Spoons!

The spoon carving project seems to have a lot of fits and starts. Perhaps this is just the way that beginning a new skill can be. The jump from no skills at all, to learning how to keep yourself safe, find the materials and tools you need, learn how to get and keep your tools sharp, how to shape and carve, how to manage the way the new activity impacts your body and where the time and patience come from for going up the steep side of the learning curve–well, it takes a bit! Earlier in the year, I recognised that the main barrier to learning spoon carving is my lack of mastery of the art of sharpening my tools. If I could sharpen my carving tools, that would mean I could sharpen kitchen knives and gardening tools like secateurs a lot better, in addition to making spoon carving better and safer. So I committed myself to treating learning to sharpen tools as a key skill set. Sometimes I’d sit down to sharpen my main two knives and treat that as the work of the day (spoon wise), then carve next day.

We also decided to declare the last of the birch trees dead, and begin to cut it down, with some help from friends. So I had a good bit of birch wood to work with. And I could see that the axe work needed to create a billet (a rectangle of wood without bark and such on it) and then a spoon blank (where the blunt shape of the spoon emerges ready to be refined with a knife) was a separate thing I needed to get a lot better at. I even decided to buy a second hand mallet when I was in Warrnambool and got one that has been home made and well used, and will be much easier to use than the chunk of tree branch I had been using to tap my axe.

All this thought and then sitting down pretty much every day for a few weeks, resulted in some spoons!

I realised after spending a lot of time and thought carving a series of three, that I was getting better at the side profile of the spoon (rather than it being flat, having the kind of shape that makes a spoon easier and lovelier to use) but that I was tilting the bowl of the spoon in precisely the wrong direction. My friends, that is what learning consists in, at some stages of the journey!

I also learned that I like carving a dessert spoon kind of size and do not like creating a teaspoon kind of size, and I slowed down a lot when I had side branches to work with, not big enough for my preferred size. And I did some work to research sharpening, practised a lot, and then stopped for no apparent reason! It might be time to get back to it. Because it was rather delightful, and I have been gifted some cherry wood and it is waiting for me!