Walking sticks, musical instruments, sculpture, ornaments, hunting equipment and native American art. The possibilities of working in wood are almost limitless, and the members of the Northwest Wood Carvers Association who meet at the Sumner Senior Center explore them all.

The group meets every week and work constantly on their own time to keep practicing what is a diminishing art.

“Many things in this world are no longer in existence or of any use,” Association President Bob Harkness said. “We don’t want to see woodcarving become one of them.”

Harkness specializes in carving decoys for duck hunting. It’s one of the more specialized branches of woodcarving because so many factors have to work together to make the product practical. In addition to having a steady hand, a carver has to know proper duck anatomy and proportions, paint the model exactly to the animal’s feather pattern and use wood that will float correctly in the pond.

The duck has to be round, but rookies sand at their own peril: the shortcut scratches away the soft grain of the wood and leaves unsightly ridges.

Jim Collins worked away at a carousel horse, a more aesthetic piece. Collins came to woodcarving in a roundabout way, slaking a desire to try a new medium after 35 years as a commercial artist working in two-dimensional mediums. He explained how he brought several levels of attention to his horse.

“I took a picture of one of the horses at the Supermall in Auburn,” he said, holding up the original picture of the carousel horse. “Then I drew my pattern off of that. Then I carved, I burned in the dark lines of detail and now I’m going to paint it pretty soon.”

On the difference from his former work, he said: “This is round. This is different. There was a little bit (of a learning curve). Mostly it was learning about woods and the cutting of grains.”

Each member of the group had an entirely different type of project, using different methods to get the effect they wanted.

Dottie Moody crafted Christmas ornaments out of thin, flat pieces of wood, and chipped a pattern out of the surface.

Richard Mazza smoothed over one of three working flutes in various stages of development. His wife Norma stitched a pattern in cloth.

“I’m the group’s moral support,” she said.

Vice President Lloyd Stuart was still working on the details of a large native American art piece six months in the making. Glued together from three pieces of wood, it depicts two “sea wolves” lunging from the head of a “sea bear.”

“This is solid, but it’s based off of a real native American tool that had a hinge on both sides,” Stuart said. “When it came time for a young indian man to become either a hunter or a warrior, the elder woman of the tribe would clap this around their head and that would determine what the man became.”

Linda Elleffson, who said she believed the woodworking instinct was in her Nordic blood, wasn’t quite sure where she was going with her own project, a long branch from a diamond willow tree that Mazza had cut for her while in Michigan. For the time being, she cut away the bark to make the diamond-shaped indents in the bark more pronounced.

“We don’t judge people’s work in the group,” Elleffson said. “That’s what’s nice about it. If people want to have their work judged, they will take it to the Northwest Wood Carving show in November and professional judges will make comments about the quality and how to improve. But a lot of what’s done here is experimentation.”

The members agreed that it takes a high degree of patience to succeed in wood carving.

“You just got to be lazy enough to do nothing else,” Harkness said. “It takes a certain amount of sitting around to create something good.”

“That’s part of the reason we have trouble brining in younger people to the group,” Collins said. “You can’t sit down and expect to have something that looks good immediately. You have to put in the time.”

The Northwest Wood Carvers Association hold an annual show once a year at the Western Washington Fairgrounds in Puyallup. Their 30th annual show will be November 13.

For more information about the Association, visit www.woodcarvers.org.