About

About The Carvers’ Companion

For Woodcarvers, By Woodcarvers

Our Core Mission:

To pro­vide a wide range of resources to pro­mote the art and craft of wood­carv­ing, to freely share with carvers and those inter­est­ed in carving.

His­to­ry:

Back in the “old days” when peo­ple had to type HTML code if they want­ed to cre­ate a web page, a wood­carv­er named Bill Judt hand-cod­ed the first wood­carv­ing site on the Inter­net.  In 1996 Judt start­ed what became the Wood­carv­er List, an email-based place for carvers to meet vir­tu­al­ly, to exchange news and tech­niques, to ask ques­tions and receive answers, and to fos­ter com­mu­ni­ty between carvers world-wide.

At the start of 1997, Judt took anoth­er step in sup­port of carvers every­where and pub­lished the first issue of what was then know as the World Wide Wood­carv­er Ezine, the first elec­tron­ic mag­a­zine, or e‑zine, for and by woodcarvers.

In March of 1998, dis­cus­sion on the Wood­carv­er List led carv­er Matt Kel­ley to orga­nize the first World Wide Wood­carv­er Exchange (W3E).  The orig­i­nal W3E pro­gram was an Inter­net-based, four-times-a-year “secret pal” gift exchange.  Still going strong after fif­teen years, thou­sands of secret pal carv­ings have been exchanged by sev­er­al hun­dred  carvers in the Unit­ed States, Cana­da and oth­er countries.

The suc­cess of the orig­i­nal W3E pro­gram then prompt­ed Kel­ley to start the W3E Friend­ship Cane pro­gram in the May of 1998.  In the orig­i­nal Friend­ship Cane pro­gram,  groups of six­teen carvers exchanged a seg­ment a month over six­teen months.  Some 80 peo­ple in the first five groups exchanged 1200 seg­ments.  In addi­tion to the Cane Exchange, there are also Cane Seg­ment Round Robins, golf ball, bot­tle stop­per, pin and orna­ment exchanges.

The W3E pro­grams were even­tu­al­ly con­sol­i­dat­ed into The Carvers’ Com­pan­ion web site, with addi­tion­al carv­ing resources added over time.

In the fall of 1999, the demands of a pro­fes­sion­al carv­ing career prompt­ed Judt to pass on stew­ard­ship of the online mag­a­zine to Kel­ley, who assumed the role of owner/editor start­ing with the November/December 1999 issue (Vol 3 Issue 5).  Host­ing of the ezine shift­ed from Judt’s web site to The Carvers’ Com­pan­ion.

Nine years lat­er, in Novem­ber of 2008, Kel­ley assumed man­age­ment of the Wood­carv­er List, which was added to The Carvers’ Com­pan­ion.

In July 2011, rec­og­niz­ing the growth in social media and a grad­ual shift away from tra­di­tion­al mail lists, the Wood­carv­er List Face­book Group was cre­at­ed, which pro­vid­ed a social venue to post pho­tographs and encour­aged fur­ther con­ver­sa­tions between woodcarvers.

Feb­ru­ary 2013, saw a major upgrade of the Carvers’ Com­pan­ion site, uti­liz­ing Word­Press to reduce main­te­nance over­head, enhance the read­er expe­ri­ence, sup­port the ever increas­ing num­bers of portable devices, and pro­vide avenues for addi­tion­al content.

Legal Stuff:

Own­er­ship: The Carvers’ Com­pan­ion ™, World Wide Wood­carv­er Exchange (W3E) ™, World­Wide­Wood­carv­er Mag­a­zine (E‑zine) ™, Wood­carv­er Online Mag­a­zine ™, Celtic­Carv­er Wood­works™, Wood­carv­er Resource Files ™, Wood­carv­er List ™. Vir­tu­al Carv­ing Stu­dio ™ as well as The Carvers’ Com­pan­ion web site, are owned by W.M. Kelley.

Copy­right Notice: This web site and all it’s con­tents are ful­ly and com­plete­ly pro­tect­ed by Inter­na­tion­al Copy­right Law. All images, arti­cles and con­tent are ful­ly copy­right­ed, either by the Own­er or orig­i­nal artists and authors. No con­tent may be copied, repro­duced, or used in any man­ner what­so­ev­er, nor appear or be used on any oth­er web site or pub­li­ca­tion with­out the express writ­ten con­sent of the Own­er. ©1999- 2013 All Rights Reserved

Con­di­tions of Use:  Com­ing soon