School Fall 2010

So Michelle and I are in school right now, I in my senior year at UW and Michelle in her last year of her Masters program there as well. So I thought I would tell you about my classes. I'm taking Northwest Coastal Indian 2D art. It all about learning the shapes and forms of Coastal Indian art and involves a lot of drawing and is super fun. Its been about 8 years since I've taken an art class, and I love it. I'm taking an intro to American Indian Studies class. It's required for my AIS minor and is very laid back and broad and . . . well . . . easy. But the best class by far is Wood Carving. It's taught by the same teacher that teaches my 2D art class. He is an Indian artist that lives locally and has been teaching for years. He only teaches these two classes and teaches them both every quarter. He is also a curator at the Burke Historical Museum.

For the Wood Carving class, the first project was make an adze, a traditional wood carving tool. First we went to the Pratt Fine Arts Center and received a piece of steel that used to be a suspension strut for truck. It was cut into 6" strips and trimmed to about 1 1/2" wide. We then used a trench forge, hammer, tongs, anvil, grinders and sanders to make it a blade.

Then we were given a trimmed tree branch to make into a handle that we de-barked and shaped. Then we used hose clamps to fasten the blade to it.

From there our teacher cut down a tree (alder) and cut it into 14" tall rounds. He brought them to class where we partnered up, picked a round and used a froe (a long thin wedge attached at a right angle to a handle at one end) to split the round in half. then we took our round, measured out a rectangle on one side, and then using squares and yard sticks to transfer the rectangle to its exact mirror on the other end.

Then using the froe, we cleaved the round at the edges of our rectangle.

Then used our adze to square up the block.

We are now tracing our sketches for our ladle (our second project), on the sides and then top and bottom and using the adze to trim away the excess wood. After that, we use straight knives and crooked knives to carve from there. Its really awesome.