For God and Country.

I hope everyone had a great Christmas Day and New Years!

I decided to embark on a new project this week inspired by the project that I did for Mrs Flying WoodShop's Christmas present (pictured below).

I'm nearing completion of a large version of the same Celtic cross above. Again, I'm carving in poplar and I'm doing this [almost] entirely by hand. On this one, I used the band saw to cut the shape of the cross and then the disk and belt sander to clean up the edges. I also used the router to bring down the level of the circle behind the cross (this circle is called a nimbus or a halo and symbolizes sanctity or holiness) before carving the smaller Celtic knots.

This is a picture of the cross as it is today. I've been working on it for a couple of days and should finish it up tomorrow. I was trying to figure out whether I would stain it or do the torch treatment. I did a test piece with stain and it looked just okay. I think I'll do a very light torching to bring out the contrast in levels before applying the clear polyurethane finish.

For those interested in the carving tools I've been using, you can see several in the photo. The red-handled tools are little files that I got on Amazon. They came in a pack of 10 of various shapes and I think it ran me about $8 for the set. I'm very happy with those. I've also been using straight bench chisels, but the vast majority of the work has been done using the carving chisels/gouges that I built the stand for (bottom right of the photo).

Thanks for reading and I'll post more as the project progresses.