This is post 11 for the year. Unfortunately this is week 16 so I'm behind a bit. I'll see what kind of plan is the best for catching up, I imagine doubling up every other week is the best plan.
Visual progress is important. It inspires me. Carving my first carving (a rabbit made from a carrot) was quick and easy. The whole thing probably took an hour at most. As I made each cut large features of the rabbit quickly came into focus. This was his head. These were his forepaws and his haunches. The rough outline took very little time and a lot fewer cuts than I would have thought.
Then I decided to work on a bird. My first attempt was going to be from a block of basswood. The block was way too big. So I took a branch pruning saw and cut a small subsection off. It was still way too big. I started working on the project but after an hour of work I had barely rounded off the edges of the block. I hadn't made any appreciable progress towards the shape of the bird in my head.
Luckily I went to hang out with some friends of mine. One of them has a very nice woodworking shop and he cut some small blocks out of a piece of scrap wood for me. I remember distinctly he kept asking me if the pieces were small enough. He really pressed me and I'm glad he did because I wanted much smaller blocks than what he had originally cut.
But I felt like I was cheating. The progress was huge and it was taking a matter of a minute rather than the painstaking hours I thought it would take. I felt like the carving wouldn't count. It wouldn't be the product of hours of work (it ended up taking quite a few don't worry) and so I felt like I wasn't really 'learning to carve'. Throw in the use of power tools and I start to feel like this bird was going to be cheap and tawdry.
When I went back to work on my new smaller pieces it was still rough going. It took me probably around four to five hours to carve the bird. I still need to sand and finish it and I estimate that will take another hour or so. This time though I could start to see the progress I was making. Even after an hour I could see the block starting to move vaguely toward the shape of the bird. The closer I got the more excited I became. I started wanting to spend more and more time on the carving.
After I 'finished' the bird I realized I wasn't happy with the shape. Staring at it I realized not only what I wanted to do but what kind of cut I needed to use to get it done. In the span of a few hours spent working I had started to learn how to look at the problems in carving. Seeing that progress in my ability to evaluate a particular piece was even more exciting than seeing the progress in the shape of the bird.
I ended up talking to my wife about the idea of hand made goods versus mass produced goods over our vacation and she pointed out that we as a society value time very highly. If someone puts a lot of their time into crafting something we value it more highly even if it is physically indistinguishable from a mass produced version.
But I don't want to make things needlessly difficult. I don't feel more productive or accomplished if I add busy work to a project to pad out the hours it takes to complete. So I think it's a finer distinction of time spent in careful crafting and consideration of the task at hand.
Ultimately visual progress in both forms (progressing projects and improving skill set) are important motivators for me. Both inspire me to put in more time and increase my enjoyment from the task at hand. People are intended to create. Each us, no matter how deeply buried, have an instinct to create. One of the most saddening things to me about living in a consumption based culture is that so many people don't take the time to cultivate our ability to create.
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