spoon

Heres my first attempt at making a wooden spoon. I used a month old piece of honey locust , but forgetting what i learned in bow making, shouldve started with a green piece. The moisture inside tries to escape through the easiest part, so the ends start cracking open soon as the wood is harvested. An easy fix for this is to seal the ends with wood glue, but it would be better to start with a fresh green piece of wood, as it would also be easier to shape. Mark a rough outline of the spoon shape, with your knife or pencil, and whittle down to size alternating between knife and axe as needed.

Start gouging out the bowl shape with the corner of your axe, as it gets deeper, its easy to shave off pieces in a circular motion around the inside edges.Use a similar technique with your knife to deepen the bottom, you could do the whole thing with an axe, but the knife is nice to access the smaller areas and do more precise shaping.

Another method to create the bowl is to place a hot coal on it and let the bowl shape be burned out.

Leave some extra wood on your spoon until the inside of the bowl is roughly finished, then whittle everything to your desired final size. Using your knife or axe, a very smooth and uniformly round finish can be made by utilizing a fast drawn up and down motion, with hard pressure and at a light angle, while slowly rotating the spoon. Or finish by sanding with a smooth rock.

More to come, check back soon for different designs and other wooden crafts.