 Welcome back to the second session of Whittling with Salty. Last time we finished up, we had carved a half of our ball. This time we're going to start out by finishing that ball and then work on to the next section of the project. When we carve the bottom half of the ball, we have to do it a little bit differently than we did with the top half. So we'll start at our stop cut at the bottom of where the ball is and begin making little v-cuts all the way around. You don't want to go up very far because otherwise your ball is not going to be round. It will be kind of peeked on the bottom instead of half-round like it should be. So we'll make little stop cuts and little v-cuts, work our way carefully around, not taking too much at a time. Not anymore than your strength will allow you and somewhat less if you have strong hands because when you're whittling, it's very easy to cut something off but it's very, very difficult to cut it back on. That just doesn't work. So we'll make little v-cuts all the way around and then as you can see, we're beginning to get a little bit of shape. So now we can work our way up just a little bit, maybe a sixteenth of an inch at a time. We'll work our way around again. Little chips, not very big. The wood that I'm working with is white pine. I like to carve white pine. It carves nicely, holds detail well. It smells good and if you have needles from white pine, you can make a cup of tea out of it also. That was a favorite drink with some of the Indians, white pine tea. It's quite mild. It doesn't taste like turpentine at all. Now that's about as far as you'd want to go so that you can begin to see that there's a little rounding there but we want to make sure that we're round. And so we have to begin to carve in a rounding fashion and I find the easiest way to do that is to carve in a kind of a slanted way. So we'll start up a little bit and carve and turn the stick at the same time so that you get a deeper cut at the bottom than you do at the top. We don't want to cut our ball clear off. We just want to make it rounding so that we have a good solid peg for the ball to stay on. I had a student one time that got busy rounding this ball off and she worked at it so diligently that she cut the ball right off the top of the stick. She came in at the next class and said, look what I did. I said, well, that's why they make toothpicks and glue. You drill a little hole and put a toothpick in each part and put a little glue in there and glue that little ball right back on top of that stick and nobody will ever know the difference. That's one thing about whittling. A whittler never makes a mistake. You just make something else. You change your project. I was carving a little dog one time while I was at a carving show and a knife slipped a little bit and it cut one of the front legs off and they all know what I'm going to do. I decided I would carve a little seal instead because they have short flippers in front and not long legs like a dog. So the little dog turned into a seal. If you don't make mistakes, you make something else. Now you might want to stop and take your circle gauge that you made before and check to see how you're coming out. It looks like we're getting pretty close to a ball. Don't be afraid to stop and check every once in a while, especially when you're beginning. Now what I'm going to do is go back right at that pencil mark and carve easily. Cut off all of the corners. As you see, we're going to clean up all of the little edges and now we have a web of a ball on the bottom and another one on the top. You can use your little gauge to check and make sure that your ball is nice and round. Maybe you've got to take off a little bit here or there. But that's another project that we have done. The next project that we're going to work on is this thing I call a dodecahedron. When you're marking your stick, we always leave a quarter inch spacer in between the projects. That makes it a little bit easier when we're starting. After you learn how to do things, you can begin to eliminate stuff like that. But this way it gives you something to cut up against and later on you can always cut it off or leave it there if you like it. What we're trying to do this time is to carve faces, flat faces on the stick that look alike. Sometimes when you're carving it's very important that you get two sides that look exactly alike or very close together or maybe three sides that look alike and so we'll do a little practice on that just cutting flat faces. Now to do that we have to have a square the same size as our stick. So you cut out a little pattern out of your piece of cardboard that's the same size as the end of your stick, the square. And you can lay it on the stick and leave about a quarter of an inch for a spacer and you can take your pencil and mark it. If you will take your pattern and fold it like that and clip the corner off right in the center, each corner and then fold it again the other way and clip the corners off. Then you don't have to wear out your ruler to measure things because you can lay that pattern down and you can take your pencil mark on both sides and then where you've made a little clip mark you can make a little pencil mark so that gives you the center mark on all four sides. Now that you have that center mark you can take your ruler or you can take a little piece of card and go from center mark to center mark and mark that off so that you get a diamond or another square inside of the other square that you had marked off. I'll just darken this one a little bit and maybe the camera will be able to pick that up. So we have a square marked inside of a square and we do that on all four sides and then we're able to take our knife and cut those dodecahedron, those flat spots which I call a dodecahedron. A dodecahedron has ten sides and I think this has ten sides. Maybe if you cut it loose it would have a couple more but we're not going to do that. So then again you make a stop cut at the edge of your spacer and with your knife take nice small slices, not too big because you want to work your way down to those two pencil marks, one on each side. The pencil marks should be the last thing to