Spoon Carving Project Book E-Book

Emmet Van Driesche

• Herausgeber: Fox Chapel Publishing
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 107

Beschreibung

Transform a block of wood into a beautiful kitchen utensil! A stunning and complete carving guide to creating functional and aesthetically pleasing wooden spoons, this must-have book features 15 skill-building projects that include a pie server, butter knife, honey dipper, coffee and flour scoops, and so much more. With clear, step-by-step instructions, detailed wood carving patterns, and materials lists, projects start off simple and slowly progress in difficulty so you can build your skills and accomplish the most challenging, final project. Also included are comprehensive overviews on sourcing green wood, roughing out, basic cuts, food-safe finishes, utensil care, and sustainable carving tips so you can learn everything you need to know before you begin spoon carving. Artistic and atmospheric photography elevates this project guide, as well as its emphasis on spoon carving as a way of life rather than just an occasional hobby.

Leseprobe

© 2023 by Emmet Van Driesche and Fox Chapel Publishing Company, Inc., 903 Square Street, Mount Joy, PA 17552.

Spoon Carving Project Book is an original work, first published in 2023 by Fox Chapel Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holders.

Photo Credits: Ben Gancsos

Managing Editor: Gretchen Bacon

Acquisitions Editor: Kaylee J. Schofield

Editor: Joseph Borden

Designer: Chris Morrison

Indexer: Jay Kreider

Print ISBN: 978-1-4971-0297-2eISBN: 978-1-63741-117-9

LCCN: 2022946152

To learn more about the other great books from Fox Chapel Publishing, or to find a retailer near you, call toll-free 800-457-9112 or visit us at www.FoxChapelPublishing.com.

We are always looking for talented authors. To submit an idea, please send a brief inquiry to [email protected].

For a printable PDF of the patterns used in this book, please contact Fox Chapel Publishing at [email protected], with 9781497102972 Spoon Carving Project Book in the subject line.

Foreword

When I was in college, someone tried to woo my girlfriend by carving her a wooden spoon. What a weird thing to do, I thought as I proceeded to whittle my own with a penknife and lots of sandpaper, just to prove that I could do it too.

It wasn’t until years later that I took to carving in earnest. The day I started, my second daughter was rolling around in the yard, putting everything she could find into her mouth. Needing something to do, I looked at the firewood stacked on our porch and figured I could do some whittling and still keep an eye on her exploring. I didn’t appreciate, in the moment, how helpful this idea would be for my mental health. Taking care of infants and toddlers is tough work, a grind of dishes and diapers and an unending vigilance to make sure they don’t get hurt. It can feel like you are constantly starting back at square one. In contrast, the spoons I carved accumulated, day after day, and the making of them began to order my days.

One of the best things about carving spoons is that it can happen quickly, with virtually no time for setup and without requiring a dedicated space. Spoons are one of the most meaningful things you can make with wood within those constraints. We still use wooden spoons in our culture, and for many of us, the spoons that have been used for decades in our kitchens hold rich memories of our family and time spent with them.

What is more, spoons offer the unique opportunity to explore the functionality of an object, while at the same time, making the form exciting and fresh. And we can do this hundreds of times. This is something most design students only get to do in their sketchbooks. We spoon carvers get to do this in real life, over and over again. It is this ability to iterate ideas that keeps spoon carving endlessly fascinating. Many spoon carvers take this a step further and decorate their work with chip carving or kolrosing, sometimes painting, staining, or ebonizing the wood or roasting it to darken the color. I have not found myself drawn to these techniques, and so you won’t find them in this book. My passion has been to think of spoons as functional sculptures, curving planes that meet at distinct, but softened, edges. Whatever your interest, I hope that you will take the forms presented here and run with them. They are merely my version of some very basic ideas, and they are waiting for you to make your mark on them.

Let us begin.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Getting Started

Why I Cut My Own Wood

Introduction to Tools

Using the Axe

Using the Sloyd Knife

Using the Hook Knife

Introduction to Sharpening and Stropping

Sourcing Material

Storing Material

Food-Safe Finishes

Utensil Care

Projects

Coat Hook

Butter Knife

Honey Dipper

Simple Spatula

Baking Spatula

Pot Scraper

Pie Server

Cooking Spoon

Serving Spoon

Coffee Scoop

Cooking Spatula

Ice Cream Scoop

Toast Tongs

Flour Scoop

Everyday Spoon

Patterns

About the Author

About the Photographer

Getting Started

There are many ways to carve a spoon, but all the projects in this book follow a similar pattern. A fresh bit of wood is broken down from a tree trunk or limb, and then an axe and hand saw are used to shape that chunk into something resembling the desired form. At that point, some combination of straight and hook knives is used to shape the wood to its final form, and then it is burnished and treated before use. When viewing photos of me shaping the wood, please keep in mind that I am left-handed, and you should adjust your grip according to what suits you best following the guidelines I have laid out.

