Seeking a creative outlet during his three-decade career in finance, Carmel resident Jim Tanner started carving fruits and vegetables nearly 45 years ago.
“I think it started when the kids were small and we would host Thanksgiving dinner for the whole family, and I carved a little turkey out of an apple, just a little turkey that we sat with the vegetables. And that’s how it started.” said Jim Tanner, 77. “From there, I got asked to do baby showers.”
His hobby grew into a side business completely by word-of-mouth.
“I wasn’t charging anything. I just did it because they were friends. And then I started getting requests from people I didn’t know, and that’s when it changed,” Tanner said.
Tanner started charging $100 to $500, depending on the size of the project and soon became a go-to for birthday parties, graduations, weddings, reunions,and corporate events. He started a business called Creative Carvings while living in Anderson and worked with his sister, Margo Royer, owner of M&N Catering, also based in Anderson.
“What he can do is so over and above what I could ever dream about creating. He recently made ballerina slippers out of parsnips,” Royer said. “Everyone is mesmerized by his creations. Angels out of cabbage, flowers out of melons, turkeys out of apples, just no end to his creativity.”
Tanner and his wife, Maxine, moved to Carmel in 2023 to live closer to one of their three sons. While he no longer operates an official business he welcomes orders from local customers.
Maxine Tanner encourages her husband’s hobby and takes pictures of each creation.
“He’s awesome. He doesn’t accept that very well. He is awesome. And he’s very particular. He works very hard getting it right,” Maxine Tanner said.
Her favorite project was a watermelon carving for an anniversary party.
“Jim uses pictures to recreate images of people. When he was done, it looked just like them,” she said. He prints images on transfer paper to help guide his carving.
In addition to carving watermelon, Jim Tanner uses cantaloupe, honeydew melons, oranges, lemons, radishes and grapes. But he will try any fruit or vegetable that enhances a project.
“The biggest challenge in all of this is the time you spend in your mind thinking, ‘How am I going to do this? They want a tractor theme. What am I going to make a tractor out of?’ And so that’s where you come up with an acorn squash, or a butternut squash, and then an eggplant for the wheels,” Jim Tanner said. “So, it’s not so much carving that takes the time, it’s pre-planning and thinking through, and some stuff doesn’t work. And so, you have to think of something else.”
Although he enjoys trying to carve different fruits and vegetables, he said he most often carves watermelons. He avoids pumpkins.
“Pumpkins are very hard to carve. As you see it on TV and these professionals, they do these big gum pumpkins, and carve them with ease, but I use these fine little knives for some of the detail, and the pumpkins are just too tough,” Jim Tanner said.
Although mostly self-taught, Jim Tanner learned from videos he ordered through vegetablecarving.com and the Nita Gill YouTube channel. Tanner says he has always enjoyed watching and learning from carvers on cruises.
“I use Thai Carving Tools from Thailand. They’re very intricate, very detailed and they have special knives that are very pointed and thin and flexible,” he said.
He’s never entered his carving work in a contest.
“It’s just mainly been for my satisfaction and to help friends,” he said.
He said a typical project takes him three hours.
“I’m often wishing I could do it over, but usually don’t have time. Part of the problem with this hobby is it’s not like a picture you can put on the wall and keep. It’s good for like three days and you throw it out,” he said.
While Jim Tanner has finished many successful projects, one of his biggest flops was a dinosaur display for a birthday party.
“I sat this watermelon on the back seat of my car, and I had to stop quick, and it rolled off the seat onto the floor, cracked all the way down,” he said. “So, I get to the people’s house, and I said, ‘Do you have any duct tape?’ And I had skewers and we patched it together. That was my biggest learning experience.”
Jim Tanner doesn’t have a social media presence or website but welcomes emails at [email protected]. He typically requires two weeks of lead time for a project.
Picking the right produce
Jim Tanner sources his fruits and vegetables – depending on the season and availability – from a variety of locations.
When carving watermelons, he said it’s important to select the right color.
“One of the important things is to get enough contrast so that your carvings show. In other words, sometimes you see watermelons that are kind of gray color, and you carve out to get to the white and it doesn’t contrast with the gray watermelon. You want to get a dark watermelon, if you can,” Tanner said. “Then it’s a matter of cutting away the portions that I want to keep white and leaving the rest. But it’s pretty intricate, and fine lines are hard to do with the watermelon. It gets flexible and wiggly.”
Tanner said he carves watermelons year-round but that it is much harder to find good ones when they aren’t in season.
