I'm off to the Irish Festival in Dublin, OH

These are the items that I am taking to the Irish Festival in Dublin, OH; August 1-3.

I call this a "Celtic War Knot". The Celts would throw this (2lbs) at the enemy while shouting "Try to find the end" - it sounds more threatening in Galic. Any enemy not struck and killed would immediately sit down to try to figure it out. They would become confused by the shape and could then easily be overcome. (OK, I made this up...)


A "Forest of Life"? - several different "Tree of Life" reliefs with a Green Man (on top not completed), a Celtic Knot and a couple of Shamrocks.


I noticed that the first 4 "Tree of Life" reliefs were a little dramatic (is this the sign of a hard life?) so I made the top one much simpler just in case someone actually did have an easy life.

I'll be at the same stone carving booth as pictured below during ComFest.

Saturday, June 28, 2008 - Comfest - Columbus, OH

My stone carving instructor invited me to Comfest in Columbus, OH. Part of his business is to sell carvings at various events in the Columbus area.

His carving booth is shown below. Notice there are two sides to the booth.

The left side is the "demonstration" side where he sets up carving benches and makes things. People watch the carving and ask questions. I arrived early on Saturday and those are my pieces in front of the booth. "The Fickle Finger of Fate", "The Endless Knot", "The Flower of Life", "The Giant Ear" and a stepping stone piece that I made the day before.

The right side of the booth has finished pieces for sale.

Of course it rained a little but the beer tent people were still happy.

We stayed across the street in the left side of the tarp covered booth. Of course the tarp leaked.

After several hours the rain stopped.

Then things picked up.

Somebody bought "The Endless Knot".

Fickle Finger of Fate

I picked up this long skinny piece of scrap limestone from a friend. At first it didn't seem to be usable. Then I found an abstract version of the flying finger of fate in it.

Here's the layout. The verticle lines are on the "Golden Ratio" line segments (see Wikipedia). This will make the curves "pleasing to the eye"...see also "The Golden Ratio - The Story of PHI. The Worlds Most Astonishing Number" a book by Mario Livio.

I used the angle grinder to rough it out.

Then I knocked off the excess stuff.

After a little refinement with the tooth chisel I'm starting to worry about breaking the finger off.



I have to admit I used a power tool to remove most of the material around the finger. Then rasp, rasp, rasp until to this point.


More rasping and a little sanding and this is it so far. Several of my friends don't see the finger from the pictures. Do you?

Endless Knot

According to Wikipedia:

"The Endless knot or Eternal knot (Sanskrit: Shrivatsa; Tibetan "Dpal be'u") is a symbolic knot found in Tibet and Mongolia. The motif is used in Tibetan Buddhism, and may also be found in Chinese art as one of the Eight auspicious symbols."

I hope I don't offend anyone (or any god) by what I do to this thing...

This stone is large enough for two designs so I'll layout half, carve it, layout the other half, carve that one, then cut the stone in two...at least that was the plan.

Below I've decide what needs to get cut out and have started hacking.

Below, I've kind of traced out the overs and unders with the chisel just in case I make a mistake.

It's difficult to tell but I've deepened the sketchy lines to make the design pop out.

This design was almost done and I started to think about a design to carve in the other half when the awful realization hit me that I could spend a lot of time carving two designs and then screw up one or both when trying to cut the stone in two.

So I decide to cut it in two pieces now using a common circular saw with a masonry blade...maybe not the best choice.

Lessons Learned:
1. Do the cutting outside.
2. Close all doors and windows if near to the house, the dust blows in the windows.
3. Wear protective clothing, breathing mask, full face mask and hat - see Darth Vader in first post.
4. Don't try to cut all the way through the stone in one pass.
5. Don't expect to be able to see the cut line, it will be covered by dust within seconds. Stop and clear it off.
6. Warn the neighbors, they may think the limestone dust cloud created is smoke and call the fire department.

So I cut it in half and I did screw up the other half so I'm glad I didn't carve that side. I used the toothed chisel again on the borders to make the design pop out.

Here's the finished product and also with the "Flower of Life" from the previous post below.

Flower of Life

According to Wikipedia:

"The Flower of Life (commonly abbreviated as FOL) is the modern name given to a geometrical figure composed of multiple evenly-spaced, overlapping circles, that are arranged so that they form a flower-like pattern with a sixfold symmetry like a hexagon. The center of each circle is on the circumference of six surrounding circles of the same diameter..."

Starting to lay out the design - see the picture at they right of my 99 cent compase? This could get complicated!

Here is the layout of the design. Now I need to decide what parts get removed.

I suppose I could have done a negative - where the design is removed - but I decided to do a positive - the parts in between get removed. As I started to remove material the pencil lines started to disappear. Since the design took a rather long time to recreate, I decided to use a diamond tipped Dremel to scratch the design into the stone.

Progress?

Whoops! So the border is screwed up...what to do?

Cover it up with a tooth chizel of course. Here's the final.

