Any suggestions?

[Joe V]

I'm not the best carver but I have a 4 postered bed to carve and I need some suggestions.
My customer wants wisteria carved onto the posts but wisteria are small dainty flowers in a bunch like grapes. Is ther some way I can enlarge them and make fewer of them and get by with it. Whats a good solution?

Joe V

[AlArchie]

Have you asked them about using dogwood flowers or wild roses. Both are similar blooms to the wysteria, but more in the line of single blossoms. You could easily group these into more practical carvings.

Al

[wade clark]

Find a simple pattern of the flower, leaves and vine, something that could be repeated easily. Then practice carving each of those on scrap wood...do a dozen of the flowers before you do one on the bed. If you can find a pattern that's basically 6 or so cuts to make the flower recognizable, you could carve them all and then go back and make each one a little different after they were basically carved. You could do maybe 3 different flower angles too. The vines could be free-formed in and make the whole carving look free-formed. You could do the leaves in a similar approach to the way the flowers were done. Wysteria leaves should be a breeze.
Sounds like a great project! Are you starting with an already built bed or doing it "from scratch"?

[Callynne]

Joe, do you happen to have a printer/scanner that you can increase and decrease the pattern size? That's what I have (HP's all in one.....love it!! ). If so, what I would do, would be to print out the size pattern I'm comfortable to work with. Print a couple copies, then cut out individual flower clusters, leaves and vines and arrange them into the pattern you want.

Tape it together and rescan. You should be able to come up with a grouping that is more what you want. Good luck, please post some pictures, we'd love to follow your progress! Deborah

[Joe V]

This is a new bed.
Thw wisteria flower is in a bunch with many little blooms in it, how can I make this simpler?

[Thomp]

is this a positive carving or negative??


what i mean is are you going to reduce the post to make the flowers stick out or are you going to just carve the nevative image into the bed post?

grouping of many flowers in a negative will leave less detail to have to carve...


another thought,
on ask this old house they were working with some applicay fancy moldings with flowers, the flowers were made of some clay looking material they glued on and heated to cure ...
but it depends on the look your after.
you could carve the flowers out of thin wood like tuplo soak it and form it to fit the bedposts.. you can tye a knot in tuplo when its soaked right.

probobaly lots of useles words if your really trying to make a standard carving, but its some ideas...