Outdoor Photographer & Writer in Northern Ireland

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And now for something completely different! Spoons!

I was recently introduced to the dark arts of spoon carving and, like all initiates, became addicted. The thing about working with green wood is that you need to really look at the wood and think about what the wood wants to do and work with that. Gaining an understanding about the nature of the wood, the tightly packed bundle of fibres under tension, the curve of the grain etc., allows the carver to plan ahead and see how the spoon will take shape. One of the big differences between working with green wood and seasoned wood is that green wood will dry out and as it does so the wood is likely to twist and distort - adding to the uniqueness of green wood carvings.

The 3 spoons shown here are my first 3 spoons. The first (on the bottom) was carved from a straight section of a birch sapling and, as you can see, remains a straight spoon. The second spoon (in the middle) was carved from a gently curving section of sycamore. Sycamore has a beautiful straight grain and was originally introduced to Britain by the Romans specifically as a crop with which to make spoons and bowls. This piece is self supporting and the bowl is suspended. It is definitely a decorative piece, rather than a functional spoon ... which is why I carved the third and last spoon shown here. Carved from a section of silver birch where a branch joins the main trunk this spoon has a distinctive curve (which isn't really evident in the photograph), allowing a nice relaxed eating position.

Of course, to carve wood one needs a knife! These spoons were carved using a Frosts Clipper, a small Brusletto carving knife and spoon knife (for carving out the bowl), but I wanted to understand more about how knives were made. Now I could have gone out and bought myself everything needed to make a knife from scratch, but for a one off exercise that seemed a bit excessive. Instead I bought a blade and handle material from Dennis at www.brisa.fi and proceeded to handle the blade. Only having a small file and some Wet&Dry paper it took some time to file down the bolts and shape the scales to fit the handle. The wood was treated with teak oil and then given a waterproof coat of pure beeswax. The sheath was wet formed and I intend to harden it with beeswax - a process used in medieval times to make leather armour.

I have a few more carving projects lined up, but more of those later!

(Oh and for those of you who were wondering what this has to do with photography - it gave me the excuse to play around with lighting scenarios!)



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