power strop to go

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2012

 More work done today on my new carving stand including a way to power hone my tools for those scary sharp edges that cut wood as if it were butter.

My carving stand was built using a "hide-a-horse", lightweight (7lbs) folding saw horse. I love it, it sets up in seconds but folds up into a very small package easy to store under a bed or in a closet.

Watch the video on this link to see how it works http://hideahorsefoldingsawhorses.com/

 A proper tool stand was made to fit. It is screwed to the base plate, not to the saw horse. The screws allow me to take this carving stand apart and flat pack it. If I wanted to I could then  put the pieces of the stand (minus the saw horse) into a suitcase and fly away with it.  I put T-nuts into the back side of the plywood to hold the vise and used plastic knob screws to go into the T-nuts. That make it fast to take apart but still strong. I have put cork sheeting on the underside so the tool stand so it can be used on its own on a table or desk.

I put a layer of thin adhesive backed cork sheeting over the magnetic, stainless steel knife bar. I purchased the bar from my local Ikea store but they can also be found on Amazon or Ebay.  The length of the bar is what determined the size of my carving stand. I like the stand to be that long because it keeps the C clamps that attach the stand to the sawhorse, desk or table top from hitting my knees. Also it gives me lots of room for hanging up carving tools. The cork sheeting is shelf liner from the Contact brand. You can find it in hardware, home center stores and places such as Walmart.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2012

Another chore today was mounting a honing disk onto a mandrel so I could use it in my battery powered drill motor. This kind of mandrel can be found in hardware stores. The honing wheel is made by gluing layers of mat board together.  Be sure to carefully cut the circles so you don't have to do a lot of sanding to true up the disk surface after the glue is dry. Use the motor turning against a sanding block. But to get that chore done even faster turn it with the drill motor against a running power sander.

Add captionphoto copyright Karin Corbin 2012

 The green color on the wheel is honing compound. The wheel does not need to be charged with compound very often, it last a good long while.

Where the Wild Things Live

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2012

The good thing about travel is all the interesting local characters you meet. This weekend I am doing a bit of international travel. Not all that far from home, it is only two  hours of a drive from Seattle to the city of Vancouver British Columbia, Canada. It has been a few years since I took a leisurely trip here with no agenda other than having a fun and interesting time.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2012

Can't you just hear this big guy saying "let the wild rumpus begin"?

Look closely at him, each of the horns on his head has a face carved into it.

These photos were taken at the Museum of Anthropology.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2012

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2012

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2012

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2012

The scale of the items in the museum ranges from massive on down to tiny miniatures. The collections have a broad range. The majority of the museum collection is focused on North West, pacific coast native art. However there are hand made items of many types from all over the world. There is also a section of the museum devoted to early European Pottery.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2012

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2012

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2012

Outside in the "back yard" are recreations of dwellings. Many swallows were busy swooping around the hill and over the pond.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2012

The Austrian  tiled stove from the museum's ceramics collection. There are also rooms full of beautiful baskets, Greek pottery and of course thousands of carvings in display cases and drawers.

I am staying at a hostel on the campus of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. What a great location, just a few blocks from the Anthropology Museum. Right next to the hostel is a lovely Japanese Garden. For only $33.00 a night I have a nice private room in an incredible location. It is an easy scenic, waterfront hugging, 20 minute drive into downtown Vancouver. The whole of the campus is beautifully landscaped and it is surrounded by a huge regional park with hiking and biking trails. How often do you get a location to stay that is forest, waterfront and right in the middle of a major metropolitan city? This certainly does not feel like traveling on a small retirement budget! Today I am heading to the dollhouse miniature show that is being held in Vancouver this weekend.But first comes a short hike in the Universities Botanical Garden followed by breakfast at a waterfront park.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2012

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2012

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2012

dragon of the day

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2012

Today's practice carving, 2.5" wide from pear wood. I am on a dragon kick this week, a few more to go before I move on to other objects. This dragon design is based on the classic S scroll style with some foliate details. His head is one end of the S, the tail the other. If you look at the dragon from the other day you will see it is also based on an S scroll layout as are quite a few carved panels. http://karincorbin.blogspot.com/2012/04/there-be-dragons.html

I am using up some pieces of pear wood from the end of the slab where there are cracks from the wood drying. It makes good practice wood, the pieces are not too small, not too large.

