All carved.

 All carved.

Down to the ground.

 The ground on this is sloping.

Let the real carving begin.

From Beer to Lime with a few pricks on the way.

The original carving is in a local church, and is made from Beer Freestone. It is a chalk limestone and is creamy grey white in colour. I am putting oak to the side for this one and using limewood (Tilia Cordata) as it is closer in colour. I also want to get used to using lime as I have just bought 5 logs of the stuff for some large sculpture! It behaves very differently from oak, but allows for greater detail, as indeed does Beer Freestone.

The swirling renaissance style of the original is complex, so I am using a method I haven't used on carving before; drawing out the design on paper and then 'pricking through', to transfer the design to the limewood board.

Then using gouges to join up the dots.

Before starting the long way down to the sloping ground. At it's deepest, 15mm or 19/32". Limewood is more brittle than oak, and more care needs to be taken.

Plank and muntin job now completely finished.

One final trip to Dorset. A last few finishing touches.

There's a fair bit of Devon oak gone into restoring this screen. Then there's the internal windowsills.

The ledge doors with rosehead nails.

New treads for the stairs.

And various other bits and pieces. The whole house is much more in keeping now for a grade 2* 16th century building. Just what it deserves. A pleasure to work on. More of the same please,

Pew end panels finished

 

More pew fun

 

Happy days!

Jack in the Green....in the Pew

 Some people call it Devon, some call it Exeter, whatever......it's my favourite carving style.

For me, it goes from 1480-ish through to 1700-ish. Tudors and Stuarts from Henry and Henry, through to William and Mary. She died of smallpox in 1694, he in 1702, after a fall from his horse. For all the harm they caused and all the good they failed to do, a lot of the carving in Devon's churches survived. 550 years, 22 generations and here am I trying to connect with those carvers of Devon, by carving what they carved.

It's a lot of hard graft, for which they may have been paid very little. Oh joy!

And the carpentry.