Members of the Central Point Woodcarvers club work on wooden art pieces, exchanging ideas and conversing during their weekly meeting. 

Long tables in the Central Point Senior Resource Center were filled with carvings and conversation as woodcarvers worked away on their pieces Saturday, Aug. 26, in anticipation for the annual Big Show and Sale put on by the Central Point Woodcarvers.

Started in 2001, the woodcarvers club has been a hub of community for whittlers in the Rogue Valley. The group meets from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. every Saturday to work on projects, receive feedback from their peers and catch up with each other.

“It’s just a great group, and we’re really excited because this’ll be the first time we’re going to do our show since COVID,” said Ron Chappell, a longtime member of the woodcarvers club.

The annual Big Show and Sale will be held from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 14, at the Senior Resource Center, 123 N. Second St., in Central Point.

With more than 100 pieces for sale from at least 16 woodcarvers in the Rogue Valley, the event will showcase a wide variety of work as it returns for the first time since the pandemic. The show includes “Santas, faces, birds, animals and just a lot of different assortments of stuff,” Chappell said.

For the early Christmas shoppers in town, the show and sale will include plenty of holiday pieces to purchase for loved ones. Also part of the annual show will be a raffle, where attendees can pay $1 per ticket and potentially receive one or multiple wood pieces that weren’t sold by the end of the event.

While the club hasn’t officially lined up the organization that the sale’s proceeds will benefit, it will likely be the Rogue Valley Council of Governments.

“This year, we haven’t really decided, but we’re part of the Rogue Valley Council of Governments, and they do a lot of stuff for the elderly … so I’m thinking that we might do a food drive again,” Chappell said. “We enjoy doing that, instead of [paying for] admission, people can just bring a can of food, something like that.”

With about 20 members in the Central Point Woodcarvers, the club is stacked with skilled woodworkers and artists, including Talent resident Dirlene Wheeler, who’s been carving for decades.

“It’s just really relaxing, and I love being creative and finding inspiration in some of the other projects that carvers are doing, just continuing to learn and grow,” Wheeler said of what she enjoys about woodcarving. “I do a variety of carving, I do mallet and chisel and then I do hand tools, but I also do a lot of power carving as well.”

Wheeler joined the club about six years ago after moving from Wyoming.

“I love the people. The camaraderie of woodcarvers is like no other,” Wheeler said. “They’re friendly, they’re fun, they’re a great conversation and share good tips about carving.”

Marc Librizzi of Talent got into woodcarving in 2019, joining the club soon after.

“I noticed in the paper about four years ago they were having a woodcarver show, and I had just started woodcarving maybe two or three months prior to that, so I came down here and met a couple of the folks,” Librizzi said. “It’s a good group of people.”

Librizzi crafts a wide range of wooden pieces, specializing in cowboy caricatures.

“I’ve been learning and trying to improve by doing faces, and I’ve expanded to do full characters, mostly cowboys,” he said. “My preference tends to be more around caricatures, I have a little bit more fun doing that.”

“On these cowboys, you can give them big noses and you can give them big hands so you can really expand and exaggerate their features and it still looks like a cowboy as opposed to a grotesque figure,” Librizzi added.

Chappell got into woodcarving after being a machinist for 35 years, looking for a new hobby to keep his hands busy.

“I was used to working with my hands, and then my wife brought home this little wood spirit from The Expo,” Chappell said of how he got started.

Chappell joined the club about 10 years ago and enjoys the camaraderie with his peers.

“Everyone likes to talk, and we all help each other out,” he said.

The club is looking for new members.

“We’ve lost a few members of our club this year, which has been really sad, so we’re looking for new members and would love to have people take some of our classes and come see what it’s all about,” Wheeler said. “We’re here every Saturday.”

To learn more about the Central Point Woodcarvers, email Chappell at ronchappell@charter.net or visit the group’s Facebook page at facebook.com/centralpointwoodcarvers.