Stone Carving - the first year or so.

This first post is to give you a history of a true beginner's story and to bring you to the current day.

A friend of mine and I signed up at the local city recreation center and started attending stone carving class every Thursday night - 6 weeks.

Here I am with the instructor at my first class. He's laying out a Celtic Knot relief for me.

So I borrowed some of the instructors carving tools and began hacking away.

The first class ended and I never really finished that first project. But I learned how to layout a carving and more importantly how to stop cut an edge.

Several weeks later in an abandoned area of the basement in my 83 year old mother's house, I discovered this old wooden storage box.

Fearfully, I opened it (Grandma is still missing).

Inside - stone carving tools that belonged to my long-departed Grandfather on my father's side. Family legend has it that he worked as a stone carver in Chicago during the early 1900's and that he worked on several of the bridges over the Chicago River and maybe the Tribune Building(?). His name is stamped into several of the tools, but most them seem to be stamped with the names of other people.

Here are some of the rusty tools I found.

So armed with Grandfather's tools, I signed up for another class and started carving again.

2007
Frog with Legs (and tongue).

The second thing I made was a frog made from an irregular somewhat rectangular block of Indiana limestone.

This rock came from a local stone works where I found it on the scrap heap. They sell their scrap for $50/ton...just weigh your vehicle going in, load it up (make sure everyone that rode in rides out) and weigh your vehicle going out to calculate the weight - they have a truck sized scale.

The frog rock weighed about 20lbs. so it cost 50 cents.

I didn't set out to carve a frog, in fact, I didn't have an any ideas at all. But I sat there and looked at the stone for a while (it wasn't perfectly rectangular) and I started to see some outlandish frog legs...

May 3, 2007


May 24, 2007 - turns out that a frog's legs are a little different.

May 31, 2007


The finished frog...that's its tongue licking its eye by the way.





August 2007
Megan (the dog) Memorial

I was about finished with the frog and was trying to think of something to carve when a friend of mine was bemoaning the fact that his cocker spaniel, Megan, had just died. He of course had the dog cremated and was planning on burying the ashes outside under a tree with the help of his children.

I asked him if he would like a marker, at least I think I asked him. I think he agreed - he did give me pictures...

Well anyway, here's Megan the cockerspaniel made from a block of travertine, hence the texture. I tryed to portray her as just resting and the unfinished travertine gives it a certain dream-like effect.

This is the front and back of the raw rock...you can see the sleeping dog there.


Starting to find the general shape and the head.


The head is turning out a little high so I added a paw to rest on.



After some filing and sanding the final product.



Late 2007 - Spring 2008
Three Little Pigs

A very good friend of mine likes to go to the state fair every year. Strangely, her favorite thing (other than the food?) is to go to the swine house and watch the mother sow with her piglets. She (my friend) will spend hours there if you let her.

So I decided to carve a pile of piglets for her. Interestingly, it started out to be two piglets but I found the middle one as I was chipping away.

Here I'm half done - trouble with ears and eyes. I made several attempts at eyes but they didn't look right so I filed them down and tried again - the faces where starting to get too skinny so I finally just either covered the eyes with ears or left out the eyes entirely.


The tails turned out to be the subject of the entire piece...

So I think this is the best view of these little piggies.





April 2008 - Giant Ear

My baby sister, who is an audiologist, recently turned 50 years old.

So what better 50th birthday present for an audiologist than a giant ear?

The problem was I only had one week to get it done.

It started out to be a birdbath giant ear but it turns out it can stand up too...so it's still undecided if it's a birdpath (water tends to dissolve limestone) or simply garden "art".

This was the first time I used my new DeWalt 4.5" diamond bladed heavy duty small angle grinder...could be the last too.

I bought this rock for $5 from a local brickyard. They had 4 of them in the scrap heap because they had "misinterpreted" the specs. I thought it was a good deal so I bought two.

Notice that it is deeper in the middle on one side. I originally thought that this would be the drain for the birdbath (the ear canal).

So I flipped the rock over and scretched in the outline of the ear on the other side.




I opened the new grinder and proceeded to make a mess.

No one told me "don't try this at home". Full face mask and respirator are mandatory.

After half the cuts were made in the garage, I moved outside to the back yard and sought the aide of Darth Vader.

Lesson: Grinders turn limestone to dust.


The cuts have been made so I just knocked them off. Then I noticed that if I left the bottom intacted the thing would stand up. The stand was a little messed up but could be salvaged. So now the ear changes from a birdbath to garden "art".

Now it's just a matter of hacking out the stuff that doesn't belong.


Turns out ears in general are far more complicated than I imagined.


Creases lead into folds and folds overlap themselves. I was having a difficult time until I realized that all the creases and folds go around and lean to the hole (ear canal?) and that their main purpose is to support the parts that stick out from the head in order to catch sound waves.



Here's the ear after much sanding and a little more grinding. It still needs work. The model's ear is provided for comparison purposes. Those are the piglets (on the left).