CARVING OPPORTUNITIES
July 13-15, 2023,Southeastern Woodcarving School,Wetumpka AL. Woodburning - Michele Parsons, Caricature carving - Steve Brown, Adze bowl - Mike Tapley and Joe Petranka, Folk Art Painting - Mary Beck Harmon www.centralalwoodcarving.com
October 16-20, 2023, Renegade Woodcarvers Roundup, Lebanon, TN. Instructors are Gary Falin, Carol Leavy, Wayne Laramore, Bob Thurston, and Roger Stegall. www.sbrownwoodcarving.com
October 19-29,2023 Pensacola Fair
If you do not receive Chip Chats, you may want to consider becoming a member of the National Wood Carvers Association. Dues are $20/year. The magazine comes bi-monthly (although in the time of Covid, it is quarterly). Send your name, address, and dues to:
National Wood Carvers Association
P.O. Box 43218
Cincinnati, Ohio 45243
We have been listed on the ChipChats web site. To access the site, go to www.ChipChats.org. They have updated their website and include listings for shows and events. You can even join the organization on the site. NWCA has sent forms to us to give to members that wish to join. Adelle would be happy to get one to you if you request it.
Are you on Facebook? Our club "Show - and - Tell" carving pictures and the newsletter have been posted recently. It makes me happy to see those pictures. Hopefully there are a few folks out there that will appreciate them and maybe decide that carving might be a hobby they might be interested in.
Wood Pores
by Robert Settich, Woodcraft Supply, LLC 2022
We, as carvers, may not think too much about how wood acts when we put a finish on our carving. But to have the finished carving look good, we must consider where end grain appears on the carving. Robert Settich gives a basic overview of tree structure that will help us decide what we must consider when painting, staining, and placing a finishing coat of lacquer or poly on the carving.
The trunk of a tree is analogous to a bundle of soda straws—a series of tubes that conduct water and minerals up and down the tree. Each growing season, the sap moves throughout the sapwood, the living portion of the tree. In the vascular cambium—a very thin layer between the inner bark and sapwood-the tree creates new cells, increasing the diameter of the tree by one cell width at a time. The first cells of a growing period are called earlywood; subsequent cells for the latewood. Together, they create a growth ring. The outer group of rings are sapwood, the inner, heartwood.
As growth within the tree matures from sapwood into heartwood, profound changes occur at the cellular level. The contents of previously living cells die, and that space may be filled with water, resin, or other biochemical extractives that often give heartwood its darker hue. The basic tubular structure of