disappear. Sometimes you have to adjust your cut a little bit because in order to get a nice flat cut you have to take off your shaving. It is the exact same size as the face that you're working on. When you get there then you can just... And it's easier to make cuts like that if you make a slicing cut rather than just trying to push it straight through. You'll make a slicing cut until the pencil marks disappear and there you have the first face done. Now you do the same thing on the second face. There's a stop cut down there and you make a little stop cut. Now you'll notice that my fingers are right over here and I'm cutting but I'm cutting up against the stop cut. So there's little or no danger that I'm going to cut myself unless I try to take too big a cut and slip and split something. So that's why it's very important to be taking small cuts so that you can control what you're doing. Let's see. Again we have to be careful that we work our way down to the pencil marks and there we have one side of it done. So we have a nice little peak, a nice little mountain and we've cut down to our pencil marks. Oh, we got a little pencil mark showing here. Can't have that. Now we do the same thing on all four corners and we wind up with something that looks like that. That's our dodecahedron. Now we've learned those skills. We're going to work on learning how to do some carving inside of things. The project that we are attempting to do this time is called a cylinder inside of a cage. And I'm not too concerned how exactly round this cylinder is. What I'm concerned with is that we learn to carve these struts or these posts on the four corners and then work inside without cutting those posts or breaking them because sometimes we have to work inside of parts of carvings and so it's important to learn that skill. To do that, we have to mark off our cylinder. Now I like to use about three inches so if you leave a stop mark of about a quarter of an inch and mark on both sides of a three by five card you have three inches and then you can use that mark to mark the second quarter and you can lay out and work your way all around the stick to get the four sides. Now we want to mark off our posts so we take your pencil and your hand with just the point of the pencil sticking out so we get about a quarter of an inch and draw that down from mark to mark on all four corners and without losing that spot on your thumb turn it around and mark the other four corners. All of those corners marked, we're going to begin carving and again the first thing that we need to do is to make a stop cut and we'll do the stop cuts on each end of one of the posts so beginning at the stop cut that goes cross ways and the edge of the posts stay a little bit away from either mark and make a stab cut. Now you can do this with a bench knife but if you are using a folding pocket knife you have to use a little bit different skill you would use the sheep's foot blade and put it down in there and just use a push motion if you try to do a stab cut like this chances are that that knife will fold up on you and if your finger is in between there that gets very very painful and it messes up your table it's all messy and you have to stop and clean things up so make a little stop cut make a little stop cut down there and make a stop cut alongside of the posts alongside of the posts and you can take a little three corner cut out a little chip we'll work on just one at a time now so that you know how to do this again you have to make your stop cut you'll have to do this two or three or four times as you get down a little ways and you can begin to move your knife over so that you're right up on the pencil mark and do that until you think you're about all the way through you can check that of course by sticking your knife blade in putting your fingernail up against there and then lay it on top so we have a little ways to go because we want to get down to the bottom of that other mark so we'll have to make another stop cut we'll do the same thing down here we'll get down about far enough yeah just about now we'll turn it over and working on the other side of the same post we'll do the same thing make a little triangular cut to start with a little triangular cut to start with make those stop cuts just barely deep enough so that you can see a little bit of light at the bottom of the hole then you know that you've cut all the way through and we'll do the same thing up here and you can stop cut we should be playing some music here now to entertain us a little bit more when you have all four corners cut down we'll start to make our post and again staying just a little bit away from the pencil line make a slicing cut a real easy one and then a little angle cut and take out a little sliver we repeat that take a small sliver you don't have to get real fast and work your way down you're near the bottom of your stop cuts and we'll turn it over and do the same thing on the other side make little slivers out a little better than time you can always take out more but you can't put it back unless you use glue I guess that's one of the reasons that they make glue but sometimes that interferes with your project because if you were going to stain something when you were done then wherever you have put glue the stain is not going to take very well the same way if you're using wood filler or something to fill up a hole if you're going to paint over it you can do that but if you want to stain it or leave it natural then you have a problem so it's best not to cut things any deeper than you need to take nice, easy, small cuts the slivers are not very big you'll have to do this of course on all four corners before we do anything else when you're doing your project on your own so you do that just far enough then so that you get down to the point where you can see a little bit of light or that your knife blade will go through and we're going to have to finish this up on our next session but you've got the idea you can get started on this now you know how to do this post on the corner of the cage and so we'll wind this up for this second session and we hope to see you next time and we'll carve some more thanks for coming