Initial research on Dong Ky wooden village in tourism development in the Northern Delta

Conch: belongs to the clam family, mainly green and red in color. Pearl: is a rare type of snail with many beautiful colors.

Cone snail: is a type of snail with many beautiful colors, with a red glow. There are two types of pearls for inlay

Vietnamese Clams: Price 200,000/tael Chinese Clams: Price 100,000/tael

The above mentioned types of shells and snails, the craftsmen have to import from other regions, mainly from Chuyen My commune - Phu Xuyen - Ha Tay, which is a famous mother-of-pearl inlay craft village. According to the craftsmen in Chuyen My, their snails are often imported from coastal areas in Vietnam, in addition, snails are often imported from Singapore, and the shells are often imported from China. Up to now, in Dong Ky, there is also a shell and snail market that meets every morning at the beginning of the village. The people who sell shells and snails come from other regions to this market. There are many types of shells and snails for sale at the market, but for each product according to the order that requires the use of precious shells and snails that are hard to find, the craftsmen have to order in advance with the seller or go to the regions with many shells and snails themselves to find many of the desired materials. They say shells and snails, but not just shells and snails like that, then smash them and inlay them into wood.

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.Mullets and snails usually have to go through preliminary processing, including 5 steps: cutting, grinding, repairing, pressing, and wiping. Each step must be carried out carefully so that the amount of finished mussels and snails obtained from the mussel shell is the largest. The step of pressing the mussel flat also requires 2 pressings, usually each pressing is 24 hours. Each finished piece of mussel has a triangular-shaped bottom and the mussel bar has an average area of about 25cm and is 0.25-0.5mm thick. This area also depends on the size of the mussel. A finished piece of snail is usually square: 2cmx2cm or 3cmx3cm, 0.5mm thick. The area of a finished piece of snail also depends on the size of the snail.

Depending on the value of the product, depending on the customer's order requirements, the inlay worker chooses mother-of-pearl, snail or mother-of-pearl. The mother-of-pearl inlay patterns, when viewed from the front, have a bright pink iridescent color, but when viewed from the side, they glow with the light of mysterious emerald flames. Or the worker uses the

The colorful colors of pearls, fire pearls, and inlaid snails combined with ivory... create unique products.

Types of paint

Son is a small tree 3-7m high, smooth black trunk with thick resin, early branching, long, pinnate compound leaves. In Vietnam, the tree grows mainly in the northern mountainous provinces; Lang Son, Vinh Phu, especially in Phu Tho, in the tropical evergreen humid forests of the midland hills. The tree produces hard wood, rarely used, mainly for resin to make varnish, oil paint

Raw lacquer: is unprocessed lacquer resin used to attach bamboo and wooden objects or to prepare painting materials.

Varnish: is a plastic solution used to apply a thin layer to wooden furniture to prevent moisture or to make objects shiny and beautiful.

Lacquer is widely used to decorate interior products and does not require harsh conditions. The solvent for dissolving lacquer is 90-degree alcohol. The dissolving resin is lac, rosin, glycerin... During the varnishing process, the raw material must be firmly mounted on the hand of the creator. The raw material must be placed in a specialized room. This room has a ventilation system, dust extraction system, air heating system and exhaust gas extraction system. In addition, the room also ensures other safety requirements. The best condition for varnishing is 18-20 degrees Celsius, 50-60%

Wood carving process

Carving techniques

To create a complete and complex product, it is necessary to go through 3 stages: Design, production, polishing, with a total of 15 stages: Studying sample drawings, choosing wood for carving, mixing wood blanks, marking the front pattern, chiseling according to the standard side pattern, marking the remaining faces, chiseling according to the remaining faces, chiseling to create shape, completing shape and structure, scraping, trimming, polishing the product. For simple products, some stages can be skipped or the order of some stages can be changed but still ensure the quality of the product.

Study sample drawings

To create a perfect wooden product, first of all, it requires a beautiful design, meticulous details in terms of shape and decoration: basically, this drawing must follow the general rules in painting like other drawings, but with the specific characteristics of the sculpture, the drawing also has its own characteristics.

The raised and recessed parts on the drawing must be shown, the retained wood parts and the wood parts to be cut out on the product must also be shown.

The far and near parts on the drawing are shown, as are the wood parts that are cut out and the wood parts that are retained on the product.

With products with so many embossed lines, it is very difficult to describe all the details in the drawing, every line requires the craftsman to have a very high imagination, this also shows the experience of the craftsman.

