Bear! The fruits of a holiday stone-carving course.

I'm back! I've been honeymooning in Canada for a few weeks. It was an awesome trip: beautiful, relaxing and inspiring.

I love learning new things and when on holidays, you have the opportunity to learn crafts that are not available to you in your local area, or just from people with a different perspective. It can be hard to find craft courses when travelling, as most places don't seem to be trying to get to that market, just marketing to locals. I think craft tourism is pretty underdone.

Luckily I didn't miss this opportunity at Whistler, although I only just found it in our last few days there. Fathom stone art in the centre of town offer stone carving courses. I picked the 8-hour bear class. "Class" is a loose term, they aren't a scheduled, formal thing at all. If you're interested, contact them, arrange a time, and off you go.

Here's my lump of soapstone at the start. Not much to look at, yet.

You can sort of see my attempt to sketch a bear-like shape on the side. With a bit of guidance and a lot of nerves, I took to it with a saw for a few hours.

This was tedious work, so they managed to convince me to try the angle-grinder. Even more nerves, but a lot quicker.

It's quite intimidating using the grinder because any little wrong move was a massive chunk out of your work! I had to take a break here and regain some confidence, or at least remind myself how tedious the other option was, then go back to it.

Much better. Quite bearish. Time to go home and sleep. Then in the morning, time to start in with the files and sandpaper.

Much better!

See all that dust? About 1 million times that much dust was on me at this point. Now for the miraculous transformation. All this time working it has looked like a dusty grey lump of rock. But a quick rinse and oil later, and it's a frickin' stone sculpture!

All these colours and patterns appear out of nowhere.
 

I'm pretty proud.  And I had a great time. I learned a lot from the artists there (getting advice from whoever happened to be around at the time) and it feels like an achievement, a milestone. They all talk about "your first bear" like it's a rite of passage ("That's a good first bear", "Good work for your first bear", and "Better than so-and-so's first bear"), and like it's implied that you won't stop at one. They did give me some tools, so we shall see...