Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Part One: Wood Culture
1 Trees & Woodland
2 The Raw Materials
Part Two: Knives & Axes
3 Spoon Carving Tools
4 Knife Grips
5 How to Carve a Basic Spoon
Part Three: The Spoons
6 Measuring Spoons
Caddy Spoon, Feather Spoon, Kuksa, Flour Scoop
7 Cooking Spoons
Standard Cooking Spoon, Bent Branch Shovel, Roma Spoon, Turned Spoon
8 Serving Spoons
Pouring Ladle, Salad Spoons, Bent Branch Ladle, Sugar Spoon
9 Eating Spoons
Fig Shaped Spoon, Swedish Spoon, Cawl Spoon, Dolphin Spoon
The New Wood Culture
Stockists & Resources
Acknowledgements
Copyright
The activities in this book require the use of knives, axes and various woodworking and carving tools and should be performed with great care and under adult supervision. Neither the author nor publishers can accept responsibility for any loss, damage or injuries that may occur as a result of these activities, and the author and publishers disclaim as far as the law allows any liability arising directly or indirectly from the use, or misuse, of the information contained in this book.
Think of how many times a day you use a spoon. This simple, ordinary tool is a part of our everyday lives, intimately entwined with acts of eating and socialising, from stirring our first cup of coffee to scraping the last bit of pudding from our bowls. And who doesn’t like to spoon in bed?
The spoon is the first tool we learn to use as children, and using it transports us back through human history to a time when our lives were very different, but our utensils very much the same. Using a spoon speaks of our evolution as humans, of our graduation from chips of wood – the Anglo-Saxon spōn – through to the beautiful Roman, Scandinavian or Celtic spoons which have inspired some of the designs you will see in this book.
Spoons are really bowls with a handle, which ask to be held, and by better appreciating our relationship with them we make our lives better. One of the things I hope this book will suggest is how much thought goes into creating something so small and apparently insubstantial as a good wooden spoon – which requires so very many things to be right to be truly good. We will celebrate the value of the tools we use, of our magnificent landscape and our key resource, the wood itself, and perhaps foremost the actions of the individual maker and his craft processes.
As a craftsperson, spoons are something upon which I have been able to build a life. Creating these small, functional sculptures has allowed me the chance to explore the concept of beauty in three dimensions, and through the process of carving using axes and knives I have discovered how satisfying making functional objects can be. I have now spent many years making spoons. I have lived in forests, learning about wood as it grows; I have been lucky enough to spend time with acknowledged experts in different aspects of woodwork, seeing how they approach their craft. All of this has left me with a great and subtle sense of a ‘green wood’ movement.
The definition of green wood, and green woodwork, is key to understanding the way that I create spoons. A live tree is 50 per cent water, and green wood differs from this only in so far as it is cut down, so dead, but it is still wet. Knives and axes are the key tools of the green wood worker, as they allow us to efficiently work ‘wet’ wood into spoons, whereas dry or ‘seasoned’ planks – where the water levels within the wood have reached equilibrium with their environment – tend to be worked with more industrial tools, like bandsaws and belt sanders.
Green woodwork is sympathetic to both environment and materials, and quite separate from the industrialised aspects of wood processing which only distances the individual from the tree. Green woodworkers often cut the wood themselves, or source it from tree surgeons, and the relationships we build, and the understanding of woodland practice which we acquire, has a big impact on the way we think about making spoons.
I see spoons as the emblem of, as well as the gateway to, a broader cultural understanding; what has been called a ‘new wood culture’ or perhaps more appropriately a ‘wood culture renaissance’. Both of these terms are about having a holistic approach to woodwork, which includes lifestyle, and about recognising that trees are fundamental to the way we have evolved as human beings. We need them to breathe, of course, but they are also central to our ideas of home and humanity – trees have given us everything from the timbers for our houses to the bows and arrows which defined our human ancestors.
The wood culture renaissance is about the rebirth of a way of life which places a sustainable interaction with trees at its centre. For woodworkers like me, it’s about finding a way of working which takes a step back from machinery and puts forgotten skills back at the heart of making. Being mindful of the way we work deeply affects the physical form of our craft objects, foregrounding questions of provenance and our relationship to things we buy. These issues are pertinent today and run counter to the trend of the last century of industrialised mass production.
People have been using spoons since prehistory, with our earliest ancestors adapting horns, shells or chips of wood to help them eat. The ancient words for spoons suggest this, with the Greek and Latin word derived from cochlea, or spiral shell, and the Anglo-Saxon spōn means simply a chip of wood. Virtually all early cultures used wooden spoons to cook with and all developed their own spoon making traditions: the Shang Dynasty in China used spoons made out of bone, while the ancient Egyptians revered the wooden spoon enough to be buried with them.
The earliest known inhabitants of northern Europe were certainly woodworkers: a Neolithic stone axe found at Ehenside tarn in Cumbria is between 5,000 and 6,000 years old. That the Iron Age Celts of Britain used spoons is evidenced by the discovery of a small wooden ladle during excavations at Glastonbury Lake Village. Despite the propensity of wooden artefacts to rot, recent discoveries have shown that Anglo Saxons and Vikings both produced wooden spoons for domestic use.
The process of carving a spoon provides a lens into a historical period when our lives were simpler and more sympathetic to the natural environment than those we lead today. The humble, rural way of life suggested by wooden spoons was largely displaced by our industrial, metropolitan age, and is considered old-fashioned at a time when we are dissatisfied with factory, but not office work – at least on the surface of things. A resurgent craft movement, recognising our need to make and do, is surely born out of the knowledge that we are not fulfilled by our sedentary, digital lives. On the fringes, people are beginning to remember the benefits of rural life, and a well-made wooden spoon, like good studio pottery before it, suggests an alternative world away from that which we currently inhabit.
