I started off with a chunk of firewood that had a big curve in the center, so I took it to the band saw and cut it into two pieces and trimmed off some knots and corners:

I decided not recreate the handle demonstrated in the skill builder, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do instead. Before figuring that out I cut the block into a cylinder using the large round-nose scraper, which took about 20 minutes:

I decided to just go with the flow, and end up with some abstract sculptural piece:

This took about 40 minutes to an hour to complete. Something about this very involved, hands on experience… the tactile satisfaction of cutting away at the wood makes this hands down the most fun and rewarding tool in the shop for me. I wanted to explore curvature and ended up doing this progressively compressed wave design. The smallest cavity to the left required the tiny gouge scraper, and the tighter curves were done with the small round-nose scraper. Once finished I took it back over to the band saw to chop off the ends, and sanded it a bit:

Wow! Straight out of a Pier 1 catalog. My mom will love this.