Maple and Poplar

I have two new spoons, the first one is from bent maple branch.

The second one is from poplar wood I found last year after a windstorm. Grey poplar is a hybrid between white poplar and common aspen. It has the softest wood I have ever carved and the finished spoon is light as a feather. The heartwood has a nice color and it had a weak fruity smell, while the sapwood is almost white and it smelt like rancid oil. Fortunately the smell disappeared after drying.

I wanted to carve and paint a decoration like Maryanne McGinn does but it did not go very well, the pigments ran too much in the soft wood. Just so that you know that things don't always work out the way I intend.

Svor

Trees are often connected through their root systems. Even when such tree is cut down, it can survive for a long time and try to close the wound. The inside of the stump would start to rot, but the outer layer would still grow very slowly. Such wood is extremely dense and it has nice grain pattern. It is called "svor" in Slovak and it can be found on beech and fir stumps. Fir svor was used for making especially tough and beautiful shepherd's cups.

I managed to find a few stumps like that but they are huge and not suitable for cups. I took just one half-stump that did not have much living wood left. I carved a spoon from it as an experiment.

Harvesting a svor is not easy. You have to dig out the stump and cut the roots in suitable places. So you have to deal with ants, centipedes, grubs and everything else that may live in a half-rotten stump. If you choose a bad season like me, you will also be attacked by mosquitos.

If you succeed, after peeling the bark you gain something like this (the stump was really almost gone and even the roots were hollow):

Then you have to remove all the dead wood. The rest is an extremely durable wood that should last many years of hard use. You can decide for yourself if it is worth the trouble.