The antiquing is done using a couple of colors of stain. The first coat is lighter in tone and the second coat is some old thick, dark walnut stain. Lighter stain first keeps the piece from absorbing too much of the dark. Rub it on, wipe some off, wipe more on, hit it with a heat gun, wipe more off and on, etc. It is a random kind of process, not carefully controlled or thought out but it is still effective.

There be dragons

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2012

Today's carving practice piece made with pear wood. Width is 2.5 inches.

make a stropping wheel

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2012

Over the last couple of days I built a homemade stropping wheel for sharpening my carving tools. It makes them incredibly sharp, even the very tiny 1mm and .5mm gouges can be sharpened to a razor sharp edge with this wheel. There is no risk of overheating or burning the small tools. It will remove any minor nicks as well. A local carving teacher told me how to make this wheel.

The cost is low and the materials are easy to come by. The material the wheel is made from is mat board. Yes, it is the mat board you find at art supply stores and framing shops. You adhere layers of it together with a PVA glue such as Elmers. Be sure you cut accurate circles so you don't have to spend a lot of time shaping it into a true circular surface after you mount it to a motor. I did the final shaping of my wheel with a coarse grit sanding block while the motor was spinning the wheel. The sanding to a true circle creates a lot of fine dust so I used a vacuum cleaner nozzle right next to my sanding area to collect the dust. Don't forget to wear a dust mask! After the wheel is trued you can put honing compound on it.

I used 8 layers of double thick mat board in this wheel. I put weights on the stack of mat board disk while the glue set to prevent voids in the layers. Getting voids is a defect that will spoil the effectiveness of the wheel.

I have glued my new stropping wheel onto a plywood disk screwed to a faceplate so I could spin it with my lathe. It is very important to look at the photo above to see how the wheel should be turning in relationship to the tools you are sharpening. I am standing on the backside of my lathe while I am sharpening my carving tools to get the correct spin direction.

What a difference using this wheel is making in my work. I can't get my carving tools this sharp with hand stropping on leather. The tools now glide through the cuts with little effort or pressure leaving a nicely polished surface. I hear that lovely ssssstt noise as the tools cut. The noise that only happens when you have razor sharp cutting edges with polished bevels.

transfering images

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2012

Using carbon paper to transfer images to wood is a common method. However the layers of paper and carbon tend to shift and when working with miniatures it is even more difficult to control.

Thin pencil leads break or else the lines keep getting wider as the pencil wears down. Also the paper the image is printed on can tear when drawing on it if you press firmly.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2012

So now I cut a small piece of carbon paper, cut the image to size and use clear cello packaging tape to hold those two items together covering complete over the paper leaving the tape wide enough to stick the image to the surface I am working on.

Instead of a pencil I use a metal scribe held at a slight angle so the point glides along on the surface of the packaging tape. Packaging tape is pretty tough stuff but it does remove without any trouble from the surface of the wood.

The end result is very nice image transfers with good dark lines and it is quickly done because there is no shifting or fussing.

practice, practice, practice

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2012

This pattern is really hard to cut because of all the curves, it frustrates me to do them because I can't get the big curves as even as I would like them to be. My hands are simply not yet fully trained for carving movements but day by day I am gaining on it.

This piece was from a piece of the free walnut wood I got the other week, nice and dark and the grain is OK, it carves nicely too. I think I will start making some trinket boxes out of the better practice pieces. One of these days I will have something good enough to use for furniture in my miniature cottage project. I need one or two chest, a table, dish cupboard, chairs, a bed, etc.

