Cat's Eye Carving

Commissioned gifts

Here are some photos of carvings I was commissioned to do at the end of last year.

A gentleman got in touch and wanted me to carve a poem he had read out at his God-Daughters wedding, unfortunately it would have been a very large piece of slate and ultimately more than he had budgeted for so he chose a line from the poem and I carved this in a beautiful piece of welsh slate roof tile-this helped to keep the weight down as it is only approximately 1/4 inch thick.

As you can see I have used a slightly italicised style of lower case letters, no paint was needed as it was clearly legible. This commission cost £75.

This Green Man was commissioned as a Christmas present and will be built into a house that is being constructed very near to Loch Ness!!
I chose Portland limestone as it has very small close grained particles, it is hard and takes fine carving, it is also a good weathering stone.

It couldn’t be too big, not only for budget reasons but also because it was being taken on a plane! It is 5 inches square and 41/2 inches deep. The rule of thumb when building something into the wall is to have 4 inches behind the wall line.

Because it was being built into the wall I over-carved the detail in the leaf to help add shadow so that it would be visible from the ground, obviously I couldn’t carve too much into the stone as it was on a small scale and too much detail can often ruin a carving.
This commission cost £145

The final photos are of a birdbath that I was commissioned to do in November, my clients were on their way back to Wales and called in to Taurus Crafts for a break, they stumbled upon my workshop and explained what they wanted- a rough boulder hollowed out to create what would look like a natural rock pool on their newly constructed rockery. Well some of you may be familiar with my rockery birdbaths and so I suggested that they have a look at my website at some of the previous pieces.
It was great to get a phone call from them telling me that they would like to commission one, I had a few boulders in my stock and picked out one that I had been saving for just this type of carving. As you can see the rock has the beautiful grey and red layering which looks so beautiful when carved into particularly when it is wet.

Hollowing out this stone is particularly hard work so I employed my angle grinder, my woodpecker and finished off with my tungsten carbide tipped bull nose chisels. This commission cost £275.