Sycamore Ladle

I've been wanting to carve a ladle, but the boards I had been buying from Home Depot were not thick enough.  That is one of the reasons I started hunting big, fallen limbs in the woods.  From what I have learned so far, you can only carve a spoon on one half of a log.  You split the log longways.  Otherwise you have to contend with the pith.  That's the center of the rings.  It does funky things when you carve there.

This isn't the deep ladle I want, but it is getting there.  As I was carving, I followed the swirl of the grain.  Engrossed in the grain, I missed the dark brown stripe until I had carved a bit of it away.  Oh well.  Another lesson.  Pay attention to the whole piece you are working on.  I would have loved for the stripe to have gone all the way down the handle.

Here's the sycamore limb from which the spoon began.