I have had to make a few more carving chisels, wish I had some more smaller gouges too. I had to switch out to my larger magnifying lamp and even the short pear handled gouges hit the lens. Always something to frustrate me while making miniatures...

tudor rose

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2012

I am not yet close to being good enough at carving to satisfy my personal standards anytime soon but I am getting better at small scale carving. This rose is .75 inches side to side, I want to be able to make it perfect at half that size by the end of the month. I did not get in very many hours of practice in the last week so I was pleased to see any improvement when I made this carving last night. Spending time watching video carving lessons has helped despite the lack of practice just as the teacher in the videos said it would. The only problem is I kept falling asleep watching the videos.

In the photo above is a wax carving tool I modified to be similar to the shape of a Ray Gonzales Hooked Skew Chisel The shape of his skew chisel intrigued me and there are many good reviews about it. However it does not come in a size for carving small scale miniatures so I decided to give it a go to make one. After I modified the shape I took it to my neighborhood knife maker for a professional sharpening. The tool looks bigger than it is as it was much closer to the camera than the carving.

I really like this little tool, it does a great job of detailing in tight spaces. The curve keeps the tips from digging in when using it for background cutting. It can also be used as a scraper for smoothing out problem areas. The cutting edge is 7mm from tip to heel. I would like to have more of a hooked point at the heel but that will have to wait until I have my knife guy custom make me one from high carbon, high quality steel that will hold an edge for a long time.

Cherry spoon finished!

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2012

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2012

My little spoon is done! If you click on the photo to enlarge it you will see how perfect the grain of the Flowering Cherry tree branch was for the project. Such a lovely piece of wood. The final carving and finish work is done with the edge of the knife using a scraping motion that goes with the grain direction. Shearing the wood leaves a smoother finish than sanding.

Time to get back to carving practice with pear wood and some medieval designs.

Cherry spoon

A miniature spoon made from a freshly cut branch of Flowering Cherry.

Driving along the street yesterday I saw a pile of branches sitting by the road waiting for the yard waste recycling pickup day. The branches are green wood, they were only cut a few days ago.

I have been following some articles on carving full sized spoons. They all say to work the wood when it is freshly cut as it easy to carve then. And so it is....
At this small size there seems to be no danger of splitting while drying. The surface is rapidly drying as the carving is being done.

Most of the work was done with a knife. I only used a gouge to scoop out some of the bowl material. I did the basic carving last night and after air drying all day I did the finish sanding tonight. You can't sand a wet surface without getting a lot of fuzz. I used a diamond coated, ball shaped, burr to help sand inside the bowl.

The Flowering Cherry branch was very fine grained. It does leave some pink color near the bark when peeling it and also some pink by the pith when I split the branch. But most of that fades away as the surface air drys. Any kind of species of fruit tree pruning should work for making a miniature spoon. But the base of the branch needs to large enough in diameter the spoon fist onto one half of the diameter plus some extra as you have to avoid the pithy center.

Time to get out the magnifying lenses and do the final touch up on my spoon. You all know by now that the macro photography reveals all the flaws, tiny things you can't see without high magnification. The transition between handle and spoon is too thick, overall the spoon needs more to be thinner, more delicate looking. Chunky looking miniatures are rarely going to work in a miniature setting other than a child's dollhouse.

Get out your pruning tools and head outdoors!

Celtic Heart

Once a month I get together with a few girlfriends to play with miniatures. We take turns hosting the gathering. This month I hosted the group at my workshop. The projects we choose vary, sometimes we work independently other times someone will suggest a project to share. I offered to show them how to do some miniature sized carvings and since Valentines Day is coming up I chose a heart design from a Dover Publishing book of Celtic Designs.

I had a piece of poplar wood that was cut thin and wide enough to fit the design. I have stained my piece to look like old English Oak for no particular reason other than I felt like it. After I was done carving the piece I cut around the outside edges with a jeweler's saw.

