Chip Carving

Chip carving decorates a flat wood surface by removing small chips -- triangular, curved, or a combination -- with a single knife (or occasionally two, a stab knife and a cutting knife) making a series of precisely angled cuts that meet to pop each chip cleanly free. Patterns are almost always geometric -- rosettes, borders, repeating triangular motifs -- built from the same small set of basic cut shapes repeated and combined.

Unlike relief or sculptural carving, chip carving requires almost no specialized tooling beyond a good, very sharp knife, which is part of its enduring appeal as a beginner-accessible decorative technique -- the skill lives almost entirely in controlled, consistent knife angle and pressure, not in a large tool collection.