My lovely wife gave me a set of carving tools for Christmas so it was only fair that I would make my first proper carving project with them as a birthday present for her.
A few months ago between the joists in my loft I found an off-cut piece of American cherry which I then kept aside as a potential project. With new tools in hand this became a good opportunity to make something useful with them.
Now the tools came with a piece of basswood to practice on for more intricate carving. This, I’m still working on but it game me some basic guidelines on how to start making my own stuff. Admittedly jumping from a super soft wood like basswood to something like cherry, which is much denser, was a bit of a leap but I like to see those things as practice pieces which end up not perfect but good enough to become a gift.
The main part was to sort the “spoon” part, which I mostly just hollowed with a wide gouge bit. As an aside, the tools I got are the Flexcut, 5-Piece carver set. The 4 included blades are very useful but I ordered another 4 to make it more versatile. One of those was the SK364 1/8″ (3mm) spoon bit, and at the risk of sounding dumb, I still haven’t quite figured out how it works as its angle of attack is too steep to grab the wood properly. If anyone reading this has experience with it, I’d be happy to hear from them.
At any rate, I designed the spoon / bowl shape to fit a spoon or ladle comfortably, added a slot leading to the bowl to keep the spoon in place and decorated the rest with a 3D version of an 8-pointed star my wife and I have been using now and then. Certainly the star was what gave me the most challenges but sharp tools help to maintain some form of control and so apart from some obvious tool marks I haven’t been able to remove, the end result is actually quite decent.
I decided on rounding the edges for a more comfortable grip (though it will just live on the counter mostly) and rounded opposite corners for something a little different. It’s not easy to maintain a decent amount of control on a small piece like this while trying to shape corners with a rasp but again I’m happy with the end result.
It also gave me a change to experiment with how to sign my carvings and for now, using the thin gouge to trace my logo will work just fine. Maybe at some point I’ll make, or have someone make me an iron stamp I can burn on the bottom of my pieces but for now this works.
Finally the piece is finished with food-safe mineral oil, which brings out the grain quite nicely. It’s not the most gorgeous piece of wood but it has character (flaws) like knots and something that looks like end-grain burning I wasn’t able to sand off. I’d love to hear what people think.
