Cooking Spoons

When I have a piece of wood large enough for a cooking spoon, I usually use the opportunity. Cooking spoons and spatulas are easier to carve than eating spoons, especially with help of a drawknife and spokeshave.

And so I started to hoard them up in my cupboard. I keep on reassuring myself that that they have stopped multiplying now because I've already spent all the long pieces of wood... but who knows?

Hornbeam Burl Cup

Burl wood often has interesting grain patterns. If you happen to find a suitable-sized burl somewhere, it's worth the effort to carve something from it.

This horbeam burl was quite big, so I had to saw some parts off. This is my improvised forest-style holdfast.

A cup is basically just empty space wrapped in wood, so I was in for lots of hollowing :) The best method was to drill a few holes and remove the leftover wood with a gouge. The holes shouldn't be too deep, it's better to drill gradually because:

1. the drill can easily divert slightly to the side but it won't cause much damage if the hole is shallow
2. the drill can be completely stuck in a deep hole if the wood is hard enough
   

I hollowed the inside with this bent gouge and then I smoothed the bottom with a spoon knife. The pencil arrows show areas with interlocked grain where I had to cut very carefully to avoid tearout.

I left the handle thick and coarse for a long time because I often cut into it accidentally while carving the outer walls. I only drilled a small provisional hole there so that the cup would be easier to hold. The picture below shows the handle after it was carved partially. It also shows how I began to smooth the outer walls with a spokeshave. The left side is shaved while the right side is roughly carved with a knife.

And this is my spokeshave. It can efficiently smooth flat or convex surfaces just like the outer walls of the cup. I also have a miniature spokeshave. I thought it would be good for spoons but it turned out that spoons don't really have so many convex surfaces. So the miniature spokeshave have been waiting for its great moment until now: the normal-sized spokeshave could not cut very well around the handle of the cup but the miniature one did the job just fine.

Here is the cup with finished outer walls and handle. And below are some more pictures of the cup sanded and polished.

The End of a Plum Tree

It's time to spend some old stock of carving wood and so I returned to plumwood. It's the same wood I used when I began carving seven years ago. It was nice work, although a little nostalgic. 

The wood comes from a tree that was infected with plum pox virus and had to be cut down (now I feel an urge to say that plum pox does not spread to humans :)) The tree was still quite young, so the trunk did not have much brown heartwood in it.

This piece was suitable for a spoon:

This for a cooking spoon:

The last piece was also meant for a cooking spoon but it split completely askew. Normally I would throw such piece away but it was the last one, so I took a pity on it and carved this tiny coffee spoon:

And that's all from my supplies of plumwood. I wish to bring back to memory all the things that can be carved from one sick tree (and also to show how I've improved my carving skills over time). So I attached here the old pictures of everything carved from this tree in 7 years.

My historic spoon, I still have it (but I don't boast about it anymore):

A spoon for a friend I met on a volunteer camp:

 

A spatula carved from a cracked piece of wood, I had to throw it away because of that:

A spoon for a colleague:

A pebble adopted by my little nieces, twins:

One of these spatulas is still used in my kitchen, the other one in my sister's:

A replacement pebble for me:

 

A spoon for a friend:

Lumberjack's spoon for my husband:

A spoon without an owner yet:

New Wood for my Collection: Elderberry

There is a black locust forest nearby. Black locusts are jerks, they release some toxins into soil to hamper other plants. Only elderberry bushes are resistant and they grow there in abundance. That's where I got the material for this little spoon. Though I also found a 6-meter tall elder tree with a thick trunk, I didn't want to destroy it. I rather cut a branch off a normal-size bush.

Elderberry wood has about 1cm wide sponge-like pith. That's why it is traditionally used for carving whistles (the soft pith makes drilling much easier). The wood has some dark streaks near the pith but otherwise it is not very interesting.

I also finished these two new spoons from wild cherry.

Highwayman's spoon

There is a popular musical Painted on glass about a legendary highwayman Jánošík. One of the songs is about Jánošík saying farewell to his adventures and some of his trusty equipment, including a spoon from lime wood.
And this is how I imagine that spoon. I've been considering the shape and decoration for a long time but I think it should look quite simple.

Shrink Cup with Tigerwood Handle

For a long time I've admired shrink cups from Central Slovakia decorated with architectonic elements. Then I decided to give it a try and I created something rather original.

The cup is from maple and the handle is from exotic wood with commercial name tigerwood. It is sold as a material for floor boards. The wood is from Astronium graveolens or Astronium fraxinifolium tree. These trees originate from Brazil, they are from cashew nut family, but they are quite similar to our ash trees.
I'm pretty sure that no one has ever made a shrink cup from these materials before. Not because tigerwood would be so hard to get or because the idea would not occur to  anyone else. But I found that tigerwood is a tricky material, tears out easily, so you can ruin the whole work with a single careless cut. If I wasn't so stubborn and if i didn't have so much time during the quarantine, maybe I would have given it up, too. But now I think it was worth the trouble.

I was able to document the process of creating a new type of handle. I began with cutting a template from a carton and fixing it on the cup to see how it looks.

Then I retraced the template to the board with a white pencil (for better visibility on the dark wood) and I drilled several holes.

After removing some wood, it looked like this:

I cut the small windows with Swedish knife Mora 106, the narrow blade is ideal for such tasks. I used a small pocket knife blade for the spiral column because nothing else seemed to work. Thin strips of tape were used to keep the spiral pattern even.

Bit by bit I removed the excess wood. The spires on top were carved last to protect them from breaking off accidentally.

Peach and Plum

I have two new spoons, one is from peach wood, finished some time ago:

The other one is from plum:

Both were carved from my stock of dry wood, so it was very hard work!

Miniature Shrink Cup

I've finished another shrink cup of the same style but this time it is much smaller.

Such small cup can be hollowed very fast. However, the handle is more complicated: it is so tiny that there's literally no place to put your fingers while carving.
Here is the series of three cups together.

Maple Spoon

I have a new wood in my collection: maple. This spoon is from a bent branch, so it has wavy patterns (but you must zoom in to see it). Maple wood is hard but not as hard as most fruitwoods.

Maple Shrink Cup

At last I've finished a shepherd's shrink cup that has been lying around forever. This one has a standard size and materials. The cup is from maple and the handle from pear wood.

I also made a tool for fixing the branches while drilling with an auger. It is something like a wooden jaw vice, one hollowed block is fixed to the bottom board with screws and the other is held with clamps.