Pat and Dot Rygh pose with a great white egret sculpture they worked together on and will be donated for a raffle at the Sept. 21-22 Woodcarving Show at the Cambria Vet’s Hall.
Members of a local wood carvers group make beauty from raw materials, and a Los Osos couple has been whittling away at the craft for decades.
Long-time Los Osos residents, Pat and Dot Rygh, who are both in their 90s, are among the folks in the Central Coast Carvers group getting set for the 44th Annual Woodcarvers Show, set for Saturday-Sunday, Sept. 21-22 at the Cambria Vet’s Hall, 1000 Main St.
Dot explains about the group and the show, during a recent carving session held in the community room at St. Timothy’s Church in Morro Bay.
These whimsical snails are among the wood carvings that will be on display at the 44th Annual Woodcarving Show.
She says they make enough money off that single show to pay the rent on the church space and coupled with the group’s modest annual dues ($20 a year), are able to offer classes in different carving techniques and various tools to beginning carvers.
“Carvers come from all over,” Dot says, adding that this year’s show will be only the second since 2020, when the COVID pandemic response shut them down for three straight years. “We invite them, and we’ll probably have 25 separate carvers,” at the Cambria show.
If readers go to the show, they’ll see numerous crafts people at work and on hand to meet the folks and talk about wood carving.
“The object,” Dot says, “Is to promote carving to the public.”
Display shows from left to right, the progression of carving to
produce a howling dog, at far right.
Some of the artists, like she and Pat, just show their work, and don’t sell many of their pieces. To the Ryghs, carving is a hobby more so than a business, though several carvers do this as a profession.
Dot and Pat had been showing some of the group’s pieces in a display at the Los Osos Library and some of those will be sold at the upcoming show, including a beautiful, small carving of a great white egret mounted in clear acrylic that looks a lot like water.
It’s one of several pieces they brought from the library, including a near-life sized deer fawn, several wading birds (Pat’s specialty), miniature animals like sea otters, and an amazingly life-like kestrel carved and painted in exquisite detail by Pat.
Los Osos resident, Pat Rygh, carved and painted this life-like wooden kestrel, as birds of prey are his specialty.
Over the years, Dot says, their annual show has been very successful, even though it’s moved around a bit. The group started out meeting at the Cavalier Inn in San Simeon, Dot explains. The carvers had larger pieces for sale in the lobby and used a back room for their carving sessions. They’ve also met at the Vet’s Hall in Morro Bay, and now in Cambria; and Dot says they met for many years at the Cayucos Vet’s Hall, “until it closed.”
The past several years they’ve been in Cambria for a second straight year.
She says the group’s history starts in Morro Bay, but their personal histories start in Pasadena. That’s where in 1987, as Pat was getting ready to retire, he took a carving class at the local college looking for something to do. “He’s been carving ever since,” Dot says. “I started probably about 1995.” Dot says she was originally a ceramics artist but began to suffer from arthritis in her hands, and having them immersed in cold, wet clay all day wasn’t helping.
Now her crafts have expanded considerably, as she not only carves but also does wood burning and pine needle basket weaving, with a couple of her pieces slated for the Cambria show.
They strictly use hand tools at the weekly carving sessions (9 a.m. every Wednesday when the hall is available), but at their home workshops, you’ll probably find some power tools like rotary cutters (dremel tools), and with big pieces, maybe even a chainsaw.
But mostly they use hand tools, chisels, scrapers and knives. And some carvers make their own specialty tools, for example a homemade whittling knife made with a hacksaw blade for cutting out chain links. Oh, and sandpaper, too.
Among Dot’s favorite tools is an electric wood burning tool that works a lot like a soldering iron, but with different tips. While it sounds easy to just copy/transfer some pattern onto a piece of flat wood, heat up the iron and start tracing the lines, the intricate nature of the designs she does — for example with her pine needle baskets — it looks immensely difficult even though the concept is fairly simple.
And carving something like a relief takes a lot of precision, as in digging down through the wood to the deepest carve outs first and working one’s way back out. Patience would seem to be a key, along with using the right wood.
Pat explains that you don’t want wood with a lot of grain patterns, and no tree rings. Among the prized woods they use is so-called Tupelo or “swamp cypress,” a softwood species that grows in the swamps of Louisiana.
Other popular woods include: basswood, acacia, alder, elm and walnut, but one can carve any type of wood, and that includes wood that is still wet (fresh cut) or dried. Folks who carve birds especially like the swamp cypress.
The wood used depends a lot on the piece being carved, as one wants to avoid certain characteristics like tendencies to crack (as with eucalyptus) or knots (pine).
Much of the wood they use for their classes is donated, including from guitar maker, Ernie Ball, which donates scraps of exotic woods like the mahogany that they use for their world-class guitars.
Craft stores like Michaels also have wood carving pieces, good for relief carvings and burning.
In the past, many of the carving shows included competitions, which Pat has entered and won many times. “The biggest used to be in San Diego,” he says. That show drew carvers from across the U.S. and several foreign countries like Japan.
“Sacramento has a big show too,” Dot adds.
Pat jokes that the San Diego show ended when the folks who ran it got too old to put it on anymore.
That’s sort of what happened to the Ryghs, as they organized the annual shows here for many years.
The local show is one of dozens held throughout California under the umbrella of the California Carvers Guild, an organization with over 50 local chapters based up and down the Golden State.
As for the inherent dangers of working with very sharp tools, equipment like special gloves is a must. Gloves worn by fish filleters work well, but just in case, there is always a first aid kit handy, with lots of bandages.
“You do have to be careful,” Dot says, thinking about her wood-burning tools. “You can burn yourself severely.”
The Central Coast Carvers 44th Annual Woodcarving Show is set for Saturday-Sunday, Sept. 21-22. Saturday hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday 10-4. Cost is $2 adults and children under-12 free. There’ll be a raffle for hand-crafted carvings by local members set for 3:30 p.m. Sunday. Attendees can check out carved wildlife, toys, jewelry, pens and flutes. They will have whittling and carving contest each day at 1 p.m. For more information about the show, contact Melody Mullis 805-748-4143 or by email at mamullis@ix.netcom.com.
