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Burt Carvings
I have been working with Wally and Leah Burt on various aspects of their historic home, the Still House Lott, in Hillsborough, NC for over 10 years now. In February 2003, they approached me with quite a challenge. They wanted me to replicate some fine gouge carving from the Montmorenci Home, a famous house built at Shocco Springs, near Warrenton, NC and ultimately moved to Delaware to be part of the Winterthur Museum. Wally and Leah thought this detailing would look just great as a chair rail in their dining room.
The original work was probably done with various sizes of palm gouges that are readily available at supply houses. I had done floral carvings and sculpture with chisels and gouges before but due to quantity of the work, 46 linear feet and 70-8 inch carvings, we decided to use a variable speed flexible shaft grinder with a foot pedal to provide precise speed control (Figure 1). I was able to do all the work with a 1.3 mm egg diamond burr, or more precisely, about 25 of these burrs. Diamond or not, this was pretty intricate carving in some pretty hard poplar. Sometimes I was able to do 4 patterns and sometimes less depending on the particular board's hardness.
Leah Burt is trained in faux and stencil paintings and she produced the pattern by eye from a photo in Winterthur Illustrated. She did this on Mylar which she then painstakingly cut out with some very small scissors (Figures 1&2). Her pattern is 24 inches long that we then traced by stepping off on the poplar (Figures 1&2). Basically it is a wreath flanked by tridents with a center medallion every 8 inches and it is 4.5 inches high.
We cut and fitted all the boards first which provided exact locations for all of the patterns, then took the boards down and traced the patterns with soft drawing pencils. Alfred Patterson did the initial cutting, fitting and tracing and also the final installing of the 4-piece chair rail.
The carving was completed in about 35 hours, which is about 30 minutes per 8 inches or single pattern. The completed carvings are shown in (Figure 3) right before installation. As soon as Chip did the final installation I followed with a paintbrush, a welcome relief from the carvings.
The final product is a nice testament to Wally and Leah's love of historical homes, detailing and craftsmanship (Figure 4,5&6). When you walk into this room it is hard to imagine that these carvings were not always there.
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| Figure 1 |
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| Figure 2 |
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| Figure 3 |
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| Figure 4 |
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| Figure 5 |
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| Figure 6 |
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