The spoons I make today, however, are far from historical recreations and this is not about simply re-enacting the past. Some of them may be based, directly or indirectly, on traditional spoons found in museums but the sculptural possibilities within a craft such as spoon making are really limitless, and my aesthetic is a result of my own journey in woodwork. This includes everything from the study of ancient designs to the teachers I’ve learnt from, to my time tramping in the woods, to using these spoons in the kitchen. These things feed into my work in a fluid, holistic way.
Thankfully we now live in an age where the maker is resurgent, where the decision making of the craftsperson is celebrated once again. This is tied to a broader cultural renaissance. Part of this is the organic food movement, which has proved a great stimulus to the general craft enterprise, and people now care a lot more about the provenance of their purchases. The media has taken a strong interest in craft, helping to channel new feelings we have as a society as people become disenfranchised by industrialised processes. The internet has opened everything up, with a flurry of blogs providing intimate information from previously obscure makers, and given us a way to buy quality, individual and ethically sourced products.
Before the internet there were very few ways to find out about green woodwork, and no real way of learning the skills, apart from through a few specialist books, or magazines which were really designed to promote the sale of machines. Most woodworkers were approaching their material from an engineering perspective, trying to get things to within a thousandth of an inch – that was the twentieth century paradigm. But I think this processing removes all of the humanity. With industrial processes, things are either right or wrong. We have long embraced the benefits of something being well designed, but for a long time this meant designed on a drawing board, engineered, machined and mass produced, and as a result the human aspect of creation was lost.
Part of the beauty of wood as a chaotic material is that it certainly isn’t ever perfectly symmetrical, on the level of the grain, and that this gives the artist something to work with, or work against. Whether it is a slight bend in the grain or a wiggle around a knot, these variables inspire sympathy in the spoon maker and an intimate relationship with their material, which is more spiritually rewarding than creating a perfect straight line or a circle.
As a child, my next door neighbour, Roger Jones, who was also my design teacher, was a proper wood worker with an inherent knowledge of wood and a drive to have a deeper relationship with it as a material. It sounds strange, but I can honestly say that I fell in love with wood at a young age. My parents got me a lathe for my thirteenth birthday and I was hooked! Whenever I carve with cherry today I am transported back to the first bowl I turned, to the curly, warm shavings being brushed from the inside of the hollow bowl and the incredible woody cherry smell that surrounded me back then. To begin with I churned out bowls and candlesticks and all sorts of weird abstract sculptures. I would wander around my school with small bits of tactile wood in my pocket, obsessing over the wood grain and the forms I was creating.
At university, I did a biology degree, which gave me the knowledge and encouraged me to think about the processes of nature and wood in action. After university I was a woodwork teacher for a while then toyed with the idea of setting up a wooden jewellery business. I was based in a dusty bedsit and using noisy machines, which started giving me breathing issues; it occurred to me that working in green wood might be the answer.
I first contacted pioneering green woodworker Mike Abbott in 2007 and went to work as an assistant on one of his chair making courses. I was living and working in the woods, cooking on an open fire each night, splitting and drying wood, and had the time and space to explore a new way of making. I was able to feel the weight of a felled tree hitting the ground and enjoy the exertion of moving tonnes of wood by hand. I soon did a whole season at Mike’s, doing forestry work and helping with courses while working and living on the farm, helping with the apple harvest and generally doing odd jobs.
I had first made spoons during my teenage woodwork phase, but I really got into it when I was living and working at Mike’s. Spoons were easy because – unlike chair making, for example – they were quick to start and something you could make around the fire at night. And yet somehow they were also the most challenging. I quickly recognised the disparity between a bad spoon and a fantastic spoon – the difference was huge and provided lots of opportunity for experiential learning on the way. Recognising that there are grades of spoons hooks you in, as there is always progress to be made.
I lived a version of the good life on this farm, with my partner, but it all fell apart; I had no money and was too old to just run back to my parents. I had been living in the woods and had no desire to change this. I had some friends who had walked the length of the country, sleeping outdoors and paying their way by playing folk music on the street, and village pubs. I decided I would do the same but with spoons.
Selling my spoons on the street taught me a lot of the sociological stuff about how to sell something you have made: how to make yourself approachable; what you should say to people; how to sit, even. Street-selling also taught me that many members of the public highly respect craftspeople, seeing them as humble, and as providing a humble service or simple product. I learned that the price you put on a spoon has nothing to do with whether it sells or not; that the average person – me included, at least to begin with – hasn’t the faintest clue as to how you might price something like a handmade wooden spoon.
Recently, there was a viral video about one of the best orchestral musicians in the world who set to busking – and everybody just ignored him. It sounds slightly presumptuous, but I know how he felt. Few people have an idea about how much time and effort goes into making a wooden spoon. I was good at what I was doing, but you could tell that a lot of people who walked past me were thinking, ‘Who is this tramp?’ I spent a lot of time being moved on, despite having a peddler’s licence. Some people offered me food; others told me to get a job. Peddlers challenge our ideas of territory, or where and how people can make a living, and our ideas of the proper boundaries of commerce. I had a lot of existential thoughts about whether people should be allowed to live in the modern world if they don’t have a mortgage and a job contract.
I travelled alone for three years and it was a completely transformative journey for me. Walking for days along old ways and canal towpaths gave me time to think. I experienced life increasingly on a natural timescale, moving around on foot and stopping to gather wood for a fire, upon which I would make a cup of tea.