Cherry Spoon with Chip Carving

 My sister called me to come visit after they took down a cherry tree.  I took several green limbs home and am now regretting that I didn't take far more.  I probably got eight spoons out of the lot.

Here's one I finished yesterday. It is being gifted to an old friend who grew up on the property from which that cherry tree grew.

I really like this one.  I am working on thinning out the bowl. It seems to me that, out of caution, most folks carve thick bowled spoons in the beginning. Well, at least after they carve holes in them a couple of times. I feel as though I did a nice job on thinning this one out.  

And I am happy with the chip carving.

Coffee Scoop Gift to Me.......from Me

 I carved this coffee scoop in the late spring. It was intended as a gift, though I loved it and wanted it for myself. (I have so few of my spoons that I love, as I give them all away!)

As I prepared carved wooden spoons for gifting, I photographed groups of spoons and let the recipients choose the one they wanted. No one ever chose this one. So, yesterday I decided that it was a sign that this was meant to stay here with me.  It is so goofy at how happy I am at a gift from me to me.

Spoons, Bikes, and Watermelon

Happy Fourth of July!

We did a 27 mile bike ride with friends this morning. There were lots of folks outside walking, paddling, and riding. I had my mask… one of those tube pieces of fabric, a.k.a. a Buff, and used it from time to time. Mostly I rode with out but if the trail looked crowded I flipped it up over my mouth and nose. 

It’s 2 pm and I am in my favorite space “in the house”; our screened porch. It is a bit warm but not at my limit. 

I will eat a little melon; carve on a spoon; and then retreat into the air conditioning when the thermometer nudges up just a little too far.  (Note: After sitting an hour or so in 90 degree heat, the air coming out of my fan felt like it was blowing out of an oven.)

The Most Difficult Part of Carving Spoons

The most difficult part of spoon carving for me, is the part where you box them up and mail them to loved ones. Parting with the spoons is not the hard part. It is the actual physical shipping and handling that is just no fun. 

These need to head out though. My goal is to take them to the post office on Monday. 

The spoon on the left gets delivered to a friend who lives near the post office, so that is handy. That one is oak and the wood came from my friend’s yard. 

The second from the left is from a piece of cherry that I got from a farmhouse in West Virginia; my favorite spot on the planet. The cherry branch had been in my freezer for a couple of years. That spoon goes to a friend who has been teaching yoga on Zoom for free during the pandemic. She isn’t expecting this gift.

The one in the middle and the one on the far right go to my daughter’s best friend from high school. She isn’t expecting anything either. The white one is (I think) tulip poplar and the large one on the far right is crabapple. Both pieces were sourced from my neighborhood. 

The apple had been trimmed from a yard up the street and was in a debris pile on the curb. The tulip poplar (or is it maple???) had fallen next to a creek in the woods across the street. This piece is intended as a coffee scoop and is two tablespoons deep. Upon reflection, a bright white wood may not have been the best choice for a coffee scoop. The discolorization it will get wouldn’t bother me, but it probably would bother a lot of folks.

The fourth spoon from the right goes to my sister. Her husband had to take down a tree in the front yard because it was dying. I love this wood!!! Hopefully I can get a few more pieces before it totally dries out. I grew up in the house my sister lives in so this wood is extra special for me. Kids from the old neighborhood have asked for a spoon made from that tree since it represents home. I need to made one for myself first.

Oak Spoon with Chip Carving

Here is the finished product that I was working on earlier in the week. Ta da!

Carving is Addictive

Oh my goodness.  Carving spoons and kitchen utensils is addictive.  I should have called last month "Spoon-tober," I carved so much.  Probably 23 - 26 wooden utensils were carved; a special order for a friend.

Fortunately for me, Mark told me where a tulip poplar tree had fallen in the woods and was still green.  It was wonderfully carvable wood and I wanted to work with it nonstop.  My self imposed deadline for the project was Oct. 31 and I am pretty accountable to myself for such things.

