when you start cleaning them out. I think there's only four on the stick, but there are eight corners because we're starting making another little stick in the corner. Always work carefully and take small chips. Don't try to do more than your strength allows. As I mentioned last time, you always have to know where your knife would go if something breaks or slips. And as long as you do that, you will be safe and everything will work to your advantage. I know what does for me. As long as I pay attention, I'm in good shape. If I don't pay attention, then sometimes we can get in trouble. And every carver that I know has gone through the same thing at least once, maybe more than once. It depends how often you lose track of what you're doing. All the corners are cleaned out so that you get a little bit of light space. Just a little glimmer of light in the corner and that's all you need because then you can round off your post, which we're going to do next. Okay, looks like we got... So now what we can do is round off, start rounding off one of these corners. And that would be very similar to what we did up at the very beginning, about halfway around. Now we get to these inside corners. This is a little bit trickier. We'll go down here, slice down. We'll go off the top part there. We can round off the bottom part here. And you can begin to round off the ball sideways as well as top and bottom. We had experience of doing this before. On the top of the stick this is following the same kind of procedure. We just kind of work our way down until all of a sudden we have light shining in there. As you round those off, then you can begin to see how the ball is beginning to take shape. So using the tip of your knife, you can work your way up. Unless you want to change hands, you have to turn the stick around. Incidentally, some of you will probably be left-handed, so you'll be doing this exactly the opposite way that I'm doing it. And some of you will be carving with both hands, and that's what we should be doing, because after all, the way we're put together, both arms are hinged in the same fashion at the shoulder. While one arm's hand is dominant, a little bit stronger, they both work the same way, and so if necessary, you can just switch the knife from one hand to the other, and you have to take your time. And what we're doing is kind of rounding off the ball and rounding off our post at the same time, working in several directions at once, the way that we should be doing things. You need an idea. You can always get your little gauge and kind of lay it in there and just kind of check how you're doing, even as you carve, even if you can't get it all the way in because you're not rounded off yet, you can gauge it to see how you're doing. You want to just free the ball up just barely, free up the sides of the ball and work your way, rounding up to that X mark that you made on the top, and you can take your gauge and you can check to see how you're coming, and sure enough, we're getting there. That's the way that we free up that ball in the cage. You just keep taking little chips like that, work your way up to the top, and on the bottom, we start kind of right in the center where the pencil mark is and take a thin chip off all the way down. Angle your knife a little bit and take another chip and angle your knife some more and take another chip all the way down. And you do this from working your way around the stick so that when you finish, you have a little peg that your ball is standing on and you cut that off and you can also use your gauge then to check this to see that your ball is not getting oblong. Check to make sure it's round in all directions. Keep checking with the gauge. Take little bitty chips and pretty soon you'll have your ball in the cage will be free. We'll have a couple of other little projects that can be done. Have a little bit of stick left over and I've sketched out with a marking pen a couple of different ways of making cuts that can be done that are triangular shaped cuts. That's quite common in chip carving to use three-cornered cuts. The end of the stick can be cut off in a taper like this, like flat planes like we did at the beginning of our working project just by cutting carefully with small chips until we get down. There are a number of different things that you can do for chip carving. You might want to carve your initials. If you do that, it's always a good idea to make a stop cut right down the center. I would suggest that when you start that you use square or block letters because they're easier to learn. You can do curved letters after you've learned how to do the block letters. But make a shallow cut down the center of your block letter sections as to keep the wood from splitting as you carve. Tilt your knife at probably about 30 degrees and you don't have to take it all at once. You can make successive cuts until you free that up. Always make sure that the bottoms of your cuts are nice and clean. Sometimes when they break out they like to leave little pieces behind. So make sure that you clean those out by working carefully back and forth all able to make your letters. If you're giving this away you might want to put somebody else's initials in here or whatever you decide to do. So we can make our letters like that. Now if we're going to do chip carving then we make three cuts. These should go so that the point of your knife goes right to the center of the chip. It takes a little more pressure so that your chip pops right out. Now that one at the bottom stayed in. There it is. And you can do another one. Oops, it wants to miss the corner here. There it pops out. The people who do a lot of chip carving have a specially shaped knife which works a little bit easier than this but this works fine for a little bit larger work. It would do real fine work with this. But for fooling around you can make two chip carvings and of course they don't all have to be three-cornered. You could make four-cornered or five-cornered or whatever. There are a lot of resources available for help. Of course there are carving clubs around. I belong to a couple of carving clubs. One in Milwaukee called Badger State Carvers and another one that's headquartered in Plymouth which is called the Kettle Carving Club. The Kettle Carving Club has a show every spring generally at the municipal building in Sheboygan Falls. And this year again they're going to do it on a Saturday with the Holman Hearth Festival I think it's called in the spring. It's sometime in April. Generally right after Easter time. Of course there are a lot of books on the market. If you go to the library, the Sheboygan Falls Library I know has copies of Chipchats which is the National Woodcarver's Association of Journal or Magazine. And I think the Sheboygan Library also has that. There are a lot of sources listed in there especially in the March issue. They list suppliers of all kinds. They list books that are for sale. Wood is for sale. Tools that are for sale. And there are a lot of woodworking magazines that have a little bit of carving in them. Look in the classified ads or in the display ads and you may see ads for carving tools, carving wood, books, other materials. There's a lot of things available to help you. Of course this video is available to help you and this video I think will be available to you if you want to purchase it from the studio here. The address and the price will be listed at the end of the program. We're going to list my name, Salty Regan and my address and phone number also because if you have any questions about carving whittling, feel free to call me or write and I would be glad to reply to you. That's one of the things about carving the Carol Carver's Club and the other clubs. Everybody seems willing to help everybody else. There are no secrets that you try to hide so that you can be a better carver than the next fellow. Everybody likes to have fun. Everybody likes to help everybody else. There is hardly any more rewarding hobby, pastime than carving. You can spend a lot of money and get a lot of tools or you can spend very little. Just have a knife and a piece of wood, scrap wood and work to your heart's content. You can make flimsies of all kinds. If you go up to the John Michael Kohler Art Center, they have a magnificent display of whittling. It's not always on display, but a gentleman from Green Bay who whittled all his life carving chains, balls and cages and other things, Adolf van der Ty. Other museums, the Sheboygan County Historical Museum has a couple of pieces of whittling art. They have some what is called tramp art pieces on display, some very, very beautiful stuff. There are a lot of things that you can find to look at to help you. So, enjoy yourself, have a good time, stay safe, keep your knife sharp and you'll have a wonderful lifetime hobby. Don't be afraid to call if you need help.