One benefit of all the tree pruning I did last month is I got a lot of potential carving material. I also got a lot of firewood and an impressive collection of smaller stuff that I need to burn or mulch, but like anything else I have to take the bad with the good.

As I was cutting up the bigger pieces for firewood, I put several aside for potential carving projects. This one said “spoon” to me.

It’s a piece of mesquite, about 12 inches long and around two inches thick down there at the left end. The limb it came from had been hanging dead on the tree for a couple of years.

The first step in making my spoon involved removing the bark. I did that with my Buck hunting knife, since that’s what I had at hand.

One of the things I like most about “found wood” projects (as opposed to buying a block of kiln dried wood from a store) is trying to make use of the log’s features: knots, worm holes, rotted sections, grain, coloring, etc. This piece has a lot of irregularities that make it quite interesting. Unfortunately, my photography doesn’t do justice to the potential I could see in this piece of wood.

With the bark off, I went inside to draw a rough outline of the spoon on the wood. This doesn’t have to be real detailed and I don’t have to set the final shape in stone right now. But it’s good to get a better idea of what I’m aiming to create.

That was a pretty poor picture in bad lighting. I enhanced it as well as I could. It gets the point across. The bowl of the spoon will be on the left in this picture. I’ll take off that protruding limb. The handle, too, will be trimmed quite a bit.

I rather like whittling sometimes, but when I want to create something, I don’t much like spending my time whittling away many cubic inches of waste wood. That’s what saws are for. A bandsaw would make quick work of cutting away the excess, but it takes a bit of time to pull it out and set it up. Especially since right now I have a very large and aggressive blade on it. I opted to use the coping saw with a coarse blade.

Here’s the spoon cutout to its (very) rough shape.

I goofed a bit with the saw, cutting away a little more than I had planned where the handle meets the bowl. It shouldn’t cause a problem. This spoon is intended to be a bit irregular anyway, so I can probably hide the goof as part of the “primitive” look.

The rest is edge tools: knives and gouges. Shaping the outside of the bowl always takes longer than I expect because a lot of it involves cutting the end grain. And I always end up taking away more wood than I thought I would have to in order to make it look right.

This isn’t the final shape, but it’s close. Note that the bowl is considerably smaller than what I drew. I’ve rough shaped the handle, but there’s still quite a bit of work left there. Still, the major work on the outside of the bowl is done.

The above, from when I took the first picture until the last, was about four hours’ work–most of it spent shaping the bowl after cutting the rough outline with the coping saw. That mesquite is pretty hard wood, which means taking small bites and stropping the knife blade very often.

The fun part (for varying definitions of “fun”) is hollowing out the bowl. I have a couple of small spoon gouges that are great for small spoons and detail work for the larger spoons, but the only tool I have for taking big chunks is a #9 gouge that’s about 3/8″ wide. It’s a good sharp tool, though, and it makes pretty quick work of the roughing out the bowl. I’m ordering a hook knife, which should speed the process quite a bit and also allow me to do a somewhat better job.

Hollowing the bowl took a lot of time. I spent two to three hours on it over a 3-day period. I finished that last night, and also put the final touches on shaping the handle. Here’s the result, ready for sanding.

Finished, this spoon should be quite beautiful with the different colors and the grain. It will make a nice serving spoon for soup, or perhaps a scoop for dry goods. I’ll post better pictures once it’s finished.

Photos of the finished spoon are here.

I’ve been told that scrapers are a good alternative to sanding. I haven’t tried them yet, but I’ve been impressed with the results I’ve seen from others. I think a set of scrapers will be my next purchase after the hook knife. Assuming, of course, that I continue making these larger spoons.