Wooden bowls and spoons are a joy to use, wood is a natural insulator so keeps your food warm without having to heat the bowl first and mealtimes are quieter without the scraping of metal on ceramic. This was dinner last night. The duck bowl was one I made a couple of years ago and is painted with natural home…
William Morris famously said “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful” Many in the craft community have taken this one step further so that we like things that are both beautiful and useful. For me wooden spoons are a good example. We have been making, buying, collecting and using…
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…
We have just uploaded course dates for next year and for the first time are running bowl carving courses. This will be Swedish style bowlcarving so we will be using axes and adzes carving green wood bowls like these.We will also be doing one course on shrink pots which should be fun. The courses last year were very popular and…
Having been running spoon carving courses for several years now this is the first where we managed three days without a single cut. Carving with knives is perfectly safe if you are careful and learn a specific set of safe efficient cuts. This weekend we ran a developers spooncarving course for folk who had some experience or had been on…
Last week we had a very enjoyable developers spooncarving course which turned into more of a kuksa carving course. After the first 2 days covering the basics of spoon design and carving spoons from crooks or bent pieces of wood to get a strong but light spoon I always offer a range of projects for the last day. Everyone chose…
I have just been reviewing course bookings for the year and am delighted to see that our developers courses are filling up rapidly with folk wanting to come back after doing a foundation course last year. Our June developers course has only 1 place left and October is already half full. I have always said I would like to judge…
I am currently working on an order for replica woodware for an English Heritage project at Dover Great Tower. I have lots of designs for 12th century wooden bowls both for the kitchens and Kings quarters but spoons were a bit more difficult. Here are the few pics I have managed to find and the first spoons I have been…
We had a most enjoyable weekend. Our spooncarving group were just a great fun bunch of people and we all had a fun time. We all went through the various processes of learning to use an axe and knife safely but efficiently and then how to get the best designs out of various bits of wood. Nicola cooks home made…
Tomorrow is the first day of our first spooncarving course of the year. We are fully booked again which is nice and I am looking forward to meeting 8 new folks and sharing time carving together. Yesterday I sharpened 8 knives, 8 axes and 8 hook knives. I spent today collecting wood, first a trip to meet with a past…
