Introducing "A Carver's Log"

Hello carvers of the Treen Revolution

* Carver’s Log 022521 *

It is Alex, your captain speaking. I have been having some really great late night conversations with someone lately about handcraft and life, woke this morning feeling really inspired to create. So I wanted to go harvest more materials to make some spoons for some people that missed out on my last sale from my webshop.

Then a brilliant flash hit me! Why don’t I just a-clamp my phone to an old light stand, and bring you all along. Although I am a very private person, I get asked a lot about what I do behind the scenes, and to be honest I’ve been wanting to share all of that for ages. People don’t realize how much extra work, studying, experimenting, the failures, the epiphanies, and building what goes into building relationship with your materials. This is what I do before I carve anything, and that includes heading out to a forest before teaching courses - class prep! So this is some insight into my personal life, why I continue to do what I do, and my love for the forest which my students never get to see as we’re usually in a classroom environment.

This will be a start of a new series for me. “A Carver’s Log” ~ My lo-fi solution for my perfectionism with my film making, and why I’ve avoided making films of myself. Setting up all this professional gear but which sometimes stifles my creative output. The thought of just sticking my fancy gear on an unmanned tripod seems like a hassle and waste of time, plus the idea of talking to a camera, and putting on some sort of show like I see often isn’t really my cup of tea. Also, I don’t want to feel the pressures of a script, or storyboard, and some of these films may not even have carving in them, they may capture my many deep and heady conversations with other crafts people I am very close with. It’s a way I can sneak in aspects of my daily creative life, including my daily recordings and guitar noodles into my films. My music, visuals, and carvings are always intertwined and always connected. If you’ve taken a class with me you’d know what I talking about when I sometimes have to explain carving technique using sound, textures, music, or even color with my words and body language.

But instead of typing away here, it’s all explained in the film.

In this episode - 022521 - I will take you on a little journey to a very special place, the place where I was born to harvest more materials. So get the coffee percolating, grab your favorite chair, and join me for some story time.

-Alex

[If you enjoyed this, drop a comment on my blog as Id love to hear from you. There have been a lot of people over the years really encouraging me to do this, and this will be the start of something fun and new. I've been asked if I was interested in a patreon type page I can run, where I can upload my songs/albums for people to download, more behind the scenes filming, carving films, maybe a live Q&A broadcast, and more little surprises I've been adding to my ever growing list of things I do on a weekly basis. You only usually see the cups and spoons but there is so much more.]