Something that I’ve been meaning to do for a while is to carve a spoon. After coming back from Matty’s wedding on Friday I noticed that a bough had broken off a sycamore tree in a nearby park. I took that as a sign to get on with it. So today I went up with a pocket saw and cut off a few sections of branches. Sycamore is a fairly soft wood and when its green its especially easy to work with.
I peeled off the bark with my trusty knife (ok a €15 Mora knife). Next made a rough sketch of where I wanted to carve out and with my trusty axe (ok the cheapest axe in Woodies (official sponsors to Shamrock Rovers F.C. btw!)). The knife and especially the axe needed a good sharpening but seem to be holding well. Anyway, lots of chopping and carving later I got something that resembled a spoon. The next step was to carve out the depression for the spoon bit. This was my first try with a spoon knife that I bought from Andrew at OutdoorCode, it cost about €35 euro but its one of those tools that you need for this kind of carving. An alternative to using the spoon knife would be to use embers to slowly burn the depression. After a couple of hours and a blistered thumb I ended up with a spoon.
I didn’t bother reading much about what bits of wood to select and how exactly to carve before trying this. Sometimes you learn more by trying first, and Sunday afternoons are a good time to make mistakes anyway. One thing to change next time will be to use a bigger piece of wood. This was carved from a piece about 4cm in diameter – which doesn’t give you much of a spoon! A branch at least 8cm thick is probably needed to get a decent sized spoon. Knots. I think I saw a Ray Mears program where he mentioned that using a fork in a branch made carving the spoon easier – having knots in the middle makes it harder that’s for sure! I’ll have to split a branch and see exactly how a branch is formed – ‘open it and see how it works’ is an approach that has yet to fail me!
That’s the spoon, and the tools used.