The Handsome & Co Educational Taster: SPOON CARVING

The Handsome & Co Educational Taster: SPOON CARVING

Spoon carving, what a delightful way to spend a morning.

“You wake up in the morning and you look at your old spoon, and you say to yourself, Mick, it’s time to get yourself a new spoon. And you do.” – Mick Jagger

There is something quite beautiful about a carefully crafted and lovingly carved spoon. Its shape and function are simple, yet a hand sculpted and organically shaped spoon is a delight to hold and use.

The task is simple yet challenging, it only requires a small collection of tools and a blank of timber to whittle.

You start out by carving the concave opening to form the essential and functional mouth piece of your spoon. Shaving and cutting it deeper and wider with a hook/crook knife, the action requires something similar to a potato peeling action with a flick and swoop of the wrist. Following this, the blank is then roughed out into its spoon shape, handle and head are shaped using a bandsaw, however this is only one way to get there, maybe the easiest method. Other methods of extracting the rough shape of the spoon from a blank are with an axe and or with a drawknife. Finally the spoon is shaped and refined using rasps, files, spokeshaves, sandpaper and a lot of time and most importantly care.

We used a wax finish to seal these spoons, important to not that it was just Beeswax and Mineral Oil, a non toxic mixture to coat the timber and ensure its healthy application in the kitchen.

While it was mused on a few occasions that the activity would have been more comfortable and better suited to stereotypical spoon carving environments, like; sitting in a rocking chair, near an open fire, on the front porch, in the country air and all while chewing on the end of a strand wheat. In a bench room in the middle of our workshop, spoon carving was an enjoyable session and it was clearly an engaging and fun session had by all.