prepping spoon blanks

I prepped a whole bunch of spoon blanks today for carving.  For funsies, I photographed the process.

I turned this

into this

and this

Then I marked the sides

and cut them

Then I shaped the back of the bowl with my disc sander

And now they are soaking for carving.

spoons like to party!

Ever wonder what to do with your spoons after you carve them?  Well, you can pose them, artistically scattered on the floor.

Or you can stack them.

Cherry Spoons

I have a friend from worker who does ceramics on the side.  She does nice work, so I asked her to make me a set of 10 drinking cups.  She asked for cherry spoons.  Here are the spoons.  I will post pictures of the great cups she made when my camera cooperates.

This is the first time I have worked with cherry wood.  It is awfully pretty, but not quite as strong or predictable as maple.  The grain is more predictable in maple than in cherry.  The maple is harder, too, so the cherry was a lot easier to carve.

wet wood chemistry

I put three spoon blanks in the sink to soak and they made the water green! One walnut, one cherry, one maple. Cold water, soaking for 2 days. Here are some pictures to attempt to show you.

I do not know how it ended up green, as I have boiled and soaked these woods before. I don't think I ever put all three together, though. I wish I knew more about what is going on here.

second thoughts about stirring sticks

As I was looking at pictures of interesting wooden utensils a while ago, I happened upon this picture of a stirring stick from Ghana.

Now, you may recall that I posted about stirring sticks a while ago, saying that they aren't all that useful, so you probably shouldn't make them unless you have scrap wood that is too skinny to make anything else.  But I saw this stick and I loved it.  I mean, look at that interesting shape.  Look at the knife marks still on it.  Look at the simplicity of it.  So I decided to make some of my own.

I made this first one from a branch of cypress that I pruned off of a tree in our front yard.  When I asked my 6-year-old girl what improvements I could make on it, she told me to get rid of the warts.  So I told her that those are little knots, not warts, and they won't come off.  Besides, I kind of like them.

This second stick is made from maple.  I tried hard to make it look like it did not come from a flat boring piece of wood.

The best sandpaper and the shape of a spoon handle

This post has two purposes: to show you evidence of the best sandpaper ever and to show you the shape of a pretty spoon handle.  First, look at the before photos and notice the knife marks.  Then look at the after photos to see how my Norton 3X sandpaper took off the knife marks in 3 minutes of sanding.  That is fast!  Finally, feel free to appreciate the shape of the handle.  I don't have much to say about the shape of it now, other than the fact that it looks really good and it feels great in my hand.  It feels nicer to hold than a regular cylinder shape.

Three "before" photos:

Three "after" photos:

It isn't just the fact that the sandpaper was 80 grit that made it fast.  All of the grits of Norton 3X that I use are fast.  They are faster than other kinds, and they last a lot longer.  I am not exaggerating when I say that the sandpaper has changed my approach to sanding.  I no longer hate it as much as I did, and I can use the 80 grit to do the last shaping of my pieces because it is so fast.  Where I would have to use a knife very carefully before to get that last hairbreadth of material off, I can now use my sandpaper and it is almost as fast and a lot less likely to take off too much material.

An odd thing. A very odd thing.

As I was going through wood stuff a little while ago, I found all kinds of weird things.  I found old projects that I should have finished by now and old projects that I should have never started.  And then I found something even weirder.  Now, look at this.  It is just a boring little bowl carved out of bass wood.

Laughter carved this at my house several years ago when he was bored.  Pretty round, especially considering that it was done by hand with a knife

Now we turn it over and see the weird part.  The boring bowl appears to have grown a head.

The face was carved by me, several years ago plus a few, when I was trying my hand at carving faces.  (I gave it up because it is too hard and not that great looking when it's done.)  Why is the head sticking out of the bottom of a bowl?  Well, I carved it on a piece of bass wood, and when Laughter was at my house looking for a piece of wood to carve, that is all I had.  So he carved on it, but didn't want to carve the semi-decent face off, so he left it on while he made the bowl.

The lesson to be learned from this?  Make sure you have plenty of wood for your guests to carve, or you may end up with a bizarre thing like this hanging out in your wood stacks for years.

Atlatls are awesome and alliteration are awesome also

Before you can make a wooden spoon, you need something to eat with that spoon.  How do you get something to eat?  You kill it with a spear.  And how do you throw that spear?  With your atlatl, of course.

