Spoons are to carving
as like what a chair is to furniture making.
Hi, I'm James.
I make hand-carved wooden spoons using carving knives
and I started a couple of years ago
and I've made close to 100.
So just before COVID was a thing,
I was just looking online, as you do,
and I came across just some Instagram artists
and one of them, for some reason,
just started spoon carving,
and I thought, "That's something I could do, probably,"
and it took off from there.
So this is kind of where I
have started from for a lot of spoons.
The first step that I really do is I take the axe
and just cleave it right in half.
Then I would process it down into what's called a billet.
So basically every spoon will have an angle
from the tip of the ball to like the back of the spoon.
Like a tick.
You want to axe that in early on so that you can establish
kind of like that dimension of your spoon
before you even get anything else that way.
And then you will draw the design on
like I've done on this one.
Then you go to the straight knife.
The guiding principles behind like what makes a spoon a spoon
are so basic,
but within that realm, there's such
a wide variety that you can do, you can make.
But essentially, like, a spoon is a spoon.
As long as it performs its job, then that's it.
So at this point I have finished the axe work.
So I've gone as far as I'm comfortable with
to go with the axe before I start getting too close
to the line I've drawn on,
so I want to just take to it with the straight knife.
I'm gonna go all the way around
the plan view, I think it's called, like, just the side
so I can come close to how it's gonna look from the top,
and then I'll focus on the next section.
So as you sort of learn and start off carving,
there's a few basic, like, grips they're called, like knife grips,
and the one I'm using here is just the chest pull or chest grip.
So you're bracing the spoon against your chest
so that the knife has something to push against.
Another one is just like the thumb push.
This is probably a pretty common one that people have seen
whittlers is used for a long time
and you're just kind of taking the knife in one hand,
bracing it against your thumb and just, kind of, using it to push.
So I'm just kinda trying to creep up on the edge there.
This is called the chest lever grip.
So what we do is, kind of, chicken wing,
you get your elbows in tight and then you just kind of
open up your chest.
As you do, you, like, get these nice big shavings.
You get underneath the axe marks.
When you get into this rhythm,
that's when, if you know, you know
'cause it's such a nice feeling
and when you see the curls fall to the floor,
it's kind of really nice and it's kind of what I'm chasing.
I don't really know exactly what the
finished spoon looks like at this point, but
I know that I need, I've got a lot of work to do before I'm there.
It is a totally random thing to just start doing out of nowhere.
I get that, but if you do it,
you understand and it's so accessible.
So if you want to get into spoon carving,
there really isn't a lot that you need.
This is just a small hatchet that I got
back when I first started and it's the only one I've ever
needed so far.
The axe work is, like, a big part of the spoon making as well
because you are essentially trying
to get to the finished form,
as close to the finished form as you can
by just using an axe.
The other important tools are a straight blade
or a sloyd knife.
It's got a really tapered tip so that you
can get into the difficult spots in a spoon,
and these are razor sharp, you can shave with them.
And then a spoon knife
or a hook knife, which is a curved blade
so you can actually curve out the bowl of the spoon.
At some point, you have to be comfortable with the level
of imperfection in something.
It also forces you to slow down
because if you go too quickly,
you could really hurt yourself.
The knives you use are really sharp
and so it forces you to slow down
and you have to, like, commit to the process
that you can't skip anything,
you have to, like, go through the motions
and it can be really therapeutic to go through that.
But then giving them to other people is just special
because people who love you would love to just receive
something you've made generally,
but if it's gonna be something they're gonna use,
it's even better.