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This is Issue 116 — the one that starts your subscription. Every issue opens like this.
Woodcarving Illustrated · The woodcarvers' quarterly since 1997 · 116 issues and counting
Packed with full sized traceable patterns, step-by-step projects, and hard-won techniques from award winning carvers like Marty Leenhouts, Dwayne Gosnell, and Pat Coffey.
Digital 3-Pack arrives today · First print issue in 4–6 weeks · Cancel anytime
Read the first issue, then decide. Cancel anytime and every issue you haven't received is refunded — by check, in your name. Backing out after issue one costs you $6.25, not $49.98.
Because the best carving channels are genuinely good — most of our readers watch them too. What a video can't do is hand you a full-size pattern to trace, sit open on the bench while your hands are covered in shavings, or look at your finished piece. An issue does all three. And unlike a feed, an issue ends: seventeen-odd projects one editor chose on purpose, not ten thousand an algorithm chose for everyone.
The free patterns are single sheets. An issue is everything around the pattern: the tested project, the photos of every stage, the tool reviews, and the readers' work at the back. Free patterns are how most carvers find us. The issues are what they stay for.
Each issue deliberately mixes disciplines; whittling, chip carving, relief, power carving, flat-plane, birds and animals, and runs from an afternoon project to pieces that take a season. Honest answer: two or three projects an issue will be squarely yours, and the ones that aren't are how carvers end up falling in love with a discipline they'd never have picked otherwise. If you want one narrow subject and nothing else, a single-subject book serves you better — we publish those too.
You're at the right bench. Carving rewards small, controlled cuts over force; plenty of carvers in this community work around arthritis and changed grips, taking tiny chips instead of hunks. Paper helps too: a full-size pattern and printed photo sequence sit at whatever distance and light suit your eyes, and never lock a screen mid-cut.
Print: within 4–6 weeks — subscribe now and your first issue lands right around the start of carving season. Your Digital 3-Pack downloads arrive today, so the bench doesn't wait. If you'd rather not wait at all, the digital edition delivers your first issue within minutes.
Cancel anytime and Fox Chapel refunds every issue you haven't received — by check, in your name. Read your first issue and decide: cancel then, and seven of your eight issues come back to you. Finding out cost you $6.25. Call 1-800-457-9112 or email customerservice@foxchapelpublishing.com.
We're currently migrating subscription services to a new system, so address changes and snowbird addresses are handled by our team directly. Call 1-800-457-9112 or email customerservice@foxchapelpublishing.com and we'll take care of it.
I have been a WCI subscriber for many years and have amassed a large collection of magazine issues. When I was asked by a friend to carve a largemouth bass, I decided to carve Charles Weiss’ “Landing a Largemouth Bass” from Issue #86. My friend was overjoyed with the end result.
James Talley LittleRiver, S.C.
I have been carving for over 20 years and had a friend ask if I would make a carving of his dog Ollie who passed away. I added a base under Ollie and made it look like he was running through the grass by carving bamboo skewers. It ended up being a neat little project, and a nice memorial carving of a beloved dog.
Greg Wymer Marshall, Minn.
I have done some whittling and carving over the last few years, but I have recently gotten my teenage daughter into the hobby. We decided Kevin Johnson’s “Little Hotdog” from Issue #115 was a great project to do while we both had the day off. It was a great time, and we both look forward to working on similar projects again.
Jason and Anne Blodgett Salem, N.H.
Start here
Chip Chats, the old national carving magazine, counted 55,000 subscribers in 1995. The clubs were full — you learned faces across a table from a man who'd been carving since Eisenhower. Today the national association counts around 4,000. The tables emptied. And for thirty years and 116 issues, this magazine has been sitting down with those carvers and writing down what they knew — Harold Enlow, Harley Refsal, Lora Irish, Desiree Hajny, Chris Lubkemann, the Caricature Carvers of America. Every pattern in the archive is instruction that would otherwise have gone with them. Subscribing is how the writing-down continues.
The part nobody told you
If you've carved for years and the faces still come out wrong — eyes too wide, expressions gone grotesque — you've probably filed that under talent. Here's the structural truth: every teacher you've ever had, every video and every book, talks at you and never once looks at your bench. Nobody has ever picked up your piece and said the eyes are set too far apart. So the same error repeats for fifteen years and gets mistaken for a lack of gift. That's not a gift problem. It's a feedback problem — the tables that used to fix it are gone.
Why more videos won't fix it
The channels are genuinely good — ask our own forum. The limit isn't the teachers; it's the format. A feed shows you what's popular, never what's next for you, which is how a man ends up with two hundred saved videos and the same unfinished blank. It can't hand you a pattern. And it can't see your work back. One-way instruction, no matter how much of it you collect, leaves those three gaps open.
What an editor is for
Every project in an issue was carved at a bench, photographed at every stage, and judged worth your Saturday by an editor whose job is saying no. Seventeen-odd projects make the cut each quarter. The rest don't. That's the mechanism: someone with judgment narrows the field, binds it into a closed set, and hands it over finished. A feed structurally cannot do that — narrowing is not what a feed is built to do.
For the hands you carve with now
A good share of the carvers in these pages work around arthritis, changed grips, and eyes that want better light. The craft allows it: basswood, a truly sharp edge, and small controlled cuts have always mattered more than force. Paper helps too — a full-size pattern and printed sequence sit at whatever distance and light suit your eyes, and never lock a screen mid-cut. And you don't have to call yourself an artist to belong here. Plenty of the best men in this magazine call themselves whittlers.
Print or digital
Print — first issue in 4–6 weeks, pull-out full-size patterns, lives happily in shavings and sawdust, back issues on the shelf.
Digital — first issue in minutes, patterns print at home, reads on a tablet. Fair warning from the print camp: nobody loves a screen propped in the chips.
Both are $49.98 for two years in the US.
You could find all of this yourself, eventually. You'd never know which of it was worth your Saturday. The deciding is what $6.25 an issue buys.
Cancel anytime — unsent issues refunded by check · Questions? 1-800-457-9112
