The Flow of Spoon Carving

***This blog has moved to my new website. New posts will be made here***

What is 'Flow'?

At its most basic, flow is when we are in a state of optimal performance, completely immersed in the activity we are doing. Studies have found there are six factors that identify a ‘flow’ state:

1.    Intense and focused concentration on the present moment

2.    Merging of action and awareness

3.    A loss of reflective self-consciousness

4.    A sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity

5.    A distortion of temporal experience

6.    Experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, also referred to as autotelic experience

Plum handle for a Mora knife

(And a sheath from an old shoe)

Everybody Should Carve a Spoon

***This blog has moved to my new website. New posts will be made here***

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.

Beech serving spoon

I've been all about the larger spoons recently. This one is from a very dry crooked piece I got from an ancient beech taken down due to it becoming unstable. One of the thing I love about making objects like spoons from wood is giving purpose and life to material that might have just ended up in the fireplace.

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:

Almost a Dozen

Got down to some serious carving over the weekend. I axed out the spoons on Saturday (and a couple extra on Sunday), used the knife to smarten up the handles and the underside of the bowls yesterday and today I used the twca cam to hollow out the bowls. There were a few hiccups along the way and a few minor adjustments to make, but I'm really happy to have been able to be as productive as I have.

Axed out spoons ready for knife work

Sharpening in the sunshine

Some of my tools were starting to get a little dull, so I've spent most of the morning putting an edge back on them. I use sandpaper wrapped around wood working through 150, 320, 600 and 1000 grit before a final strop using autosol as the honing compound. Not all my tools needed all the grits, for example, the Nic Westermann chip carving knife only needed the 1000 grit and stropping