A Holiday Souvenir

Other people usually bring sea shells, fridge magnets or bottles of some local booze from their vacation. This time we brought a broken olive branch that we've found during our trips on Krk island. (Well okay, we also brought some pebbles from the beach...)

I cut the branch into two bent pieces. One of them is already split and prepared for carving on the picture below.

Sometimes you have to shape the bent branch properly, otherwise you end up with a spoon that looks crooked.

And here is the result. The branch was too thin to have the typical wavy pattern of olive wood, but it was just as hard as heartwood. I also realized that only dead wood from some side branches had the typical olive smell. So I think that an olive tree uses the aromatic oils to preserve the inactive parts of wood from decay.

Pink that Won't Last

I carved a new spoon from plum wood using my favorite design:

Before you start wondering about the pink color of wood, I'll tell you what it will look like in a few months. You can see this spoon from the same log on the picture below. The end of the handle is not completely brown yet because I store it in a cup handle down, so the light does not shine on it very much.

So the only way to keep the bright colors is to store the spoon in a dark room and keep it away from the daylight forever :)

Beech from the Freezer

The green beech wood that I've brought from the forest in spring is now split into smaller pieces and stored in the freezer. I took the pieces out one by one and  used them for carving. (They were in the freezer because the wood stays wet that way and it is much easier to carve.)

This shape of cooking spoon is inspired by two great carvers: Yoav Elkayam and Jojo Wood. Apart from flat spatulas, this is the first cooking spoon design that I'm happy with. I will surely make more spoons like this.

This spoon is made according to medieval Spanish spoons from Robin Wood's blog. I just changed the handle ending because I don't like the original one :)

A Wood without Surprises

This spring I brought another beech log from the forest (because the lumbejacks always throw away so much fine wood). It is almost perfectly straight, without knots, worm holes, black pieces and... completely without surprises. It's really a pleasant change :)
And here is the first spoon from it:

I tried to imitate this spoon, but it still seemed a bit bland to me, so in the end I gave it a little decoration.

Peach Couple

These are two spoons from peach wood, a commission for a married couple. The peach wood has variable colors and patterns, so each spoon is unique, even though they are carved from the same log.

Thanks to these spoons, I've also put my wood pile in order and I've split almost everything that could be split. So now I have a large stock of spoon blanks instead of logs :)

Working on Commissions

My friends ordered a few spoons before Christmas, so I started working on them one by one.
The first thing was a spatula. I selected a piece of applewood... which (as it turned out) didn't want to become a spatula and moreover it decided to annoy me by all possible means. Well, in the end I won.

The second commission was literally: I want something like this spoon, but bigger, to scoop a huge mouthful of halušky! :)
The dry plumwood was hard as nails, but the work definitely paid off... I don't know if I've ever liked the finished spoon as much as this one.

The last commission still remains: to carve two identical spoons for a married couple. So I have to search my wood pile and find two pieces of wood, at least distantly similar... That won't be easy!

Kuksa

This is a Christmas present for my brother, a kuksa from birch wood. I have to admit that it was really hard work for me...

I found a piece of blackened wood inside the blank while I was hollowing it. I didn't know how deep it could go, so I bored it with Dremel and high speed cutter bits, as if it was caries in a tooth. The black wood almost reached the bottom of the kuksa, but luckily there was enough healthy wood left on the bottom, so I could go on with hollowing.
It was easier to carve the outside and the result started to look like a kuksa at last. And then there was sanding, unbelievably lengthy and tedious work. I sanded the inside using 1cm wide strips of sandpaper fixed to my thumb or forefinger with sticky tape.
I added some chip carving decorations to the handle and I felt like I was starting to understand the process better around the 10th tiny triangle I've made. I finished the kuksa with a mixture of oil and beeswax, which forms something like a thick ointment.

The wood itself looks interesting, it contains brown strips, which are phloem inclusions inside the wood. This can happen for various reasons. Such birch wood is very popular for carving in Finland because the strips can form interesting wavy patterns.