Stone Carving and Letter Cutting
A lovely article was published in The Gloucester Citizen and Echo today, Saturday 9th, however they wrote in it that I am celebrating my 1st anniversary this year. I am in fact celebrating the 5th anniversary of my business on November 22nd!
I will be having a celebratory offer available and obviously a party!! Watch this space for more details.
Well time is marching on and my sculpture is progressing very well.
The unveiling ceremony takes place at the magnificent Lower Slaughter Manor, on the 10th October.
There will be a Champagne reception at 7pm, I will be giving a talk and demonstration and there will be a late supper provided by the excellent head chef. Tickets are £45 per person for more information and booking details please visit www.lowerslaughter.co.uk
There is a wonderful write up in this months edition of The Cotswold Style magazine.
I also will be placing some more of my sculptures around the hotel and the beautiful grounds. These will be available to buy.
I look forward to meeting you at this very exciting event!
I will be taking part in a few craft fairs in the coming months.
Sunday 19th September, 12:30-3:30 at The Bishops Cleeve Tithe Barn, This is a craft and farmers market.
I will also be here on the 17th Oct, 21st Nov and 19th December at the same times.
For more information visit www.cleevetithebarn.org.uk
26th September 11am-4:30pm at The Wharf House, Over. Nr Gloucester. This is an open day to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the restoration of the canal basin at Over. The day is to help raise money for the canal trust, a charity that concetrates on the Gloucester-Hereford Canal.
For more information visit www.h-g-canal.org
On Sunday 10th October, I will be giving a talk and demonstration to celebrate the unveiling of a piece of sculpture specially designed and carved from Cotswold stone for the beautiful gardens at Lower Slaughter Manor. Tickets are £45 per person and include a champagne reception, the talk I will be giving, a group supper prepared by their new Head Chef Stuart Ralston, with accompanying wine, coffee and petit fours.
For more information or to book your place at this very exciting and special event, please visit, www.lowerslaughtermanor.co.uk email, info@lowerslaughtermanor.co.uk or simply ring 01451 820456
Have a look in the September issue of The Cotswold Style for a special article featuring myself and Lower Slaughter Manor. Sadly this event has had to be cancelled due to poor ticket sales.
I look forward to seeing you at one of these events!
As you can see since my last post on this sculpture, it is really coming on!
I have been nibbling my way through the stone to create windows, these allow the light through and make you want to climb inside and explore!!
Carving this has reminded me of all the shells and pebbles that I have found on the beach, with all the imperfections and hollows.
We used to explore the caves in the white cliffs on the Kent coast-left by the smugglers. As I was peering up through the stone this afternoon all these memories came flooding back!
It is exciting to see my inspiration coming out in my carvings and I can’t wait to see this finished!!
This year, I decided to step outside my comfort zone and work a geometrically constructed Nautilus shell. I used the spiral designed by Descartes and Bernoulli in 1638, shown in the second drawing. This is much more pleasing and true to form than the spiral which is based on Fibonacci’s Golden Numbers-shown in the first drawing, 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34 etc
The first thing I had to do was to set up the spiral so that it would fit comfortably into a 300mm x 200 x 200 cuboid of stone. Once I transferred the shape to the surface of the stone and then worked off a series of chamfers to create the smooth curved outer shape.
Saturday was a very long and hard day, in order to stay on track I had to remain disciplined and focused. Once I had created the outer shape of the shell I then had to smooth the surface of the stone, this was very difficult as the stone was very hard and brittle and several areas had plucked out as I was carving.
After having spent 12 hrs carving on Saturday with few breaks I needed to have a good nights sleep!!!
Back to work at 8am on Sunday morning, having finished the outer surface shape of the shell, I was able to concentrate on the air chambers of the cross section-thankfully I was getting used to the brittle nature of the Wormsworth Magnesian Limestone and was able to create beautiful sharp features.
The auction was due to start at 3pm so time was of the essence, I didn’t want to appear rude to the ever inquisitive public so I tried to answer their questions as best I could and keep working at the same time!!
Thankfully I was able to finish my carving, hope you like it!
