Variations

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I opened up a cherry log. It really useful to make a couple of wooden wedges before starting the split. The wedges help split the log, and won't damage the axe if they come into contact.

I split the log into ten sections, ready to be turned into ten cooking spoons. 

By the end of the morning I had ten spoons roughed out. 

I used my adze to help speed up hollowing he bowls out. 

The twca cam also quickly removes wood from the bowl, and I find it easier to get a smooth finish.

I've got five pretty much finished, with a few minor refinements still needed. I am really surprised with the variation in colour between the spoons, especially as they're all from the same log. 

Tool-roll: Mora (Frost) 106 Carving Knife

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Probably the best wood working knife out there at this price. 

London's Carving Workshops

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I recently held a couple of carving workshops in London. One near Old Street and another in Victoria Park. Both of them were great fun and they kind of surprised me with how eager people were to learn crafts.

Both of the workshops were a part of Keep Britain Tidy's Waste less, Live more Week. The week was themed 'Be Resourceful' with daily challenges. The first challenge was 'Make it' and that was where my workshops came in.

While I spend most of my time making spoons, butter spreaders are a better project to start with as they only need a knife and are less complicated objects to make.

Butter Spreaders

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When I'm not carving things or out in the woods, I'm usually found in an office in London working on Eco-Schools for the charity Keep Britain Tidy. Each year in September Keep Britain Tidy has a Waste Less Live More week. Last year the theme for the week was food and food waste. This year the week is running from 22 - 28 September and the theme is 'Be Resourceful'. 

To encourage people to be resourceful and to raise awareness that what's good for the environment is good for us, I decided to teach people how to carve wooden butter spreaders, a nice introduction to green woodworking. 

Hewing Out A Beech Bowl

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I brought home a large beech log from Spoonfest, with the intention of making some bowls from it. So after a particularly hectic week, here's the first of hopefully several bowls this log will provide.

It's a lot of fun working on a bigger project like this. I do however want to make sure I have it ready for drying by the end of the weekend, as I already have about three bowls that have dried before I've got them to where I wanted to get them. They've all been sitting untouched for a while now. Should probably get round to finishing them soon!

Here's what I managed to get done today. Hopefully I can show you the (almost) finished product tomorrow.

Took a while to saw through

A Spot of Decoration

Inspired by the  designs and work of Simon Hill, I decided to do a little more spoon decorating. Here I've drawn out the pattern on the spoon handle.

Rainy weekend

The weather has been rather unpredictable over the weekend. Fortunately I've managed to axe out the spoons before the weather got really bad, before retreating indoors to finish them off. All of the spoons have been carved from purple plum that was a street tree felled due to ill health. I've got a fair amount of it in my wood pile and am really liking the wavy grain and contrast between the heartwood and sapwood.

By splitting the wood radially I can display this contrast nicely. I've also been trying to get the bowls as thin as possible, something I can't really display in the photos. 

Spoonfest

A Year of Spooning

Returning for its third year, Spoonfest, an international gathering of 200 spoon carvers in Edale, a scenic village nestled in the stunning Peak District has come to an end

An adventure into Welsh dolphin spoons

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On Friday I made this spoon from a purple plum branch and shared it in a Facebook spoon carving group. I've mentioned before that the group is a great source of help and inspiration and the following spoon making journey is proof of that. 

Wonky Sweet Chestnut Spoon

This came from a naturally bent branch I came across in my local woodland. After splitting out the blank I decided that the handle should follow the flow of the grain.

Decorated Silver Birch Spoon

I don't tend to do much decoration on my spoon handles, but when I found out my friend Simon Hill would be teaching spoon decoration at Spoonfest in a couple of weeks, I thought it best to get some practice in! 

Plum handle for a Mora knife

(And a sheath from an old shoe)

Everybody Should Carve a Spoon

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Creating handmade, personal objects for everyday use.

