One of the highlights of my recent trip to Galicia was a visit to an ethnographic museum where amongst other wonderful craftwork I saw an excellent display of locally made spoons. The design looked excellent and I have been looking forward to making some copies and learning more about how they work. So here are the first ones. I find when first exploring a new design it is no good just making one, I have to make quite a few to begin to understand them. The originals were made at speed by someone who knew what they were doing and I wanted to do the same, the first few involve a lot of thinking time by number 4 or 5 I am beginning to speed up and know where I am going. The one in the foreground here has been finished by Nicola and then oiled, the ones in the background are just roughed out.
The oil makes the birch go quite translucent if you soak it for a few days. If a spoon is well designed it can be carved quite thin and still be strong, this is much nicer to put in your mouth than a big thick spoon.
These are the old spoons in the museum that served as inspiration.
He carved one of these spoons for us to film in less than 10 minutes. I took stills and my friend Stuart took video some of which is on youtube here.
The last thing to do now is to test the spoon out for a while to see how it compares to our previous favourite Swedish eating spoon designs.
