I have recently become interested in carving wood, not by hand but on the CNC mills at hackspace. I got the idea after carving the saddle potentials for the ball traps. The lime wood gave such a lovely smooth curve that I thought it would be nice to carve more functions into wood.

So I bought a large piece of rough sawn oak, levelled it and carved a wave patten across it’s surface. The pattern was generated in Mathematica. I wrote a fairly random 2D function and tweaked it until I came up with something I liked. Exported it as stl and used the large CNC router to do the wood munching. Turned out really well (the contours can be a little hard to see in the pic):
 

I want to hang it on my wall but being quite heavy and living in a rented house that’ll have to wait. So I tried something a little smaller. I had a lime carving block left over from the saddle so I carved a bowl shape. Again generated in Mathematica. This had much finer detail than the large piece but also worked really well.

Excited by all this I now have a garage full or wood waiting to be carved! The next job, an oak beam being turned into a garden bench, with wave carved seating…