I might turn this project into a necklace or maybe I will put a pin on the back of it. I suspect I suspect it will become a random, surprise gift for someone on Feb. 14th. Maybe my favorite barista will be the one to end up with it.

I used Dockyard brand miniature carving tools for this project. They come in sets or as individual pieces. The sizes range from 1.5mm up to a 5mm width. Two are two issue I have with the Dockyard chisels, first is they don't hold a sharp edge for very long and second there are no shallow or medium sweeps available on these U gouges, only a full half circle, what is called a deep sweep, is available. This really limits what you can carve with them unless you grind them down to create a shallower sweep. A better option for much higher quality made miniature sized carving tools is to buy Ashley Iles block cutting gouges. Available in the USA from www.toolsforwoodworking.com.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2012

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2012

It is a trick to sharpen a tool that small. The chisels are easy enough to deal with but the gouges used to be a challenge for me. However I just learned a trick that makes it easy. Take a piece of softwood such as pine or basswood and use the gouge to carve a groove into the wood. Each size of gouge gets its own custom groove. Put some honing compound in the groove and use a pull stroke on the gouge to polish the beveled edge at a 20 degree angle. The honing compound quickly brings up a lovely mirror like polished surface and it creates a razor sharp edge. On the side edge of the block turn the chisel over and use the inside curve against the wood to carve a matching shape and use it to burnish the inside edge to remove any burrs left from the honing process.

As you are carving and the carving tools start to feel a bit dull give then a few strokes on the honing block and they will be sharp once again. No need to regrind these tiny tools if you take good care of them.

Light check = OK to go

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

My lighting for the box bed seems to be good enough that I can go ahead and put a roof on it.  I can see into the box bed from a dark dollhouse interior;  it won't be overly bright once there are lights in the rest of the dollhouse and there are still shadows inside the box bed.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

There is enough light to see the carved baby bed looking into the little window in the box bed.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

I can also see the carved baby bed from the outside the dollhouse looking through big window on the front of the dollhouse.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

There are some white light bright spots on the walls up at the top of the room from the spot light but that won't be possible to see once the roof goes on.

For my test I took one wire from each of the lights, twisted the bare ends of wires to form a pair of wires. That made two pairs, you could call one a positive pair and the other negative if that terminology makes more sense to you. I then put one of the pairs under the screw on a small terminal block and then the other pair went on the strip next to it. The other side of the terminal strip has a wire under it that comes from a 12 volt transformer. If you look closely at the terminal block you will see that there is a divider in the middle that prevents the negative and positive pairs from coming into contact with each other. If they contacted it would create a short circuit and blow the fuse  in the transformer. As long as you keep your pairings from getting mixed up you will find that dollhouse wiring is very straight forward and very easy to do. One wire from a light bulb goes to one bundle, the other wire from the light goes into a different bundle. You can color code those wires coming off the light bulb, just make one of them black with a felt tip marker if you like. If you enlarge the photo you will see where I have used a black marker on the ends of one of the pairs.

So wherever you make joins all the wires in one bundle would be black, all the wires in the other bundle would be white. They must never make bare wire contact between white bundle and black bundle. Color coding will make visible and simple to understand what is happening and very easy to avoid mistakes. Just remember you never want both wires coming from a light bulb ending up in the same bundle on its way to the transformer. If you can keep that very simple rule straight in your head then you can successfully wire a dollhouse and get everything to light up. White to white, black to black, never mix them up in the same bundle.

Little by little

The box bed room is now glued to the side of the main house wall. I have finally made a commitment that says no more major changes can be done to the inside of the box bed.

Still fighting that chest cold and it is really limiting how much energy I have for working on the dollhouse. But I am making some progress if only 10% of what I would hope to be doing. I hesitate to bludgeon my art work with a cold's huge deficit of patience and lack of the required imagination that drives the creative process. I don't have the whole project planned out in every detail, I let the house "speak to me" as I go. I know the general direction I am heading but make thousands of decisions along the way.

