Carving Floral and Molding for the Panel

Flowers and a molding on one board is relief work where blooms, volutes and a shaped profile all share a slab of basswood, roughly 20 mm thick, call it three quarters of an inch. You read the heights off a finished piece before the tool ever touches wood. Then the ground drops around the flowers. Save the profile for late, because its miters have to meet the moldings that arrive after it.

Ever carve a flower you were proud of and then watch the molding beside it come out crooked? Or lost a pencil line you still needed, one pass too deep? Both of those come from the same place, and your hands are not the problem.

Nobody settled the heights before you started. I carved this detail twice, the second one mirrored, and I still kept walking back to the first piece with a pointing machine to check a depth I thought I already knew. My shop was half torn apart that week. I had pulled the sharpening machines out and shifted a tool chest along the wall, because I get tired of looking at the same setup, and there is another four feet of chest running past the edge of the camera that you never see.

Fourteen workshops, one panel detail from a Venice room, and you sit at my bench for all of it. Every measurement, plus the mistakes and how I dug my way out of them.

Five things I settle before I start carving

• Basswood, one board, 19 to 22 mm thick. Four quarter stock is fine. An inch of thickness buys you flowers that stand proud of the ground.
• Heights come off the finished piece with a pointing machine, never off a ruler and a hope.
• A router plane flattens the ground while a flat reference face still exists.
• Clover profile on the molding. Convex, convex, convex, and 19 mm wide on the money.
• Spare wood, roughly a millimeter of it, stays standing at both ends for the miters.
• Flowers get carved from the outside in, every time, no exception.

What is a clover molding?

A clover molding is three convex rolls sitting shoulder to shoulder, and nothing more than that. Nothing hollow in it. Three rolls and that is the lot. Simple, as moldings go, and that suits me here, with this much ornament sitting on top of it.

I put calipers across the finished one to be sure and got 19 mm, dead on, which is 3/4 inch in old money. Calipers are probably my favorite measuring tool in the whole shop.

Here is the part people miss. The molding does not end at the edge of this piece. It turns a miter and runs downhill into the next section, and the section after that. So I left about a millimeter of extra wood standing all around. When the neighboring pieces are carved and the corners get fitted, that millimeter is the room I have left myself to make the corner look right. Leaves crossing a profile get their own course, acanthus over moldings, if you want more of that.

How thick should the board be?

Three quarters of an inch, 19 mm, is what I used, and mine ran a touch over. Anything between 19 and 22 mm carves the same. Four quarter stock in the United States, 20 mm in Europe, either one is right. Reach for a full inch if the blooms should sit even prouder, and the whole detail still lifts out of one board.

Wood here is basswood. Limewood, linden, lipa where I grew up, all names for the same Tilia, whatever the label on the rack says. Try this on a construction two by four and you will spend the evening sharpening instead of carving.

What holds a pierced panel to the bench?

Glue it down to a scrap of plywood with paper in between. Mine was half inch plywood out of the garage, nothing special about it. Between the plywood and the basswood go two sheets of ordinary printer paper, the kind you buy for the office machine, and the whole sandwich is stuck with spray adhesive.

My glue is a Loctite spray, the high performance one. It is not the strongest glue on the shelf, and that is the point. High initial tack, weak final grip, so the carving peels off the plywood at the end without a fight and the paper splits down its own middle. For smaller work I have leaned on photo mount spray for years and never once had a complaint. On a piece this size the Loctite wins.

Now the plywood gets pinned to the bench. I use solid brass pegs by Veritas, and I glued a strip of shoulder leather to the face of each one, because brass will mar basswood the first time it touches it directly. Here the leather is only meeting plywood, so it hardly matters. It matters a great deal the day you clamp straight onto the carving itself.

My bench holes measure 19 mm, being North American. European benches and Festool tables run 20 mm. I have thought about drilling a second row at 20 so I can use either, and I still have not done it.

Why measure before you carve anything?

Copying my own first piece means I do not get to choose the depths. On this one I needed the top of the molding, and the pointing machine gave me half an inch less about a thirty second, call it 12 mm. Another spot read 10 mm, three eighths of an inch. I marked three points on each side, middle, left, right, using my own finger as the fence.

More you measure before the first pass, fewer mistakes you make. I say it in every course, and on this piece I still went back to double check more than once. That same pointing machine is what I reach for on a human face, or on a lion head, where every high spot has to land where it belongs.

How do you pierce a panel without a scroll saw?

A number nine gouge does it, slowly. Stand the tool at 90 degrees, rotate it in place, and a plug lifts out. Rotate again, lift again, and keep going until the hole breaks through the back. Then open it toward the line. On three quarter inch stock the wood gives up quickly. A hand drill works too, several holes side by side, and I used exactly that trick when I found two sections I had forgotten to pierce on the saw.

My scroll saw is a Pegas, and the blade in it is one millimeter across, which is why I can turn inside a shape most blades cannot enter. On a band saw you get the outside perimeter and not much else. So take the outline with the band saw, then attack the trapped triangles from a direction that lets the waste fall out.

