Christmas Presents

Handmade gifts are the best... but there is a catch in making them. Sometimes they turn out so well that you would really prefer to keep them.

This is a salad fork and scoop from plum wood.

This is a coffee spoon with hook from lilac wood (this time I sharpened the knives really well, so the carving was no problem).

And finally, everything together for scale.
Tomorrow I will let them go.

Peach Spoons and Other Things

I've carved several things since the summer but I always forgot to take pictures. These are two peach spoons for commission.

The spoon below was originally also a part of the commission, but I liked it too much and decided to keep it.

 

I got a small plum branch from a colleague who is learning to carve and so I carved this little spoon from it (design by Spångossen):

Lilac, Second Try

I was tidying the cellar recently, so I also went through my stack of dry wood and I sorted out all cracked and knotty pieces. I found a few lilac branches and carved a new spoon. My first experiment with lilac wood is documented here.

Maybe I got used to green (and much softer) cherry wood, so dry lilac was a bit of a shock. But the hard work paid off. I don't know any other wood so unbelievably smooth after polishing.

There was a small knot on the bottom. It could be avoided, but the spoon would have to me much smaller, so I rather left it there.

Grain Patterns

I finished two new spoons from wild cherry. This is the first one, the shape is based on the pattern created by growth rings on the handle.

This is the second one, placed "upside down" with respect to the center of the growth rings.

And here are all the cherry spoons together. The sapwood sometimes stayed white, sometimes oxidized to reddish color and sometimes it is separated from heartwood with a distinctive white strip.

First and second spoon from the left is a reversed tangential cut, third is a tangential cut and the last is a radial cut. Here is the schema:

Cherries all around

The last spoon from wild cherry was so nice that I couldn't leave all that remaining wood from the broken cherry tree to rot in the forest. I went there again and split a few more pieces.
So much for my resolution that I won't overfill my freezer with green wood anymore.

First I carved these two cooking spoons (not oiled yet).

Then there's this spoon with a dramatic contrast between heartwood and sapwood.  White sapwood oxidized to orange color, probably because I soaked it repeatedly during sanding.

And finally one more spoon from apple wood.

Hornbeam and Wild Cherry

I have two new species of wood in my collection. The first is a wild cherry. There are many wild cherries growing in this area and they blossom beautifully every spring together with blackthorn bushes. But many trees are very old and we found one of them uprooted this winter.

The heartwood has a pretty shade of brown, the sapwood was completely white during carving, but later it oxidized to orange hue. The lower picture also shows a white strip that remained between them.

On the other hand, hornbeam wood is very pale, but it has very interesting patterns.

Elven Spoons

This is a spoon from apple wood that I carved before Christmas. Jarko says it looks elven. I can quite imagine Elves in Rivendell eating with such spoons.

So I made another spoon like that - also from apple wood but this piece has a nice golden color. I tried to carve the same shape.

And here are both spoons. They may look the same at the first sight, until you notice the place where the handle meets the bowl. I carved the notch too deep on the upper spoon and it disrupted the harmony of curves somehow. It does not look ugly but it is different than I wanted it.
So here is the moral: measure twice, cut once! Little details matter.