I was complaining to Don about how long it was taking me to create this bed shed. He replied, no longer than building the real thing which is  what you are doing. That is a valid point as there are just as many pieces of paneling, just as many window trims and such. Also you have to consider I need to create my own paneling, it is not something I run to the lumber store and buy needing only to be cut to length. I have worked on projects like this in real life houses and Don is right, it takes about the same amount of time but the illogical part of me says it should only take 1/12 the time.

I had a funny little shed room like this on a real life house I lived in a few years ago. It was part of a bedroom but I never thought to turn it into a box bed. It did not have a sloped ceiling  as it was built under a deck for the room above. It did have a salvaged window in it. That was also the house where I setup my first workshop for making miniatures buildings. It was an interesting home, there was even a widow's walk up on the roof for viewing ships passing by out on Puget Sound.

Back to work, the photos above have shown me some things I need to touch up.

Ready to install

The Celtic knot carved panel is complete and ready to install as soon as the finish is dry.  Now I had better get all the support pieces that hold it in place glued into the box bed and painted.

This is a sneak preview of the type of details I will be putting on my line of  furniture for dollhouses that  I will eventually make and sell. It can be used in cabins, bungalows, cottages, fairy houses, witches cottages, Santa's workshops, castles and houses of many other eras including Arts and Crafts and today's homes. Timeless is a good description for it.

Quick start carving

I have started work on the front panel of the box bed cradle. Continuing the theme of sailors and ropes I selected a Celtic knot design from a Dover publisher's pattern book that came with the images on a CD. I resized the image to fit my cradle.

The photo above shows the carving work as it is progressing. Some areas just have the pattern incised, others have the background removed and a few have the "ropes" just about finished up.

I am very fortunate to have access to a friends laser cutter and I used it to transfer the image I chose to my piece of wood. Now most people stop there and use the laser carving as the finished carving. While pyrography, a word meaning writing with fire, has been around since the days of the cave man that was not the look I wanted for the cradle. I wanted a hand carved panel with deeper detailing.

I could have used a piece of carbon paper to transfer the design to wood and then used a hot knife to cut in along the edges of the pattern. I have used that method on carvings before and it works nicely to help prevent broken carving details.

So here are the steps, transfer the detail and cut along the edges straight down into the wood with a knife or laser. Next remove the deeper background areas with a small knife and chisel. Jeweler's gravers are terrific micro chisels that fit into small spaces. Remember those diamond burrs I showed you a couple of postings ago? I am using those as hand held sanding sticks and also using needle files as the abrasives to help round over the roping details and also to smooth the background.

I hope you all find time for a bit of creative fun today.

Miniature Custom Carved Sabots

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

I commissioned Linda Master to carve a pair of sabots for my coastal cottage project. Fishermen wore these to protect their feet from the wet long before there were rubber boots. Of course if a wooden shoe came off it would float instead of sink. They are much also warmer than wet leather.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

They arrived just the other day. I love the custom carved shoe box she made for safe shipping.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

You can see their actual size as they sit on the inch ruler.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

This is amazing carving in miniature. The width of the wood on the shoe opening as it turns around the heel is so consistent I can't imagine achieving it myself. The leather straps are perfect as well. The shoes look just slightly worn and scuffed, exactly what I was hoping for.

Sabots are fairly simple compared to many items Linda makes in miniature. You really have to check out her web site. You will fall in love and want to spend all your dollars there. Click " HERE"  to go to the website for Miracle Chicken Urns. There is an interesting story to go with the choice of name for Linda Master's business.

Linda does take custom orders so your miniature dreams can come true just like mine did. Have you ever wanted your real pet dog or cat to live in miniature size in your dollhouse?


I learned an interesting tidbit about the word sabot, it is the root word for sabotage which came from  throwing these shoes into the working parts of machinery during the war years to mess up production.

Texturing timbers

The items you see in the photo above are involved in some of the stages of creating textured timbers that are going to be used on a 1:12 scale structure I am building.

