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"I've been working with wood for as long as I can remember," says Walter Ulrich of Holy Mother and Child parish in Corinth/ Lake Luzerne.

The 69-year-old calls himself an avid scroll saw technician, stressing that he is not an artist. However, those who see his work might think differently.

Mr. Ulrich makes crosses and other items out of wood. He recently donated an intricate scrollwork cross to St. Joseph's parish in Greenfield Center that features the Stations of the Cross carved into the wood.

The scrollwork cross stands almost six feet tall, took about 160 hours to complete and weighs about 20 pounds. Although he started working on it last year, Mr. Ulrich didn't finish it until recently; he wasn't able to spend as much time in his home workshop as he would have liked.

Mr. Ulrich's workshop is heated by a wood stove - mostly so he can throw the "oops" pieces into it, he said. In the shop, he "scrolls out" intricate crosses, cribs for his granddaughters and parts for his Victorian house, which he is renovating.

Right now, he's working on the home's gingerbread molding; in the past, he made pine ceiling tiles for a unique drop ceiling in his dining room.

Retired and working
Since he retired in 2007, Mr. Ulrich has had more time for his hobby. Working for the Department of Defense Education Activity (the education sector of the DOD), he lived overseas in countries like Germany, Turkey and Iceland for more than 20 years, only coming back to the States for about six weeks every summer.

But every time he came home, he said, he picked up his saw and started crafting.

Now settled in Corinth, where he was born, the retiree has two daughters and two granddaughters in the area. His wife passed away about five years ago.

Although he has crafted many projects with his saw over the past 60 years, Mr. Ulrich stated that the cross being donated to St. Joseph's might be his most complicated piece of work.

"Each of these panels takes about five hours," he said, pointing to the cross' wooden squares depicting the Stations of the Cross. The wood for that part of the cross was reused from an old pew found in the basement of the Church of the Holy Infancy in Lake Luzerne, one of Holy Mother and Child parish's two worship sites.

Mr. Ulrich says that working with wood gives him a special connection to his faith. Jesus Himself must have been a woodworker, he noted, considering that Christ's stepfather, Joseph, was a carpenter.

Jesus and Walter
"I don't think people think of [Jesus] before He started His mission," Mr. Ulrich remarked. "Christ was trained as a carpenter."

Although Mr. Ulrich enjoys woodworking, he said he isn't creative enough to do anything freehand. Instead, he uses patterns he orders from catalogs or sees in magazines. In the case of the donated cross, he did calculate how to make it twice the size of the original pattern.

After placing a pattern on the wood, Mr. Ulrich drills small holes where cuts will be made. He then lowers the scroll saw blade into the hole to carve the pattern, using it much like a sewing machine.

The woodworker said that Christ may have had the same resulting cuts and scrapes that he has on his own hands.

"I've got scars from it. That's the problem any woodworker will have," Mr. Ulrich said. "I don't notice it till I see the red on the wood" from a bleeding cut.

One of Mr. Ulrich's granddaughters will often ask where he got a particular cut on his hand. Usually, he doesn't even remember.[[In-content Ad]]

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