the two year whittled bird

The start of this project is all thanks to my beautiful baby, in which this project would not be possible.

In March of 2023, I received a gift: two rectangular blocks of wood, a special knife, four different grits of sandpaper, some oil, and lastly some instructions on how to turn that plain old block of wood into a beautiful, wooden bird. I was over the moon!

If you know me, you know that I love trying new things. For my ego’s sake, I especially like things that are easy to grasp and feels like mastery could be attainable and within my reach (I’m looking at you, crochet.) This felt like the start of a cool project, especially with my growing interest in wood.

Most of my time working on this bird stems from the day I got it on my birthday until sometime before I finished my contract working in Northern Quebec in 2023. I had some friends help a little bit along the way in their curiosity of what I was doing and how it worked. Some days after work, I would just grab that little block and shave away hoping that this thing that was all sharp corners was slowly turning into something more bird-shaped.

The thing is, after hours of work, it definitely resembled a bird, albeit a bird that was drawn by memory by a five-year old. It was still a bird nonetheless, and for that my friends, I was proud!

Upon coming home at the start of August, I worked on the bird slightly, but I reached a point where the wood was not soft and even my newly sharpened knife was having trouble penetrating the hard fibres of the wood. I think having that resistance put me off on finishing the project into greater detail like I wanted.

Finally, a year later, I’ve decided that at some point you have to be honest with yourself and know when a project needs to be marked as complete. So today, (11.29.25) I took my bird and sanded it down with all four grits until smooth. Lastly, I applied that aforementioned oil and set the bird down. She still remains without a name, but I’m sure that update will be coming soon.

With love,

Jolyssa