One of the popular teachers of storybook cottages has the students texturing timbers by scraping the wood with a piece of saw blade. The tales of days of pain in hands and arms from this method can heard round the world!

My hands would never hold up to long days of that kind of abuse. Besides I like power tools and they save vast amounts of time to say nothing of pain. Downside is of course the cost of the tools and the need to control the sawdust. There will always be sawdust no matter the method. It does help to have a good dust collection system. I have dust collection but it is far from perfect. The black shape you see in the photo is a dust collection hood I use with various tools around the shop. It helps keep the fine dust out of my face and lungs.

Stage one was sizing the timber on the 10 inch tablesaw.

Stage two was routing a decorative edge, you can't see really see that edge on the piece of wood since I took the photo at distance. Note that I am not using a Dremel Motor as a router, I use a 1/4" router for this kind of work. It can be done with a Dremel but I don't care for their router table.

My router table has a special feature that allows me to adjust the height from the top of the table, pure workshop luxury! I just got a digital readout that I will be adding to that router setup so I can tell how many thousandths of an inch I have moved the bit, major pure luxury!

To create the texturing I used my reversible direction Foredom motor with a structured tooth carbide bit to rough up the surface of the wood. The last stage is removing any little fuzzy bits sticking out on the piece of wood. That is quickly achieved with a few swipes of a 3M Scotchbrite pad. That aluminum wool material cuts the fuzzies right off without removing the texture.

My workshop smells great from all the cedar sawdust I have been making.

Cutting edge miniatures

You would think that a new out of the box knife blade would be sharp. Unfortunately that is often not the case, the one you see in the photo was very dull indeed.

An essential item in your tool box should be a small sharpening stone. I purchased the "stone" in the photo from my local hardware store, it is coated with very fine bits of industrial diamonds. Regular sharpening stones are fine too, just as long as you have something on hand to touch up your cutting edges. A small size stone is handy for taking along in a toolbox or stashing in a drawer with your knife.

Working with dull blades is really frustrating, a time waster and you are more likely to get cut. It only takes a few licks across the stone to make working a pleasure and improve accuracy too. The trick is to hold the blade at the same angle as the cutting surface was ground and then push it along the stone as if you were cutting something. One direction only rather than back and forth works best.

Santa's workshop under construction

I thought you might enjoy a little excursion into the past back to the time I was building the Santa's workshop. I don't have a lot of photos of that time but I do have a few.

This photo shows the balcony area over the main work room. The balcony rest on the hammer beam truss structure that supports the roof over the workshop.

Have you ever heard of a dollhouse built with two scales? You are looking at one. The the balcony, the box beds and the adjoining room over the kitchen are all sized for the elves. Mr. and Mrs. Claus could never fit into any of those spaces. As I recall the beds are only 3 inches long even though the photo makes them seem larger.

The major style intent was to capture the feel of Victorian era, German Christmas card featuring a snow covered building in a forest. The owner of the dollhouse has many such cards displayed at Christmas time in her Victorian home. The detailing on the dollhouse beams is meant to resemble the hand carved ornamental style of wooden toys or cuckoo clocks from that era rather than a hand adzed beam more typically found in real buildings. There is also a very strong Scandanavian influence in the carvings on the structure and on those built in elf beds. This building has a lot of carving on it and I will show more of that in future postings.


The underlying structure of the dollhouse is a metric plywood, just under 3/8" thick. You can see all the layers of materials in the construction photo. This is a specialty plywood, waterproof glues and almost no voids. I purchase it from a lumber company that supplies to the wooden boat industry in the Pacific Northwest. It is the same plywood I use for my birdhouse building. I feel it is a museum quality way to build a dollhouse although it does make for a heavy house.

The timber framing details are Western Red Cedar. I hand select for dark colored, old growth heartwood with very tight grain patterns. Most cedar is fairly soft but this wood is sometimes so hard it can be difficult get a carving chisel through it.