(From the Fine Accents Collection)

Molding and hand-carving tools

A Bit of Carving History
Carving inscribes beautiful details in wood, adding dimension and drama to a piece of furniture. From the earliest days of furniture making, craftspeople have added artistic details to their pieces by transforming angular pieces of woods with lovely shapes. Some of the first carvings were incised cuts into the wood and were often geometric shapes. As available time and tools improved, carvings became more artistic and often captured the lines of simple elements seen in the environment like flowers, leaves and vines.

Carvings on furniture became more sophisticated as the role of some furniture pieces changed from strictly utilitarian to more of an art form. Splendid carvings adorned many kinds of furniture - either as a singular decorative element or as a repeated shape in a molding framing a drawer or a bed frame.


Common carving motifs
Traditionally styled and 18th Century furniture pieces tend to exhibit more carving than transitional and Contemporary furniture. One of the most recognized carving elements is a ball & claw foot on a chair or dining table. Legs and feet for tables, chairs, beds and some chests and dressers may in the shape of a spoon, slipper, a nimal foot or even a serpent's head. Scallop shells, vines, acanthus leaves, laurel leaves, flowers of all varieties and rice plants are present on furniture seen in museum and modern-day furniture stores. Transitional and Contemporary designs will have simple curves or geometric shapes if carving is present at all.Attributes of Beautifully Done Carvings

Well-done carvings are crisp and precise and are attractive additions to a piece of furniture rather than an overpowering element. The carving should be sized to be in proportion to the piece of furniture and should look like an integral part of the design. Moldings (strips of shaped or carved woods that frame sections of furniture) should have an unbroken pattern that is in proportion to the piece of furniture itself. Where moldings move around a corner, a well-carved piece will make a seamless transition without an obvious stopping and starting point.

Hand-carved vines

Carved moldings ready for mitering

Types of Carving - Features to Look For
Hand carving is the finest kind of carving found in furniture. This artistry allows the carving to accentuate the grain of the wood and to transition around corners while preserving the pattern of the carving. It is done one piece at a time by those who are wood carving masters.

Machine carving uses a machine that can simultaneously shape many pieces at a time while the machine operator moves a stylus across a carving template. This method is a bit like paint-by-number, with carving results that usually aren't as quite as precis

Applied Carving

Applied Carvings
Hand-carved overlays are carved from solid wood and are applied as a design element to wood furniture. Less expensive overlays are machine-shaped in wood and glued to furniture pieces before the finishing process.

Another type of decorative element used that may look like carving is molded resin. Resins can have very sharp detail because they are not carved, but are liquid resins poured into molds to attain their shape. When finished, they may look like wood, but they're really a member of the plastic species. FFDM uses no plastics or resins.

Hand carver at work

Shell carving