END OF CARVING

Today was my last day of carving, and Si (who normally teaches upstairs in the kitchen) to give me my 1-0n-1 instructions. Oil, my favorite teacher, has to teach another class in floral arrangements. I am quite sure Si lost the toss in the staff room. It takes an enormous amount of patience to teach someone like me, but she did it cheerfully. Come to think of it, the entire faculty here is worth its weight in gold. Their professionalism, individually and collectively is second to none. Above all, they are so happy doing what they do. I feel envious watching them perform, tirelessly, through a 9-hour day. I only wish I had a team like that when I was in business.


I call this piece the 'Curtain Carve' ie the last one to conclude the 5-day Carving Section of the Basic Wandee Course. Central to be good at this, or to doing it right, is how one manipulates one's knife using the fingers. Needless to say a lot has to do with experience, and the curriculum is designed so one accumulates working knowledge from one technique to the next. This personalized watermelon is supposed to draw on each and every technique we learned progressively, but needless to say I need loads of reminding along the way. I was given a choice from RAYMOND in fancy italic to other simpler styles. I picked the one I can best manage ie RAY in block capital. I know who I am, there is no point pretending to be someone I am not.

If you enlarge the picture you will see the details involved, even though they are far from perfect. As in many things in life, I tried and I tried so hard everyone in class noticed. All of them are better, some much better than me, everyone was kind and encouraging. Again I owe all this to Oil from day one, whom I must thank again. I started with splitting that single strand of scallion to carving my own melon, what more can I ask? The next question is would these be displayed at TKT's Thai dinners? Well let me think about that one ...