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    Spoon: A Guide to Spoon Carving and the New Wood Culture
    Spoon: A Guide to Spoon Carving and the New Wood Culture
    Spoon: A Guide to Spoon Carving and the New Wood Culture
    Ebook235 pages1 hour

    Spoon: A Guide to Spoon Carving and the New Wood Culture

    By Barn the Spoon

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    About this ebook

    In this fully illustrated and beautiful guide to our most functional utensil—the spoon—a master craftsman shares his life’s work: designing and carving exquisite, functional wooden spoons from branches and logs using time-honored woodworking skills and techniques.

    The simple, ordinary spoon is part of our everyday lives, from stirring our first cup of coffee to the long slurp of soup poured with a ladle to scraping the last bit of pudding from the bowl. Barn the Spoon is a master craftsman in the rarified art of spoon carving and a thoughtful proponent of the new wood culture renaissance. His love, care, and passion for wooden spoons is genuine and infectious. In Spoon he brings unparalleled color and character to his role as one of the world’s most respected spoon carvers and shares the extraordinary skill and gentle philosophy he applies to his life’s work.

    Barn shows how to use the axe and knife, from how they should feel in your hand to honing the perfect edge when carving your own spoons. Featuring sixteen unique designs in the four main categories of spoon—eating, serving, cooking, and measuring—Barn takes you through the nuances of their making, how each design is informed by its function at the table or in the kitchen, and the key skills you will learn. Stunning photography on nearly every page both inspires and acts as a blueprint to help perfect your technique.

    A celebration of the ordinary transformed into the extraordinary, Barn’s spoons take you on a journey into the new wood culture, from understanding the relationship among wood, the raw material, and its majestic origins in our trees and woodland, to the workshop and the axe block, and into your own kitchen. This gorgeous, full-color book is the perfect gift for the home chef, woodcarver, crafter, collector, artist, escapist urbanite, or anyone harboring dreams of a self-sufficient lifestyle.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateNov 14, 2017
    ISBN9781501182785
    Spoon: A Guide to Spoon Carving and the New Wood Culture
    Author

    Barn the Spoon

    Barn the Spoon has been a woodwork obsessive for over twenty years. Eight years ago he decided spoons were his thing and dedicated his life to them. He now runs London’s little spoon shop “Barn the Spoon” at 260 Hackney Road. Spoon is his first book.

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      Book preview

      Spoon - Barn the Spoon

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      Contents

      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

      Acknowledgments

      About the Author

      To my teachers, who gave gifts that can never be taken away

      Introduction

      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 socializing, 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; and 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 percent water, and green wood differs from this only insofar as it is cut down, so dead, but it is still wet. Knives and axes are the key tools of the green woodworker, 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 industrialized 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, have 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 recognizing that trees are fundamental to the way we have evolved as human beings. We need trees to breathe, of course, but they are also central to our ideas of home and humanity—they have given us everything from the timber 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 center. For woodworkers like me, it’s about finding a way of working which takes a step back from machinery and puts forgotten skills 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 industrialized 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 ax found at Ehenside Tarn in Cumbria is between five thousand and six thousand 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 artifacts 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 than those we lead today and more sympathetic to the natural environment. 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, recognizing 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 re-creations, 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 industrialized processes. The internet has opened everything up, with a flurry of blogs providing intimate information from previously

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