Back to the easys

Winding down on the earrings for this year and looking around for more enjoyable things to do. So carving is what I enjoy doing and it sure don't take a lot of wood.

  This piece has been cut out with the scroll saw since early fall and I have changed how I go about carving small things.

Both pieces are from the same size pattern but ended up different sizes from the appearance.....The unfinished piece after I cut out all the pieces I screwed them back on the backer board then took it to the sanders and using both the 1x42" belt sander and the disk and the drum sander I set about rounding all the outside pieces, sloping all the outside pieces...This process only takes a few minutes to give me the general shape you see in the picture...then the little gruves here and there only took one morning. Then the holes all over took a few minutes.... 

  Both styles are okay with me but for the jewelry boxes the rounded edges style seems to go better with the sides of the jewelry boxes...I have no idea as to what anything is called in wood wooking world but just lets me be able to know what I am working on. To stain or color the guy on the right I submerged the whole piece at once..

 The guy on the right has raised holes and this takes longer than the entire piece took to get to the finished piece at this stage of completion.

 None of the carving on the left piece has been sanded except the top edges. The little 1/8" grinding bits, a total of 4 bits did all the grinding and smoothing of all the valleys.. Its the Dremel and the great bits that has made this and enjoyable woodworking pass time. I look back to the 2 sets of bathroom cabinets I built in 2010 and remember it was a pain in the rear. So I then started building clocks and tried to totally forget any flat wood.