Last year I found a piece of broken aspen in a forest. Here is the spoon I made from it. The wood is light and easy to work with, but also strong. The kolrosing pattern is filled with a natural red ochre pigment. I was inspired by Maryanne McGinn's amazing work.
Last year I got to explore a fascinating part of Provence. My favorite spot was the ochre quarries in Luberon. I bought some ochre pigment there and I planned to use it for coloring spoons.
I spent a long time thinking about the design and I finally went with the Roman shields pattern from the triumphal arch in Orange.
And here’s the result - a spoon made from alder wood. Cedar would have been more thematically fitting, but unfortunately, I didn’t come across any random cedar logs lying around in France. I still have two more shades of pigment, so maybe I’ll make a few more spoons like this someday.
After the big floods last September, I obtained a piece of elm wood. It looked interesting at first glance and it also has a nice color.
Up until now, I’ve sorted wood into two categories: “Better to sand” and “Better not to sand.” But elm doesn’t fit into either.
The surface stays annoyingly rough after carving, even with a super sharp blade. Sanding took forever and the surface never got completely smooth. Maybe that’s the reason why I've never heard about anything made from elm wood.
So now I have a brand new category for elm: “Better not to use” :)
It turns out that my family already is well-equipped with spoons, spatulas, ladles and other kitchen utensils. This Christmas I got a different request: wooden mushrooms that could be attached to the fridge with magnets. So I dug through the wood stash in my basement. I chose a small piece of plum wood and a scrap of hornbeam burl - a leftover from carving a cup.
This is where some clever electric tool would come in handy because those tiny pieces of wood were difficult to hold firmly and my hands were hurting. But other than that, it was fun work. I played around with the wood types and textures. I left the stems with a delicate knife-carved texture, I sanded and polished the tops of the caps and I kept the bottoms of the caps unsanded and slightly porous to the touch. The grain in the stems runs mostly lengthwise, while the growth rings on the caps make concentric circles when you look from above.
Everything was going great until I realized that even strong neodymium magnets aren’t enough to keep stuff on the fridge. The magnets that I used should theoretically pull almost a kilogram of weight but my tiny mushrooms, which weigh just a few grams, kept sliding and flipping upside down stubbornly. Adding more magnets didn’t help either.
So I visited an unnamed DIY megastore with a vague idea of looking for something thin, adhesive, but not sticky. I searched the entire shelf of tapes (who knew there were so many kinds?!) and finally I stumbled on vulcanizing tape which is basically just a thin slice of rubber. This solved the whole problem like a charm.
Here are the finished mushrooms after sanding and waxing. They stay in place just as they are supposed to.
At the end of 2023, I signed up for a relief carving course at ÚĽUV. Besides reliefs, we also carved some spoons, and people brought in all kinds of interesting types of wood. I even got a few pieces from them to use for my future spoons.