There’s nothing sacred about doing it this way. You could cut your spoons out of milled lumber using a band saw, use a rasp and gouge to shape them, and then sand them to a final surface. But you would have a hard time recreating many of the details of the forms, and much of the point of this book would be lost. More than a compendium of forms, this book is an extended lesson in how to carve spoons in this way. Each project builds on the one before it, adding the next layer of complexity, and so to walk through the forms of this book is to establish a vocabulary of much of what is possible in this style of carving. Fluency, of course, comes with repetition and deliberate practice, but attempting each of these forms, in order, is an excellent start.

Key Terms

•   Bevel. A beveled edge is an edge that is not perpendicular to the face(s) of the piece being worked. It is used to soften the edge of a piece. There is some overlap between this term and chamfer.

•   Billet. The billet is the piece of wood that is left over once you have chopped your log or branch down to size. This is the first thing you will need to create before beginning any of these projects.

•   Crank/crank face. A crank or crank face is a very shallow V that establishes the line of a handle and the line of the top of the bowl of a spoon or blade.

•   Camber. A camber is a slight convexity, arching, or curvature. To camber a piece is to create a curve upward in the middle.

•   Chamfer. To chamfer a piece is to knock off the corners at the edge of a facet. This can be done precisely, but loosely works just as well.

•   Facet. To facet a piece is to create multiple sides by carving or axing them into the wood’s surface. A facet is one of these sides.

•   Microchamfer. A very small chamfer.

•   Taper. To taper a piece is to make it become progressively smaller or narrower toward one end.

Why I Cut My Own Wood

All wood was once a tree. Obvious, right? But many ways of using and working with wood obscure this fact—sometimes by how the material is processed before you encounter it, and sometimes by the tools used to manipulate it. We have gotten good at these things, and it is possible to work with wood in many ways that almost completely ignore how it existed as a tree.

Not so with the projects in this book.

You will be devastatingly aware that the material you are using was once a living organism. More than that, you will be aware of exactly where the material came from, how it relates to the larger tree, and why it will or won’t do what you want. You will fail in some of these projects because of the piece of tree you chose. You will succeed in others, largely because you managed to attain some sort of synchrony between what you were trying to achieve and what the wood was willing to do.

Wood is like that. It is your partner in this process, and when you use a knife or axe, it is an extension of your body, feeling what the wood does in response. The more experience you have, the more you will be able to predict how the wood responds to your action, but there are always surprises, because once again, all wood was once a tree. And trees are individuals.

Maybe the tree you are carving grew up along a windy river, and its fibers reflect that swaying back and forth, interlocked in a tight ripple that makes sense for the tree but spells frustration for you. Maybe the tree you are carving grew slowly in the shade of other trees for much of its life, putting on the bare minimum growth each year to stay alive, and is dense beyond reason. Maybe it grew out in the open, fast and bounding, and the growth rings are wide and strong. These are things you will come to learn and appreciate.

Breaking down a tree or a limb into usable parts is something everyone should experience at least once, even if you usually need to buy spoon blanks because you live in a city or otherwise find sourcing your own wood impractical. Like watching a butcher break down a side of beef into cuts or learning to harvest vegetables, there is value in understanding where your material comes from, even if you don’t always go right back to the source yourself. Part of what this process gives you is an appreciation for how the material differs from one part of the tree to another. Furthermore, each tree is unique and will surprise you. I have split open a perfect log only to find it useless for my purposes, and I have found some of the most beautiful carving wood lurking under several inches of rotten sapwood.

Never forget that this is a dance between yourself and a tree. As you gain experience, you will be able to anticipate what the wood is willing to do. Each of these projects exists in that space, in dialogue with the tree it once was.

The end grain of a piece of wood will crack over time with exposure to air. Sawing off several inches will usually get you back to fresh wood.

In addition, each of us has access to different species of wood and different types of logs or branches. If you live in a city, smaller branches tend to get chipped, whereas largerdiameter chunks are often available if you ask. If you live in the country, you might only have access to the branches in your yard, or you might be able to fell an entire tree. In general, my advice is to stockpile the largest-diameter and longest logs you can. Obviously, this will differ for each person and depend on your available space, capacity for moving them and breaking them down into smaller pieces, and what you can get your hands on.

The piece on the left, although technically clear of knots, has too much ripple for spoon carving. Notice how the piece on the right has a more relaxed grain.

Keys to Selecting Wood

•   The larger and clearer-grained the piece of wood is, the fewer problems it will give you.

•   An exhaustive list of all usable woods would be impossible to include in this book. Birches, maples, walnut, pecan, cherry, fruitwoods (apple, pear, peach, plum), staghorn sumac, avacodo, and poplar are all great carving woods.

•   Avoid conifers (pines, spruces, hemlocks, junipers, firs, etc.) or other intensely sapped species like eucalyptus, along with super dense tropical hardwoods that can be toxic.

•   Species with lots of tannins (like oaks) or those that are ring porous (oaks and ashes) are worth avoiding unless they are all you can get.

•   Look for wood from healthy trees. Rotting or overly dry wood is no good for spoon carving.

So, what do I carve? Well, in my part of the northeast US, the best large-diameter, clear-grained logs I can get my hands on tend to be black cherry and various species of birches and maples. But you might live somewhere with walnut, or tulip poplar, or avocado. So feel it out and you’ll be fine.

Introduction to Tools