I searched some Celtic illustrations looking for something I could CNC carve into a pendent for a necklace. This horse looking creature caught my eye. It looks part horse, part sea monster, and part Celtic with its typical Celtic knots look. Further research reveals it is a water horse, hippocamp or more friendly Scottish (Gaelic) or Celtic name, a Kelpie. So Kelpie it is... I thought I just had to put some work into the design.

My hands and eyes are not good enough to do this just with hand tools. I use Vectric Aspire to build the design digitally. The design took about two days of computer work and created around a quarter million lines of code. 

The result is the wax carving shown in green wax that took 1:45 to run on my wax carving mill. That wax was used in lost wax casting to create the pendent shown in Sterling SIlver. That is a post-it note for the background and the Kelpie is under two inches wide.

I also made the wedding style band which was carved entirely by hand from a 3/16" (0.1875") thin, flat, square, wax blank . I always like to have several items when I am going to expend the energy to heat the kiln to 1350 degrees for several hours. Total kiln time is usually 10-12 hours per heat.