Studying the drawing is the stage where the craftsman must master the product model to be processed and the structure of the entire product, both the surface and the hidden parts... After studying the drawing, the model must be traced on thin cardboard according to the exact size and details of the drawing. When receiving the model to carve, the craftsman must pay attention to the overall layout of the model, the proportions, the size of the model, the convex and concave parts of the model.

Choose wood for carving

Wood carving products are a high-end item, many products have many complex and sophisticated details, so the raw materials to create this type of product must meet quality requirements, the wood used for carving must be sapwood-free, with beautiful grain, wood used for carving is usually: mahogany, ebony, rosewood, rosewood, po mu, giổi..., the wood is not termite-free, not affected by the environment, not termite-free... In addition, it is also necessary to base on the characteristics and requirements of the product to choose the appropriate wood.

Wooden products need strong, tough, crack-free, dark-colored wood such as tea cabinet sets, tea cabinet pedestals, mahogany bed pedestals... Mahogany is often used for carving.

Old

To make a product with beautiful grain and smooth shine, often use Cam Lai wood.

Carved products made of Pơmu and huangdan wood are both shiny and beautiful.

incense used to carve worship objects

To make a yellow statue, use jackfruit wood. To make a white statue, use grapefruit wood.

Sawing wood (wood blanks)

The overall dimensions (length, width, height) of the product are smaller than the size of the raw material because it has too much processing allowance, which will waste wood, waste labor, and increase the cost of the product. On the contrary, if the processing allowance is too small, it is easy to have incorrect specifications, dimensions, or not ensure product quality because the amount of excess wood in the product processing process is difficult to repair and polish.

Technical requirements for wood blanks

The surface of the blank after mixing must be straight, smooth, and accurate according to the ink line. The blank surface must not be convex, concave, jagged, scratched, or cracked.

Front face pattern

The front face is the front right side of the product. The front face must be free of defects, have beautiful grain, and not be twisted for easy processing.

The pattern is a cardboard that has been turned to the shape, size and details of the carved sample. The pattern ink must be chosen to be clear with the wood part of the blank.

Pattern marking sequence on the front face

Place the blank neatly on the table. Place the cover template face up. Draw an ink line around the product.

Ink the details from top to bottom, from left to right.

Draw the side face perpendicular to the front face

In the technique of processing wooden details, choosing the right side surface is also very important when processing by machine as well as by manual method. In the technique of carving when carving statues or animals,

The worker must mark the ink on all four sides. Therefore, choosing the correct reference side is very important. The opposite sides, reference sides or side sides are of course determined after choosing the correct reference side.

However, to engrave accurately after choosing the main reference surface, people choose the reference surface perpendicular to the main reference surface on the left side of the product depending on the complexity of the left or right side of the product. Usually choose the side with more difficult details as the side reference surface.

Frontal fracture

Chiseling has the same meaning as sketching the shape in painting in wood carving, chiseling plays an important role, it creates the shape of the product. However, this is only the shape of the preliminary product, so when chiseling, a certain amount of processing surplus must be left for the later stages of chiseling, scraping, trimming and polishing, the chisel must be sharp and neat, not scratching the wood or creating cracks, even small cracks.

Tools include chisels, hammers, and punches. Chiseling follows the principle of shaping, so the chisel can be strong but precise, avoiding chiseling into the wood of the product. The tool must be sharp, selected in the direction of the grain to chisel away each part of the wood cleanly and neatly, do not chisel randomly, chisel each part neatly, must shape the product then chisel out the important details of the product first, then chisel other details.

Break the details according to the side standard

Technical requirements are similar to chiseling on the top surface. Pay special attention to the chiseling lines on the standard surface, to combine to create a harmonious shape of the product on the remaining 2 sides. It is necessary to correctly determine the center of gravity of the product on the 2 sides and it is the basis for determining the center of gravity of the product's shape.

Trace the remaining faces

Trace the remaining side pattern: Take the standard contour of the part towards the main standard face that has been broken as a line from which to trace the other parts.

Back pattern

Take the standard contour of the detail on the broken side as the standard line and draw the remaining lines from there. After drawing the sample of the next parts, if the details on all 4 sides do not match in shape or size, the worker must promptly adjust according to the template.

Punch the remaining sides according to the pattern.

When the product surfaces are broken, we get the product in its basic form. That means the product must meet the requirements of size ratio, harmonious and balanced shape on all surfaces, ensuring that there is a basic axis, and a center of gravity exactly like the sample product. Therefore, when breaking the remaining surfaces, we must be skillful, combining the detailed lines of the product on all surfaces, otherwise the product will be very difficult to repair.

