Sunday 23 August 2020

A Day off and a Spoon Whittle!


Decided today to take a day off all projects and stuff. It's been a busy couple of weeks and I needed a slow day pottering. The trouble is I am easily cajoled into making stuff! My son Harri (10) is currently a bit obsessed with bushcraft and Ray Mears and he was showing me in the Ray Mears book the section on whittling. He can baton wood and is practicing and its a nice thing for us to do in the garden together. 

So I ended up making a small spoon! I made it from a batoned in half piece of ash from the garden pile and I used the Mora Heavy Duty carbon knife to rough it all out. I don't own a spoon/bowl gouge knife so I used an approach thats in Rays book amongst others, that of placing a small ember from the fire on the spoon to burn out the bowl shape into the blank. I then made one concession to modernity in that I used a stamps worth of sandpaper to clean it up and finish it. It's certainly not great, but is a nice object for a first go and it's nice to sit doing things like this with my kids. 


 


No comments: