Carve 2 Serving Spoons and 3 Eating Spoons - roundwood.iron.spoons PEP BB

  Hello! I'm just getting on board the PEP train now and trying to assess where I already am; so please forgive me if I'm overshooting this one.

  Last year, my New Year's resolution was to carve at least one thing each month, never having carved before. I figured spoons were a good place to start, and once I got started things sort of got carried away. I got curious as to all the different kinds of wood in my area, and I wanted to carve a spoon from each one. Even if it turned out to be a worthless spoon, I figured I'd learn about the wood in the process. I took upper branches from the trees I felled to build our house and made them into spoons. I don't have documentation of the halfway point, but I will share the pictures I do have as well as lessons learned.

  First, the glory shot. Shown here is an example of the roundwood blanks I used (chestnut oak in this case), my carving knives, my spoons, and the templates I copied. Not shown are the deer antler I used to burnish them or the raw, organic linseed oil with which they were finished. From left to right, they are: a bamboo template cooking spoon, chestnut oak cooking spoon, steel template spoon, black locust, maple, chestnut oak, beech, red oak, white oak, hickory, locust heartwood, pine fatwood (not for eating), tulip poplar, sourwood serving spoon, serving spoon template, and bonus oak butterknife.

  To a certain degree, a progression in skill is visible from my earlier to my later spoons, with the hickory and locust heartwood most closely resembling the template spoon, but the shapes of the resulting spoon were as much the result of the character of the wood as of my developing skill.

  One interesting lesson learned from all this came not from carving the spoons but from using them. If I had bought these spoons from a fair, I might have paid a higher price for the locust heartwood or hickory spoons, and these are indeed favored by some in my household. But my youngest daughter strongly prefers the chestnut oak spoon, and I always go for the red oak or the maple. The ability to select for mouthfeel and handling has been a surprising advantage of carving the spoons myself.

I am happy to finally submit my entry for this badge with several spoons I have made over the past couple years. I thought I'd finished, and sold the seal/dragon-headed spoon before realising it needed to be oiled! I've now carved a few more; I believe they are of a sufficiently fine workmanship to fit in the wood level badge.

Each spoon is oiled with a wood paste made in a traditional medieval French recipe involving grapeseed oil and beeswax.