SPOON # 41 - Sunday 20th October

Julian and I have long been fans of charity shops - for the first 5 years of marriage we pretty-well lived out of them. (My wife Ruth has just pointed out that this sounds like Julian and I were married - if we were then I've got some complaints about how little he helped out with the kids!) Plus, I tend to find that what popular society no longer finds fashionable and so sends off to the charity shops, is actually often exactly what I'm looking for.

Any way, Julian found this spoon in a charity shop, liked it and bought it. It's a very practical cooking and serving spoon and I know he and his wife use it a lot, which is why they were a little disappointed to discover a crack opening up from the front of the bowl.

I really like it too and so took it home with the intention of copying it. And so I tried this weekend, another piece of laurel.

This is not a great picture as the colouration on the right of the bowl
makes it look flat - trust me, it's symmetrical.

You can't see it too well but I have purposely left some axe marks on the front and back of the handle
as I thought it added to the hand-made, rustic look of the spoon.

It's actually quite a deep bowl, but looks flat compared to the original below.

Unfortunately, despite having some lovely colouring, which will oil up beautifully, the wood wasn't quite deep enough and so doesn't have the lovely deep, full bowl that the original had. Don't get me wrong, I like my spoon, it will be a good serving spoon, but I'm going to bide my time till I get something a little bigger and try again.

On a completely different point, it still amazes me to look at the before and after and know that after just an hour or so of carving a chunk of wood can become a spoon.

 

 

And on still another note, I had said that I would try and carve the handle of my last spoon, so thought I'd give it a go a couple of nights ago. I have long been an admirer of the carving of Jan Harm ter Brugge, a very skilled carver from Amsterdam whose small scoop workshop I attended at the first Spoonfest. He does a lot of fine decoration and kolrossing on his spoons and often employs a basket-weave pattern, which is very effective and beautiful. Here are a few of his spoons:

 

actually, I can't show you any of his spoons as for some reason Google wont let me copy the pictures, but if you do an images search you can have a look for yourself. Strangely, there aren't that many images on line - I wish he had a blog that I could follow.

 

Any way, to cut a long story short, I tried the basket-weave pattern on my spoon handle, it didn't work, it looked pretty awful and I ended up having to carve it back off! I'm going to have to practise this one as I would really like to master it. Any one out there have any tips or advice, I'd be pleased to hear it.