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. 

Skedfest

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Just got back from an amazing three days at Skedfest in Sweden. It was a brilliant experience, and hanging out with such an international group of spoon carvers was great. So much happened during the three days that for now I'm going to just put up my photos from the weekend.

Charcoal Marking (part 2)

Last week at the Essex Wildlife Trust's Pound Wood I helped load and light the charcoal kiln. In the evening I went back and switched around the chimneys and vents. On Wednesday morning the kiln was shut down (all the vents blocked off) and it was left to sit for a week.

Charcoal I helped produce, from cutting to cooking.

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

Charcoal Making

While this isn't wood carving, charcoal is a cool sustainable product and making it used to be a really process widespread across the UK. It's a great way to use smaller diameter wood that it can be hard to find uses for. 

I often help out at Pound Wood, an ancient woodland that's managed by the Essex Wildlife Trust as a coppice site. A common product from coppice woodlands is charcoal. Charcoal is wood with the water removed by setting fire to it and then severely limiting the oxygen it receives. The charcoal from Pound Wood is sold locally. A fantastic British product made very sustainably.

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.