Cat's Eye Carving

St James the Great in Staple.

My job takes me out and about.
Today, I went to my village church to look at a potential commission. I’ve been asked to clean and re-carve some memorial tablets.

While there, I decided to have a look around, something that I haven’t done since I was much younger,

There are some great slate notices explaining why things have been left or what is going on to help nature and the churchyard.

There are alot of old beautiful carved tablets and tombs, some have been laid down before they fall down.

I rather like this carving next to this wonderful drainage hopper.

Don’t forget the wonderful things that are on your doorstep, read the memorials, look at the carvings and wonder at who came before us.

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Creative Careers Day.

I spent Friday inspiring young adults with stonemasonry.

East Kent College in Dover in conjunction with the Maison Dieu ran a creative careers café, the students could choose which activity they would participate in and there were also tours of the college.

I was invited to run stonemasonry activities and decided to give a basic introduction to the fundamental tools used.

I took my tools, stone, drawings, photos and my old course notes.
There were four sessions of 45 minutes and each group had a go at the basics of stonemasonry, I also showed them how to draw an Ellipse using the trammel method, this is a great introduction to technical drawing as you only need paper, a ruler and a pencil.

I demonstrated the basics of stonemasonry, using draft, claw and bolster chisels and then they all got to try their hand. Each group was split in two so they had roughly 15 minutes on each activity.

The morning was two groups of school children and in the afternoon I had two groups from the college. They were all studying different subjects, but being given the opportunity to share my career story and my passion for stonemasonry was fantastic.

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House signs.

These two are the very latest commissions, very different house signs but carved with the same care.

Designing a house sign can take a few tries, as finding out what my customer doesn’t want helps me identify what they would like.

The second image is whimsical and has a toy like hare, whereas the first image is more formal with the mystical moongazing hare, this is the one my customer liked but I needed to make the snout shorter.

3 Rectory Orchard was more straight forward as my customer liked a previous commission.

I currently have a 5 month waiting list so please get in touch if you would like to discuss your project.

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Commissions

This is one of my latest commissions. I was asked to carve something unique to celebrate a wedding that took place in Bali. This is hand carved and painted out of a piece of Forest of Dean sandstone, with the national flower of Bali and holes for tealights.

3 Rectory Orchard will be my first commission of the new year.

Harecroft with the whimsical font wasn’t right for my customer so I re-drew it, the font is right but I need to make the nose of the Hare shorter, it doesn’t look quite right.

Each house sign is drawn from my imagination, so I don’t always get it right first time.

This is the next one on my list, but this is just a rough draft and I need to get the spacing and size of some of the letters redrawn.

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Greenman carving

I finished my Greenman carving today, he’s got a real old grumpy look about him, but in a good way, maybe it’s just because I’m fed up with the weather and it’s coming out in my carving. He He He.

Here’s a video from my youtube channel and the finished photos.

This is roughly 25 hours work and costs £1200

There’s a mouse tucked in one side and a bird on the other.

I hope you like him, there’s two hares coming next 🙂

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