Which Wood is Best for Carving Wooden Gifts? Beginner Tips.

Hello everyone, in this post we continue to bring the essential knowledge of carving wooden gifts, we will guide you to choose which material is more suitable for carving, and side by side comparison of the advantages and disadvantages in different woods.

Comparison of two commonly used wood for carving

First, we use hand carving tools such as saws, carving knives, etc., so be sure to choose a relatively soft of wood. As mentioned in many previous tutorials, we recommend balsa and basswood, which are inexpensive and readily available on the market. Below we will describe the differences in their properties.

Balsa

Balsa is so soft that you can even break it with your hands, so it's easy to sharpen when making wooden gifts with it, which is an advantage for novice carvers with little strength.

However, balsa wood is too soft and has coarse wood fibers, so we must keep the knife sharp when chipping, otherwise the cut surface will be particularly rough. In addition, still because of the softness, it is not possible to carve lines with balsa, only approximate shapes, as shown in the motion picture.

Basswood

Basswood is moderately hard, about the same as a pencil. The wood fibers are fine and uniformly dense, and it is possible to carve very fine lines to add detail to the wooden gift you want to make, making the piece more vivid and suitable for fine carving.

So how do you choose between the two as a novice?

A novice can use both types of wood together. Practice carving with balsa wood at first to learn the shape of the carving and to use for trial and error, in which case the difficulty of carving will be very low and will not tire the hands too much. Once the novice has a good understanding of the shape of the wood carving, carving in basswood will ensure the success rate of the work. Lastly, we do not recommend hardwoods for carving small wooden figurines with hand tools.