I *thought* that I had not made a carving from last year's tree, and that I had just slung a chunk of tree into the decorations basket, thinking that I would carve it next year. Which seemed like an annoying decision from the perspective of now, because in general, I prefer to carve wood green, it's much easier to work and not so hard on the thumbs that way. Admittedly there's always the risk with carving green wood that it might split as it matures, which is very annoying when it does happen, but I find it worth the payoff of easier cutting.
Anyway, I didn't want to miss a year's carving, so I took the dried chunk of last year's holly and worked with it a bit, and after a while, I found that I had made this little porpoise. It was actually quite an interesting exercise, because although the wood was rather hard, the shape of it had a lovely wiggle to it, and also the texture is lovely because the wood seems to have picked up some small fungus in the loft before drying out, and so is much more interestingly veined and marked than holly usually is. You probably can't pick it up from a photo, but the wood is very smooth and hard and veined and quite tactile.
And then when I was getting out my drill to drill a hole (and finding that I had snapped my smallest drillbit and not replaced it, annoying! ) I found this lurking in my toolbox. And I remembered that actually I had decided that it would be annoying to leave the carving for December, when I'm often busy, so I carved a little Green Man, back in January. And here he is!
So, 2015 has turned out to be the year of two carvings and I still have a chunk of this year's tree that I need to work on. Ah well.