I worked hard and finished on time. The goodies got put in the mail yesterday and so today has been spent vacuuming all the sawdust and wood bits from all over the house.  (How it gets to some of the places it does, I have no idea.)  I cleaned off my desk to make room for scherenschnitte time.  November will be a time for cutting my Christmas cards.  I'm sure that as soon as I get into it, I will feel as addicted to it as I do to the carving right now.

I carved fives set of these.  They varied wildly in how they turned out.  (It depends on the shape and size of the branches and the usable space between knots.

I mostly carved out on my screened in porch, but  my studio room, aka Snippyville, also  doubled as a wood shop.

Here's a spurtle in the rough stages. Every one of the spurtles turned out wildly different looking.

My beloved ax.  I mostly treat this tool like a baby. It is a good one.

My babies were almost done at this point.  They had all been sanded smooth.  Then, I soaked  the in water to allow the grain to rise again and then to get sanded once more.

Pyrographed Sugar Skull Spoon

This is another wood 

burned design.  Wow, did 

this one take a long time to burn!

Wooden Spoon Love

This week I've gotten numerous projects finished.  It may have been because of deadlines.  It may have been because of the piles of unfinished projects on my work space.  It might have been because of days and days of rain.  Regardless, I have cleared swaths of space in my studio.  Yippee!

This accomplishment also gave me time to spend carving without feeling guilty about the other things that needed attention.

I just finished this spoon.  It might just be my favorite spoon.  ....at least for the moment. The shape is pleasing to me and it is spalted just enough.

I'd like to just sit and hold it.

Spoons for Drums

I have been carving spoons like crazy this summer, but I have yet to try and sell any. In order to fund my contribution to my sister-in-law's Donor's Choose project, I am selling some of my spoons in my Etsy store. Here's a link to my shop if you'd like to take a look: https://www.etsy.com/shop/SnippetyGibbet

Carved Fudge Spurtle

This was the piece I made today.  Evidently, it is called a "spurtle." In my mind it is a spatula.  This particular one was made for stirring fudge.  I don't know how well it will work for fudge but it feels very smooooooooooooth.

See the initial "j"?  That's my brand.  I took a little nail and bent it.  A wee bit has been cut out so that it looks like the dot over the j.  I lay this brand on top of the wood and then lay a hot wood burning tool on top of it.  It heats the metal enough to burn the brand in the wood.  That's my signature for the time being.

Sycamore and Branding

Every week or two I wander out in the woods to see if any new sycamore branches are on the ground.   After rain storms is the best time to find them.  I feel so excited when I see new ones as it means I have wonderful carving wood for a few weeks.

I barely got down the trail this week before I found this one.

Sycamore carves so easily that it is my favorite wood to carve. The limb I found on the ground was relatively thick and had lots of straight lines with few knots.  Those parts will make for nice big straight spoons.  It also had wonderfully zig zaggy bits which I enjoy carving into oddly shaped spoons. The odd ones have a lot of character and are my favorites.  But my friend asked me for a long handled spoon and didn't request that it look odd, so I went with "normal."

Actually, I carved multiple spoons.

When I am done with carving, sanding and treating the wood with spoon butter, I use a wood burning tool to sign my initials.  It often slooks sloppy to me, so I investigated branding.  This is what I have settled on.

I sawed off the top of a cup hook and squeezed it with pliers until it looked like a "j."  Then I layed the "j" on the back of the spoon and pressed a hot wood burning tool on top of it.  After a few minutes, it branded just fine.

There are some fancy spoons that I have half finished on my work table, but plain old spoons are satisfying to work on.  Plain ones are the ones I go back to work on day after day.

Grandbaby Spoons

My granddaughter came to visit us for three weeks.  We call this time "Camp Grandma."  When you have a grandma who is artsy, of course you are going to do artsy things.  These are the spoons my granddaughter carved during her stay.

