Sam Dunning thinks he might have some future carvers in his house.

Dunning and wife Holly are the parents of two 9-year-olds, Andrew and Elizabeth, adopted from Kazakhstan, and a 5-year-old, Hannah, from China. Andrew, the oldest by three weeks, has expressed interest in his father's chainsaw art, but more importantly, he knows his adoption is inextricably tied to it.

Dunning was just a couple of years into creating chainsaw sculptures when he attended the first Carving in the Ozarks Festival 10 years ago in Eureka Springs.

"I was ready to quit carving," he remembers. "We needed to figure out how to pay for adopting a child from Kazakhstan -- actually, two at once -- and I didn't have the time or the money. But I convinced my wife to let me go to this one competition."

He won -- and his success led to commissions, which led to financing the trip to Kazakhstan.

"We worked our fannies off for a year," he remembers, "but the Lord handed us the way. I probably would have quit carving had we not gone to Eureka Springs."

He's been there every year since -- except three years ago, when the family was in China to adopt Hannah.

"It's a smaller event, but it has a big draw," he says of Saturday's competition. "There will be a lot of nationally recognized carvers there. I've been fortunate to meet a lot of them and to watch them and get ideas. It's hard to teach somebody (to carve with a chainsaw). Everybody's got their own style."

Dunning started carving when he and his wife moved back to a farm in the countryside near Paducah, Ky. He was just "playing a little bit" while cutting firewood, he says, and came to enjoy the creativity of revealing a bear or a buck in a piece of oak or pine.

Even now, though, he doesn't do it full time. Then, he says, it would become a job, and he already has one of those.

"When I feel creative, I can go out the door and carve," he says. "If I'm just not in the mood, I don't have to."

Starting today, Dunning and the other artisans at Carving in the Ozarks will be creating in the public eye. What they do will be sold at auction at 4 p.m. Saturday. Proceeds are divided among the 20 to 25 participating carvers and Eureka Springs civic organizations and charities.

Dunning says he'd invite people to come check out what he's doing for about 10 minutes, then come back about 30 minutes later. He thinks they'll be amazed at how much can happen in how little time.

"I could never do hand carving," he says with a chuckle. "This way, I can get something in my mind and just take off and do it."