How Make Wooden Spoon – All books of Dana Weldon’s first book, Discovering Yourself in the Kitchen: Kitchen Meditations and Inspired Recipes from a Mindful Cook (Rodale Books), are sold out. She lives in Oakland, CA.
I have a beautiful wooden spoon, one of my favorite things in my kitchen. Because it is hand carved, it is expensive. Totally worth it in my view, but a once in a lifetime purchase for me. I like to give one as a gift every now and then, but the cost is too high. So when I stumbled upon an old article
How Make Wooden Spoon
Mother Earth News originally published the article How to Make a Wooden Spoon in the November/December 1978 print issue of their magazine, but it is now available on their website. Author Lee H. Arden explains how he learned to make his first wooden spoon as a gift for his wife. Arden’s tone is inspiring and real, making the prospect of carving a wooden spoon as attainable as possible. He subscribes to the notion that the spoon is already in the tree and the maker pulls it out.
The Artful Wooden Spoon By Joshua Vogel
Arden never bought wood for his spoons. He recommends asking lumberjacks, furniture makers, and high school shop teachers about wood scraps that are routinely thrown away. He uses simple and cheap tools like pocket knife and rasp. You can use a band saw to make the initial cuts, but it’s not necessary.
An article about Mother Earth news may be too rare for some. If you want more detailed instructions, check out Edward Smith’s Making Wooden Spoons with Pictures or watch one of the many videos you can find on the web like the one above.
Making a wooden spoon for your kitchen or as a gift is a relatively simple project that requires very few tools and is a rewarding way to spend an afternoon. With fall and the holidays just around the corner, it might be time to get started!
By the way, the spoon in the picture above I mentioned in the first paragraph, it is far from what a beginner can do. Still, it’s an inspiration, and I’d like to give credit to creator Lance Herriot and his daughter Nicole, who runs an online store selling his creations and makes himself known through his blog Forty Six at Grace. Her photography and styling work. As I’ve said before, spoons are one of my favorite things, and it’s a blessing and a privilege to be the custodian of such a beautiful and lovingly made object. In the past few years, spoon carving has become very popular among the public. Workshops conducted by me. It’s a wonderfully tactile process and a lot of fun.
This Dude Carves The Most Gorgeous Spoons You’ll Ever See
In the Northern Hemisphere, wooden spoons are mainly made of green wood. Here in Australia we don’t have a menu of suitable trees. So do some things differently.
I mostly use hardwoods for wooden spoons. Greenwood spoon makers need different tools for this. Hardwood spoons are incredibly durable as kitchen utensils. As ornamentals they are very difficult to carve and finish well.
An old stove of more than 100 years came my way. It had 3 of the original 4 split turns nailed to the face for decoration. The entire cowrie is made of pine wood, so I took it for the wood alone. What about a half spiral?… I cut one in half and carved it into a spoon. Both of those parts are pictured above – a sort of “before and after”.
You can see 4 layers of old paint on the back of the spoon. This is a decorative, not a functional spoon. As it tells a story, it would be a shame to lose color from it. Love this spoon.
Is It Safe To Cook With Wooden Spoons?
Designing and making spoons is a lot of fun. The next round of public workshops I will be running on June 20-23 will include a spoon making workshop at Earthwise in Subiaco.
We only use traditional hand tools – no noisy power tools. Typical tools are mallet, gouge, coping saw, compass, curved scraper, spokeshave. When making a spoon this way, you want to create a connection with your wood. This is the best way to understand the importance of working with grain direction and character. I carve a lot of spoons. Often in very high doses. Small inefficiencies in my process add up to wasted time very quickly. If you carve spoons and don’t do as much as you’d like, or just want the process to go more smoothly, these tips are for you.
As you carve spoons, you can slowly enjoy the process of pushing the sharp tool through the green wood during your busy week. Not every carving session will achieve maximum performance.
As we enjoy the process, it’s good to remember that we make wooden spoons by hand. Sometimes being a little messy and not worrying about performance is just what we need. If that’s you, don’t waste your time reading this (see, I can’t help you make your day more efficient).
The Best Way To Oil Wooden Spoons And Cutting Boards
One of the most common questions I get is, ‘How often do you sharpen your tools?’ The correct answer seems a bit trivial: whenever they need to be sharpened. A great part of using hand tools is that it reconnects you with your body. There are a lot of knowledge workers who feel like brains in jars. Carving with hand tools requires you to feel how the tool interacts with the wood. Just as a blind person’s cane expresses the world around them, your hand device sends signals about how it interacts with the tree. Once you get an idea of how it should feel, you’ll quickly know when something is wrong. A change in grain direction, perhaps the cut is wandering from its intended path, or the tool needs to be slowed and sharpened.
The best way to keep your tools sharp is small and often. So you don’t have to have a strap near you when you carve out your ‘sharpening station’. Our tools have very fine edges which makes them sharp. However, this makes them relatively soft. Grid and other debris can damage the edge and require more steel removal than is efficient with a strap. Having your stones or sandpaper ready to use allows you to correct the error and start carving as quickly as possible.
Setting up a sharpening station puts you mentally first. A lot of people don’t enjoy sharpening. A difficult skill to learn. So they put off sharpening. Once you have all of your sharpening kit ready to go, you admit to yourself that sharpening needs to happen. So you can do it easily.
As part of the spoon carving journey everyone has to do a few batch jobs. Trying to carve multiple copies of the same pattern is good for learning multiple skills. It teaches you consistency, you learn to see how a bowl is made, and it allows you to practice specific areas of carving with a spoon.
Round Spoons — Sylva Spoon
My preferred method for batch work is to select how many copies I want to make and run them at the same point. That point varies, but it’s usually after I’ve finished a certain surface or a certain tool.
For example, I cut a round tree and divide it into twelve billets. Then I cut them square with an ax. I might do some more refined scoring on the shave horse. Then I draw on my template. These days I use my bandsaw to cut around the template. If the shed needs to be warm, or if I’ve eaten a lot of donuts, I’ll use an ax for this area. Depending on the bowls, I may cut the top off the spoon bowl with an ax and then harden the bottom of each spoon with the ax. Then I take all twelve and clean the top with a knife. Then clean all the bottoms of the duodenum. and empty. Then make the finishing cuts.
Patch work, especially if you focus on it, will show that you want techniques to work well in different areas. If a new technique clicks during the hole, you can immediately practice it multiple times. If you have to work another spoon from scratch before trying the same technique again, you lose all the variables of body position, cutting direction, and direction.
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