The little guy had a blue face, a big nose and a toothy grin. It could be that he was tickled that his days of being smacked by a golf club were long gone.

With half of its dimpled shell shucked to reveal its hard rubber core, the golf ball with a face is the creation of Romans Kikuts, who has been carving for about three years now. The blue material in the ball is nice for carving, he said.

A few chairs away from him at this meeting of The Woodcarver Club another carver was making a golfer out of basswood.

The club, which currently has between eight and a dozen members, will happily welcome more. The word meeting likely is a bit too formal for the gathering that takes place from 8:30-11:30 a.m. Wednesdays at the Mower County Senior Center in Austin. The guys kind of wander in throughout the morning, said member Russell Vaale, who is in his 90s. He encourages potential carvers to simply stop by on a Wednesday. Experience is not necessary, and they don’t need to bring anything. Club members will help you along, he said.

Carver Dan Lee said Vaale helped him get started.

“I had been in scouting in different positions for years with my sons as they came up through,” said Lee. “Every once in a while they would come up with something, their scout jacknife of something; and I had retired and really needed something to do.”

He heard about the club and found Vaale’s phone number.

“I gave him a call and he says, ‘Oh yeah, you can come down any Wednesday morning and we’ll be here.’ He got me started. He got me a knife to use and he got me a piece of wood.”

Everyone does their own thing, and if inspiration is needed, they have woodcarver books with patterns and guidance on a table off to the side of the row of tables set up as their communal workshop.

Vaale said he enjoys making birds, his latest is a bluebird made of basswood, which is a preferred wood to work with. Butternut is another popular wood.

“It’s just been carved and sanded,” he said of the bird. “And now I’ve got to put the feathers and the details. There’s a lot of work to do on it yet.”

Tools of the craft include specialized knives, gouges and v-blades to add details.

Lee is working on a flower lapel pin, using a v-blade to outline the pedals.

Kikuts has a few projects he’s working on, including carving a loose ball inside a cylinder structure. He’s taking his time with it, making small cuts on the ball and leaving braces a little big until he’s closer to the finishing touches. He will sand the ball smooth, and jokes that he used to use his wife’s emery boards for that kind of thing until she got wise to him.

“I think a lot of these things are for gifts,” Vaale said.

The camaraderie is as much a part of the meetings as the carving. Paging through a magazine, carver Darryl Saurer stops on a fishing lure. His father used to make lures — without hooks —  for spearfishing, he said.

“It’s kind of like a decoy, is what it is,” Vaale said.

“Yeah, it’s called a decoy,” Saurer said.

“To draw the fish in,” Vaale said.

Explaining how to spearfish through the ice, Saurer said you need to be in a totally dark fish house, sitting on a chair ready to strike into the hole.

“You have to have a really dark house when you spear,” he said. “You can’t have any light.”

He paused, and then added: “I had a muskrat come into my house once. He thought it was his house. I hit that door so hard.”

There’s no arguing with a muskrat, another carver laughed.