I made this atlatl ages ago.  It is made of pine, so it is not terribly strong.  Perhaps I should make one of maple for when I need to hunt for survival.  And maybe Laughter will loan me a knife for skinning my prey.

a little rough carpentry

Some days are for researching and sketching and designing.  Other days are for sanding.  Then some days are for cutting things out or banging with a gouge and mallet.  Others are for carving pretty handles.  And then some days you just need to go to the scrap lumber stack and make a bike ramp for your boys because they have been bugging you about it for weeks.

Six spoons a-soaking

Yeah, that should be enough for this weekend.

Quilted maple is pretty!

Quilted maple is pretty, but it is horrible to carve with that wavy grain.  So these were done mostly with power tools.  I had to carve the bowls of the spoons sideways, across the grain.

Another variation on the"perfect" spoon

Same shape, much shallower.  This is about 3/8 inch deep, because you usually don't need a very deep bowl, and because I can then make 2 spoons out of the same wood that would otherwise be 1 spoon. 

My first attempt at making spoons for eating

Here are my first eating spoons, halfway done.  I cut the blanks on my scroll saw and then soaked them for a few days.  I took them out of the water the night before carving so they wouldn't be too wet.  Maple carves much easier when it has been soaked.  The blanks were are a lot heavier, so I could tell they had sucked up the water.  I carved them with a knife and my gouge.  I carved the bowl by cutting across the grain, using the gouge more like a knife than a chisel.  It was fun to do it all by hand after having made several utensils all by machine lately.  I am going to give these two days to dry, and then I will sand them and oil them.  I already tested the size by putting them in my mouth as I was carving.  That was yummy.

A note about stirring sticks

Here is a stirring stick that I made out of some scrap walnut.  (I made two of them, but I can't find the other one.)  I give you two pictures so you can see the grain with the slightly different lighting.

In the process of making them, I learned a few things:

They are fun to make.  You take your scrap wood, carve off the edges, maybe make it a funny shape.  Very easy and fun.

Walnut is hard to sand.  It really likes to splinter.  You will sand for a long time.  (Actually, I also learned this at Christmastime when I was sanding walnut spoons.)  This is another good reason to use maple instead.

Finally, the most important thing.  Stirring sticks are good for only one thing - stirring.  Spoons, on the other hand, are good for stirring, scooping, tasting, scraping, serving, etc.  Therefore, only make a stirring stick if you have wood that can only be made into a stirring stick.  Otherwise, it seems like a waste of wood and time to me.

About boiling wood

I boiled some maple today to make it easier to carve.  I just used a saucepan and only had the heads of the spoons in the water.  I boiled them for about an hour and a half - boiling for 50 minutes or so and then simmering for the rest of the time.  It worked well.  The stuff was much easier to carve.  Easier than when I soaked it, and much faster.

When you boil maple, you get water that looks like this:

This makes me wonder.  What exactly is that boiling doing to the wood?  Is that just a bunch of tannin in the water?  And am I hurting the wood by removing that tannin?  I sure hope not.

Jam Spoon

A while back, I thought to myself - "Why get my fingers sticky with a short knife that requires four or five dips into the jam jar to make a sandwich?  I should make a jam spoon instead."  (I was also antsy for a new project that was different from what I have already done.)  So I made one.  Well, kind of.  I cut one out and carved it and even sanded it mostly.  But I didn't like it, and it is hard to finish a piece that I don't like.  Here is a picture of it. It still isn't done.

It is made of bloodwood.  As you will discover, the difficulty in making a jam spoon of blood wood lies in carving a small spoon head out of very hard wood.  It would have been easier out of maple, but not nearly as interesting to look at.  With all the maple in my spoon holder, I needed some contrast.  But, alas, I just don't like it.  It seems rather boring to me.  Maybe I should make the end of the handle skinnier.

But there is better news, and better photos to see.  A few weeks after getting bored with the first jam spoon, I thought of a different design.  I like it much better.

side view

backside view

This one is also bloodwood, but with a totally different shape.  I based the head on the shape of an oar.  Because it is just used for scooping and spreading jam, it doesn't really need a normal bowl shape, so I just did a scoop shape, as you can see in the side view.  This spoon is beautiful and not boring.