Carving and crafts @ your library:

A few weeks from now, the Bear Creek Carving Club will be at the James Kennedy Public Library to display some of their works, demonstrate carving techniques, work on their current projects, and answer questions about carving.  In conjunction with this, the library will have a display of books, magazines, DVDs and videos that you can check out. 

For this article, I wanted to write about a few of the items you can find at the library.  I went to our library catalog to create a bibliography that would put together this list and display.  With our new catalog system, however, I was able to easily locate websites about carving and I want to tell you a bit about that also. 

If you are new to carving, you are probably looking for something on the basics.  A couple of books that might be good to start out with are “Beginning Woodcarving: projects, techniques, tools” which is a collection of the best articles from Woodcarving Magazine, and “Woodcarving: 20 great projects for beginners and weekend carvers” by John Hillyer.  If you would like something visual to help you, the DVD “Carving Techniques and Projects” might be a good place to start.

If you are interested in specific projects, the library has several books of projects.  You can learn about chip carving in “Chip Carving: design & pattern sourcebook” by Wayne Barton; carving animals in “A Woodcarver’s workbook: carving animals with Mary Duke Guldan”; carving from ‘found’ wood in “Whittling Twigs and Branches: unique birds, flowers, trees and more from easy-to-find wood” by Chris Lubkemann, and intarsia in “Easy to Make Inlay Wood Projects – Intarsia : complete patterns and techniques” by Judy Roberts.  The library also has a subscription to “Carving Magazine” which is full of patterns, tools, techniques and new ideas for the carver.  “Ornamental Woodcarving”, “Carving Bears and Bunnies”, “Penknife Carving” and “Carving Texturing and Painting a Pair of Miniature Flying Mallards” are the videos we have available.

If you go to the library catalog, either at the library or at home at www.dyersvillelibrary.org and click on the library catalog link, you can find out which materials the library has to offer.  For this display and article, I typed in “wood carving” and clicked on keyword search.  I received a list of materials that the library owns that include the words “wood” and “carving”, as well as a link to “WebPath Express Results”.  When I clicked on this, I was taken to a page that lists 12 websites about wood carving.  These sites range from the definition of wood carving: “a form of art that includes sculptures, furniture, and architectural design carved into wood” at www.infoplease.com, to a site on wood carving tips and techniques, then to a site on wood carving in Foumban, Cameroon, Africa.    If you aren’t able to come to the library, this is a fun way of learning more about something right from your home.  And these links are to websites that have been viewed by the people hired by our catalog software company to make sure the links are informative and appropriate.