Spoons

carved from green wood: roughed out with a hatchet and/or a northwestern style adze, then shaped and finished with crooked knives and a straight blades (click on the thumbnail for an uncropped view of the entire photo). Some of the detail work is done w/little burins. The bowls I carved with a crooked knife, straight blade, and a neat jig designed by Bill Coperthwaite (author of A Hand Made Life). Bill’s spoon is the little yellow (birch) ladle with the scooped indents where the handle meets the bowl — his addition to the tradition of spoon design. After I started carving spoons, a friend gave me a book about the Shakers. It had a photo of a beautiful wooden grain shovel. I don’t shovel grain, but I wanted to make one. On the next page was a photo of a tin dustpan. We do use one of those, but it’s the ugliest plastic thing you’ve ever seen, and it just gets uglier with use. So for xmas last year I carved Hannah a dustpan out of a piece of maple firewood — that happened to have some nice bird’s eye figuring in it.