Mary May - Woodcarver My new book, Carving the Acanthus Leaf, has been available for purchase since November from Lost Art Press (yay!). You can also view my Carving the Acanthus Leaf page on my website to learn more. I recently made the casual comment “I just finished my first book”. My husband responded “you mean there’s more?” I think the “significant others” of authors deserve a lot of credit. How many late nights of clicking away on a keyboard, obsessive editing, and “I’ll only be a few more minutes” do they put up with? He’s a very patient man and I am so grateful. I have been thinking a ..read more

Mary May - Woodcarver November 13 is your last opportunity to pre-order my Carving the Acanthus Leaf book through Lost Art Press and receive a free downloadable pdf file of the entire book for free. After November 13, the pdf file will be available for separate purchase. Also, I am having a raffle to give away resin castings of 2 of the acanthus leaves over the next 2 weeks. These resin castings are very helpful to look at and study while you are learning to carve the leaves. Sign Up Here. Next week’s casting is of the Scandinavian style leaf shown below. These resin castings will soon be ava ..read more

Mary May - Woodcarver To help celebrate completing my Carving the Acanthus Leaf book, I am giving away 5 different resin castings of several of the leaves I show how to carve in my book. For the next 5 weeks, I will be giving away a separate resin casting each week, starting October 25. Drawings will take place each Wednesday evening at midnight. Sign up HERE. You can only sign up once, and your name will stay in the list for a chance to win throughout the 5 weeks of the raffle.   Why a resin casting? Quite often, I make rubber molds and then make resin castings of woodcarvings that I hav ..read more

Mary May - Woodcarver Pre-Ordering is now available! The printed book will be available toward the end of November, but if you pre-order you can have access to a downloadable pdf file of the entire book immediately. What the heck is this “Acanthus Leaf” thing? To help you get an idea of what my new book, Carving the Acanthus Leaf, is all about, you are welcome to preview a sample of my book. This “snippet” shares my personal carving journey and a complete chapter showing the instructional process I use to demonstrate how to draw and how to carve each acanthus leaf design. You can also vi ..read more

Mary May - Woodcarver After 3 years, I am excited to announce that I have finally given birth to my first bouncing baby book (not such a baby at over 300 pages) on Carving the Acanthus Leaf. It was an agonizingly long gestation period, but don’t they say you forget about the pain, once the child is born? Odd, but true. The long nights, the focus, the red eyes, the trying to figure out how to describe something in words that is nearly impossible to explain, the edits, the edits of the edits, and then the edits of the edited edits… and then the final edits. Oh… and probably a few more edits afte ..read more

Mary May - Woodcarver Have you wandered through my Online School of Traditional Woodcarving lately? Learn more about me, Mary May, and find out why I ventured down this meandering road of creating an online carving school over 5 years ago. There have been a lot of recent changes and upgrades to my school with new and helpful features – and a NEW look! What FREE Members get (register as a Free Member): • Over 6 hours of free videos to get you started with woodcarving (sharpening, starting to carve, safety, and several beginner lessons) • All Free lessons are now in Ultra-HD video. • A new ..read more