Punch and shape

Carved products from human statues to animals or pedestals, pedestals... must have a harmonious and balanced appearance and layout. After chiseling all 4 sides of the product, the saw is truly complete in shape and detailed size like the original before proceeding with other processing steps. Chiseling to create shape is a detailed repair step, so the processing tool is a small chisel, requiring the chisel to be gentle and the tool to be sharp.

-Peeling

The purpose of sharpening is to create a product with standard size, at the same time making the carved product clean and smooth, ensuring conditions to improve product quality for the following stages. The tools for sharpening are usually chisels or chisels.

-Perfect shape and structure

To carve a high quality product, special attention must be paid to the shape and structure of the product before proceeding to complete the shape and structure. The tools are chisels used to correct missing details compared to the sample drawing.

-Scrape

Scraping is a processing step to smooth the details of the product. Scraping operations must ensure technical requirements. Tools are scrapers of many different sizes.

depending on the detail to be scraped. The scraping operation must follow the grain of the wood, scrape evenly to avoid collisions, if not careful scraping can easily make the surface of the detail rough or break small details.

-Trim

In wood carving products, there are detailed parts that need to be trimmed such as: Bird feathers, animal hair, eyebrows... that need to apply trimming techniques. Use a chisel to gently separate, so that the cutting blade is tilted towards the part that needs trimming to create loose fibers.

Mother of pearl inlay process

Mother of pearl inlay has existed for a long time in our country. Since ancient times, people have known how to use pieces of mother of pearl and snail shells to attach to common household objects. Until today, mother of pearl inlay has become a decorative art to create unique fine art products.

Materials used in mother-of-pearl inlay include: mother-of-pearl shells, snail shells, lacquer materials, glue, colored lamp black or black dye, sandpaper or whetstone, solvents, carbon paper, lead, tape, etc. Wood used for mother-of-pearl inlay is often good wood with beautiful colors and grain such as: mahogany, rosewood, rosewood, etc. The wood does not crack, warp, or have termites.

Tools

To have beautiful and delicate mother-of-pearl inlay products, the first thing that inlay workers do is to create suitable production tools. Over time, experience and learning from famous inlay areas such as Chuon Ngo village, Chuyen My district, Ha Tay, workers here have gradually perfected a very useful and unique set of tools. To create different types of products, in reality, workers are forced to explore and carry out strict, complicated and meticulous steps, this process is divided into stages. To grasp that technological process, we must first learn about the tools used for production.

Tools used to cut mother of pearl patterns include:

-Small saw or also known as art saw: the saw blade is about 20cm long and the wide side of the saw blade is from 0.5-2.5mm long, depending on the lines of the pattern, the craftsman chooses the appropriate size of the saw blade.

-File table : Used to rest hands and clamps when cutting and filing patterns.

- Clamp : Has the function of holding more precisely and firmly than hands, used to clamp when cutting and filing mother-of-pearl and snail patterns. Clamp is made of two wooden, horn or hard plastic plates curved like two leaves joined together by an iron ring.

- Saw blade : used to support when using a saw blade to cut the saw blade to create saw teeth.

- Small files of all kinds : there are flat, round, curved, trough-shaped, and triangular files used to match the curves of the pattern.

- Trimming pen : used to draw patterns on pearl shells

-Clogs : to rest your hands on the pieces of mother-of-pearl when grinding on emery stones

- Various types of chisels : flat, trough-shaped... A mosaic worker's chisel set has about ten pieces. Compared to the size of a carver's chisel set, it is much smaller.

-Marking pen : a sharp steel pen used to mark the mother-of-pearl and snail patterns that need to be inlaid. Based on those lines, the craftsman drills holes on the wood surface to attach the patterns.

Carving knife or carving knife : made of saw blade steel, used to carve lines on the surface of the mother-of-pearl inlaid into the wood surface, the knife is also used to scrape off the paint coating on the surface of the mother-of-pearl.

There are also some other auxiliary tools such as glue, paste, tape. Each of the above tools has its own function and is suitable for each stage of the worker's production.

Mother of pearl inlay technique

To create a complete mother-of-pearl inlay technique, the craftsman must carry out 12 steps: studying the sample, preparing the materials, cutting the mother-of-pearl, and gluing. Taking impressions of the patterns, chiseling the background, attaching the mother-of-pearl, rough grinding, drawing separate lines, lacquering, grinding the scenery, and polishing.