We currently live in a throwaway society. The things we buy are designed to fail, the natural world is being priced up and sold off and we are forgetting traditional techniques and knowledge that might help us in the future. These issues, along with many others are having a serious negative impact on our wellbeing and on the health of the planet.

While these are all huge issues we might find difficult to address, there is a process I think we should all try to start tackling these concerns: hand carving a wooden spoon. Doing so increases our wellbeing, reconnects us with nature and teaches us useful skills that are hard to attain in modern life.¹

This post aims to look more closely at some of the problems we face and will show how the seemingly simple task of hand carving a spoon actually goes a long way towards providing solutions to those problems.

Purple plum wedding spoon

A colleague is attending a friend's wedding and commissioned me to make a serving spoon as her gift to the happy couple. Here's the finished product, carved from locally felled purple plum:

My 3 Favourite Carving Woods

Silver birch (Betula pendula)

Identification

It is easily identified by its white, peeling bark. On the bark, starting at the base, grow dark, rough arrows/diamonds, which can cause the whole base of the tree to appear dark and rough. Birches can grow 30m (100') tall. The shoots on the branches are slender and tend to droop. The leaves are small and trianglar, with ragged teeth along the edges.

Some Traditional Uses

The bark has been used to make containers and even canoes. The thin, flexible branches are used to make besoms (think 'witches broomstick'). Birch poles were also used to stir molten copper as they prevented oxides from forming, which meant a purer copper.

My Birch Carvings

Maples (Acer campestre - field maple, Acer pseudoplatanus - sycamore)

Identification

Tend to be densely crowned, with pale, cracked bark. The leaves are opposite paired with five veins radiating from the stem to five lobes. Most easily recognised by their winged seeds that spiral to the ground like little helicopters. 

Some Traditional Uses

Perhaps most famously used to make violins, with the rippled grain being referred to as 'fiddleback'. The sap can also be boiled down to make syrup.

My Maple Carvings

Hornbeam (Carpinus Betulus)

Identification

The grey, smooth bark makes the trunks look a little like elephant's legs. The leaves a deeply veined with fine, uneven serrations.

Some Traditional Uses

Hornbeam is a very hard wood. As such it has been used for mallet heads, skittles and butchers' chopping blocks. The wood also burns very long and hot, used to smelt iron.

My Hornbeam Carvings

Hornbeam shrink pot

Hornbeam spoon and small shrink pot

What are your favourite woods for carving? Feel free to share examples of your work in the comments section.

Tool-roll: Svante Djarv Small Viking Axe

Yesterday I received my Svante Djarv Small Viking Axe from the Woodsmith Store. I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but wanted to give my first impressions of it.

Here's the description from the Woodsmith Store:

The Svante Djarv Little Viking Axe is a very useable everyday axe for green wood working made by respected Swedish tool maker Svante Djarv.

These axes are made in very small quantities.

The bit has two equal bevels ground to 30 degrees with distinct shoulders, a long curved bit which extends above the heads eye and the position of the cutting edge in relation to the handle make this a very efficient axe producing a very natural slicing action.

The medium weight head at 800gms has a cutting edge of 140mm, (5 1/2").

The curved ribbed handle in Swedish elm is 340mm (13 1/2") long and very comfortable in the hand with a good grip. As was traditional only a well seasoned wooden wedge is used to fix the head to the handle.

Up until now I've been using the Gransfors Bruks Wildlife hatchet and wanted to get something that a) had a bit more weight behind it to help make bowl carving a little easier and b) was more specifically designed for carving - notably an axe with an upswept bit. With regards to a) the 800g head on the SD Little Viking axe does not feel heavier that the 600g Wildlife hatchet. This might be because the American hickory handle on the Wildlife hatchet is heavier than the Swedish elm of the Little Viking. I'm not 100% sure that this is the case, but the balance of the two axes makes me think that's the case.