One habit worth stealing. Start the saw where the shortest run of waste sits between the blade and your line. Begin anywhere else and you saw straight through a piece of good basswood you were going to use for something. I keep those offcuts.

Which tool comes off the rack at each stage

Where you are	The tool I pick up for it	Its size	What it does to the wood
Bosting the shape	Number seven gouge, as wide as possible	28 mm	Drops the big waste in minutes
Grounding the flowers	Number nine gouge, my grounding workhorse here	10 mm	Walls each bloom in straight down
The flat ground	Router plane, set light and run slow	Wide iron	Holds one height right across it
Hollowing the petals	Number eight gouge, the smallest I own	2 mm	Digs a curl deep for shadow
Opening flower centres	A micro gouge, stood square on top	1 mm	Takes the middle core out first
Blending and cleanup	Number five gouge, turned right upside down	6 mm	Wipes the facets off a surface

None of that is a shopping list. Bigger is better in the bosting stage, so a number seven at 30 or 50 mm beats mine. What matters more than the number stamped on the handle is whether the edge is sharp enough to leave a shiny surface behind it. A dull gouge rubs, tears and makes you hate the day. Sharpen it. I keep an entire course on sharpening because it is the skill that takes longest to own, and there is a separate one on choosing tools if your bench is still filling up.

What makes a petal read from an angle?

Concave, then convex, then concave again, running across the width of the petal. After that comes the move nobody sees from above. The curl rises, drops back on itself, and rises a second time, and the ridge between those moves stays proud. Look straight down at the finished flower and you will barely notice it. Turn it sideways and everything changes, because a deep shadow now sits where a flat leaf used to be.

I excavate that hollow with a number eight at 2 mm, sometimes drop to a 1 mm to go deeper, and undercut it from the back later. During that workshop I hooked my phone up as a second camera so students could watch the profile while I worked. The thing froze on me. Left that in the video, because it happened.

Seven flowers live on this panel. Five are the same flower in different attitudes, and two are built differently on purpose, just to keep the thing interesting. Grinling Gibbons mixed his flowers for the same reason, and if you want a whole course on carving in his manner, the class I taught in Maine is the one. For the flower itself standing alone, try the Venetian flowers rosette.

Why does order matter on a tiny flower centre?

Wrong order and the middle snaps clean off before you have carved a single petal. Each of these centres runs a little under a quarter inch, call it five and a half millimeters, and by the time you get to it there is almost nothing holding it. Think of a combination lock. Know every number, dial them in the wrong order, and the lock stays shut.

Drill the middle first. A one millimeter gouge, stood upright on the face and twisted in place, takes out a core about 6 mm down. Only then do you carve the outer ring in toward that hole, every pass travelling outward to inward, so the whole centre looks like it is pushing outward from the middle. Lower the petals after that, never before. The full sequence sits in the numbered steps below this article.

Attacking from outside toward the middle is the general law here, not a trick for flowers. Carve the other direction and the grain catches, and a break does not stop where you are working. It runs into detail you already finished.

If any of this is landing, the fastest way in is the tuition page. All fourteen workshops of this panel sit inside, along with the rest of the Venice room it belongs to.

Do you sand a carving like this?

Mostly I do not. I really like leaving my relief work with the facets still on it, and sanding takes every one of them off. This particular panel goes into a room under thick primer, twice, and then chalk paint, so half those facets disappear anyway.

Furniture is a different argument. Nothing gets painted, everything gets seen up close, and there I spend longer cleaning. When I do sand I use AbraNet by Mirka, a mesh you can see daylight through. Dust collects inside the net instead of clogging the face, and very little abrasive gets driven down into the wood fibers.

Old carvers mostly skipped sanding because sandpaper did not exist yet. Gibbons did sand, though. He used reed rush, which works out around 400 grit. Give those men sandpaper and I think they would have used it.

Where else can this design go?

Furniture is where I would put it first. Put it on a raised door panel, fielded or flat, and it works straight away. Mirror frames take it, so do picture surrounds, and the molding simply keeps running and wraps down the next side. I built a whole panel that way in the furniture panel course, drawing stage and all. Rearrange the same flowers, the same volutes and the same acanthus and you have a different composition by dinner time.

The style is Venetian, out of Venice itself, and by the eighteenth century it had travelled north and settled into furniture all over Europe. Chalk was used all over Europe too. Whole houses in Italy, in Germany, in Ukraine and Russia were finished in it, ground into water and brushed straight on, and the rain washed a good deal of it off every year. Modern chalk paint carries binders those people never had. It stays matte and chalky, with no sheen at all, and it does not run down the wall in a storm.

Two pieces came off my bench, mirrored, and they are not symmetrical, not really. Look at the movement on the left of the first one against the right of the second and you will see it. I like that they do not match. If you are earlier on than this, start with first cuts for beginners or the design principles course, then come back here. A full map of where to begin sits waiting as well.

Shall we carve?