I fell in love with the crooked knife 20 years ago when I watched Cesar’s bark canoe the most incredible wood craft film showing César Newashish, a 67-year-old Attikamek building a canoe with three tools, a cheap axe, a pen knife and a crooked knife. Apparently simple tools like these can often be surprisingly complex to get working properly with…
I have met and spent time with Wille Sundqvist several times and been inspired by his book Swedish Carving Technique, both the technical advice and the life philosophy, I had not met his son Jögge until this last week when he came to SPOONFEST taught 2 short classes in knife carving grasps for us and gave an inspirational lecture. His…
Sunrise on Sunday morning over the SPOONFEST campsite some of the wood we had gathered, I had planned to add notes about what each species was good for but ran out of time. We had over a dozen species of wood ranging from lime and horse chestnut to hornbeam, field maple and cherry. I was a bit disappointed nobody made…
This post is mainlythe first batch of photos of SPOONFEST the first international celebration of the carved wooden spoon. Around 170 people came together from Holland, Czech republic, Sweden, Germany, France, USA, England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The week before my daughter Jojo and I were busy gathering perfect spooncarving wood, here we are thinning a birch woodland planted by…
SPOONFEST is over, the first international celebration of the carved wooden spoon was all that we hoped it would be and much much more. It has been a lot of work and I am now straight into an amazing course on mocataugan making with Jarrod Stone Dahl so no time to sort the few pictures I had time to take,…
Roy Underhill should need no introduction, I remember first seeing his books on traditional woodcrafts many years ago and wishing his TV series was available in the UK. Well the good news is that the early episodes are now available either online or as DVD. A good time then for an interview with Roy to see what makes him tick,…
We are so lucky that folk years ago filmed these for us and also that folk today are uploading them and making them available for free.Alex Stewart cooper [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTb2zVpQGg4] I love this one Elizabeth Proper “it’s just a job, ya gotta eat” “I just like working wood that’s all”[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3egz1xnW_wA] and 90n yr old tinsmith John Forshee[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfXutrIS1HY]
The quick answer is most woods are food safe and for cutting boards most used wooden boards in real world situations are more hygienic than most used plastic cutting boards. This may be surprising for some so lets run through the background in a bit more detail and I’ll also point you to all the regulations and science I know…
My little tribute to the Olympics, well as a bowlturner how could I not? And I also wanted to share daughter Jojo’s latest spoon done entirely on her own, I am really very proud of her.
My mate Barn is with me this week and as always we have interesting discussions on all sorts of topics. Today we are thinking about success. I guess we all have an inner feeling of whether we have made it or not, many of us will feel maybe we aren’t quite what our parents might have hoped for. Maybe we…