It was the second time I taught spoon carving around the campfire.

Loving to Carve Love Spoons

I spent many hours in carving bliss while working on this Love Spoon.  At the very end I gave it a little sanding, but most of the smoothing out was done with a knife tip.  It was happily meditative.

This spoon was carved out of sycamore and I just drew a pattern on it that seemed to fit the wood.

Love Spoon

It's been raining all day long here in Northern Virginia.  What a great opportunity to go down to Snippyville and practice new carving techniques.

There is a genre of carved spoons called "love spoons."  They can be quite elaborate.  Here is my first foray into it.  It is pretty simple, but carving it was challenging enough to be entertaining.

Carving Cravings

I've been carving wooden spoons as often as I can.  To both keep the cost down and use soft wood, downed limbs are sawed up and carted home. Spoon "blanks" are chopped into shape with my axe and then stuck in the freezer.  This helps keep them "green."  I finish the spoons within an inch of their lives.  And then I wood burn my initials and the date on the handles.  I spend hours and hours on this and love every moment of it.

Spooning

This past week I finished Spoonula 3 and carved another spoon for a friend.  There have been no big wood mishaps in the last week.  The only problem is that I can't stop thinking about wanting to carve.  I wake up at night thinking about it.

 

Spoonulas 2 and 3 were carved out of a board of Ambrosia Maple.  I love the color of this after I oiled it.  Gorgeous!

Here's a photo of the spoonulas carved out of Ambrosia Maple. The one on the top is unoiled and the bottom one is oiled.  It's oiled with just clear mineral oil, mind you. No stains.

Carving dried boards is like carving brick though. Wow, that was tough on my hands.

Surprisingly, green wood is good for carving.  I would not have guessed that you should do that, but I read it on many blogs.  Green wood carves like butter.  The green wood that I have available to me is mostly beech and sycamore.

  Downed limbs are what I use.  No cutting trees for spoon making! When we are out and about in the world, I keep my eyes open for limbs of other woods that are on the ground.  I've never looked forward to wind storms like I do now as that is when I am more likely to find wood.

Return of Spoonula

I honestly do not mind my carving mess ups at this point in my learning.  There are so many things I learn from the mistakes.

My first spoonula was carved out of a fallen sycamore limb that I found.  The mistake in that one was that I carved one spot of it paper thin.  So, when I carved the next one, I tried so hard to not carve it too thin.


This one was carved out of Ambrosia Maple.  See the board under it?  That is the board it was carved from.  It is almost white before you oil it.  It feels like magic to put clear oil on it and have it turn this beautiful color.

Well, unfortunately, I repeated my mistake and carved it too thin again.  It isn't as paper thin as the first time, but still thin.  I carved the depression on the spatula before I carved the angle under it. And not only did that thin it out, but when I started carving the depression I gouged it out with too much gusto.  The more I tried evening out the gouge, the thinner the whole thing got.

So, now I am working on spoonula number three.  I am pretty happy with it so far.  There is a worm hole along one side that I might fill.  There is still a little sanding to do.  Then I will coat it in mineral oil.  After that, I will let my friend choose the one she wants.

Spoonula

I think I have not carved 2 spoons alike since I started playing with wood.  A lot of the reason is that each piece of wood presents its own possibilities and limitations.  That, plus I whack off an accidental piece of wood here and there.  That kind of changes the designs.

A friend of mine asked me if I would carve a "spoonula" for her.  That is a spoon and spatula combo. I had tried a spatula a couple of weeks or so and the angle of the the bottom piece was just way wrong.  So, last night I decided to carve a prototype of the spoonula.

I totally love the prototype.  It was carved from a found limb off a sycamore tree which was a limiting factor sizewise.  Besides that, the piece of wood carved just fine. 

My error was that I dug a little too deep in the bowl of the spoon. If you look at the next photo, you can see where the wood is so thin, light shines through.  Good enough for my kitchen for now.

Onward to a better version.

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.