Kolrosed Christmas Ornaments on display in a store, all done by John Carlson
I have added these to our website because of his inventiveness in using color and cross-hatching to achive a more 3D effect. At the bottom of this page is a letter by him describing this process.
Here is John’s letter about making these:
Hi Del,
I thought I’d send you a picture of some Kolrosing pieces I created using your knife. I purchased a kolrosing knife and instructional video from you and have really enjoyed putting it to use. It’s a beautiful tool that’s a pleasure to use! It makes it easier on the fingers than a straight knife blade, which I had started on. I can really appreciate the quality and craftsmanship that went into this tool. I love it.…. Some of the designs are my own, and a few of them I started with carving outlines from the book ‘Chip Carving & Relief Carving’ by Josef Mader, and then added my flair. My goal with all of these was to create a more 3D appearance using shading and hatching, much like pen and ink drawings. I practiced using different filling materials such as ashes from a fire, cinnamon, ground birch leaves, and many spices from the cupboard, haha. Some work better than others. I would like to bring at least 3 colors into each piece I do. I’ve done that fairly successfully with ashes, cinnamon, and powderized ground leaves. Then I have to selectively rub in one color at a time and oil it.
These are small round pictures that hang on the wall, however, one person did buy one from me to use as an ornament. I created them to sell at a couple of pre-christmas craft sales I did in November and December. I got the idea to do round designs from a couple of rosemaling books. Many rosemaling patterns are done on round plates, and I had these little round ‘wheels’ already cut out, so they were perfect.
Feel free to post any of these you feel are interesting and show off the Kolrosing art form. I have a lot of fun doing it, so I expect I’ll refine my own style even more as I go.
I did use sanding sealer on all of the pieces and that is one really valuable tip I learned from the video, because without it, the cinnamon and ashes bleed with really soft wood like this. And the sanding sealer makes the image much crisper looking with a clean background. It might also help keep the wood together with the very fine cutting for shading. On a couple of practice pieces I did have some wood pieces chip out so that was part of the learning process and I simplified my designs a little more and made sure I was holding the knife absolutely vertical for the fine cuts…..
Sincerely,
John Carlson