SD Little Viking Axe and GB Wildlife Hatchet

I was also surprised by how thin the axe bit is. Hopefully this will mean it will do well slicing. I'm also very happy with the flat grind, which should make it easier to sharpen than the convex grind on the Wildlife hatchet.

I've got a rather large piece of hornbeam sitting in my woodpile that has been waiting for this axe to arrive. I'll dig it out and report back on how the Little Viking axe holds up against 'ironwood' hornbeam.

Big lump of hornbeam at the bottom

Tool-roll

 Tool-roll

Most of the carving I do could easily be done with three tools: an axe, a knife and a curved 'spoon knife' or gouge. However I have about ten different tools in fairly regular use:

From left to right they are as follows: HK bent gouge (40-90), Laplander folding saw, Mora 120, Mora 106, HK right handed spoon knife, custom Ben Orford sloyd knife and Nic Westermann chip carver. 

These are my more heavy duty wood removal tools. A HK 50mm adze, Svante Djarv Little Viking axe and Gransfors Bruks Wildlife hatchet. Below it is my Ben Orford Woodlander with the SD Little Viking Axe.  I'll be writing some detailed reviews of each of these tools over the coming weeks.

Review: Gransfors Bruks Wildlife Hatchet

It is fair to say that Gransfors Bruks make the best widely available axes out there. One of their most popular models is the Wildlife Hatchet. Here's the description from their site:

A small, light axe wich can be easily carried, masked with its leather sheath, inside your pack or on your belt. Even with a small axe you can manage a lot: cut branches in the back-yard or chop and split sticks for a camp fire. This little hatchet awakes in many of us memories and dreams of exciting camps and adventures.

The hatchet has a 3" face and a 13 1/2 " hickory handle and the head weighs 1 lb.
It comes with a grain-leather sheath.

I've had my GB hatchet for about four years now. It has the initials of the fellow that made it stamped into it - MM - which belong to Mattias Mattsson. This personalisation is a reflection of the philosophy of an "unlimited responsibility of the Total" taken at Gransfors Bruks. It's nice to know that there are successful companies out there which view themselves as responsible for the lifetime of their products. I've been fortunate enough to visit the Gransfors Bruks factory and the pristine countryside it sits in is a testament to the care they take to preserve the environment, whilst creating quality products.

Near the Gransfors factory

It's been in my backpack to over five countries. I've used it to fell small trees, limb fallen trees, split small rounds of fire wood, hammer in tent pegs and even to open walnuts. However it is most often used for carving.

Sugar maple with more work to do

For spoon carving it is a great axe. The small, relatively light head means it's easy to use for extended periods of time. I've found that it holds its edge very well and the hickory handle is very comfortable. Most of the time I'm using the axe 'choked up' - with my hand very close, or partly holding, the head. This allows for very fine carving, useful for quickly getting spoon blanks into a shape that doesn't require so much knife work.

Recently I've been trying my hand at bowl carving. At this endeavour there is a slight drawback to the lightness of the axe - wasting large amounts of wood can be tiresome. A heavier axe with a longer edge would be useful.

If you are looking for a good all-rounder then this axe is fantastic. However there are several axes out there that are more specifically designed for sculptural carving, but I have yet to try these. Once I do, I'll be sure to let you know my thoughts on the matter.

If you've used the GB Wildlife hatchet it would be great to hear your thoughts on it in the comments section below.

New knives

Here are a couple of knives from the fantastic blacksmith and all-round nice guy Ben Orford. They are both handled with apple wood and the blades are 01 tool steel. I really like the handle on the sloyd knife (the smaller of the two), but I've found myself using the larger 'woodlander' more often. With a full tang, it's a very strong knife, allowing me to make big, powerful cuts with confidence. Recently I've been doing a lot of my carving indoors, so this knife is able to quickly remove wood in areas where I might otherwise use an axe.
Aside from being very functional items, I find both of these knives to be aesthetically great and incredibly comfortable to use for extended periods.