alder a-plenty

 

An opportunity to teach spoon carving came along in the Spring of this past year. A friend suggested contacting the Chuchanut Center in Bellingham and when I did they were enthusiastic about working with me to bring this class there. I'd just begun to learn the basics of traditional Scandinavian spoon carving. I decided to use one of my first spoons of this style as a template for the class. That spoon was this small alder spoon I made from a cast off shard I found at the shop of my teacher Walter Henderson on Orcas Island.

The spoon waited in my posession for months before it finally found it's mate in my lovely friend Matia of Lopez Island.

In preparation for the spoon carving class I watched some videos on the internet that demonstrated the techniques used in clear steps to produce the spoon in the most expedient way. The best one I found, which I think I watched after the class actually, is this one by Adam Hawker. Other nspirations at this time were Maryanne McGinn and these Silent Carving videos. My goal was to carve a spoon in two hours, and I devoured the information in these videos with glee, imagining what was possible. Then I began to practice. 

I didn't have much time before the class, and had a sort of marathon of axe work practice at our family place on Orcas, where I stayed for about a week leading up to it. There were young alders in the field there that provided me the ideal wood for this purpose. Alder is easy to carve when green, and hardens up nicely for use when dry. I roughed out about fifteen blanks in a couple days, and selected about the same amount of half rounds for the students to rough out themselves. The class would teach both the axe work and knife work in one session, so I decided to have blanks already axed and partially dried. 

Out of the blanks I roughed out, there were some left for me to play around with. These are some of the spoons that came from that group.They were completed mostly while at the small farm of some new friends in Renton, Washington where I stayed for a couple weeks after my Bellingham stay.

The pair of larger ones eventually went to my father and his wife. The smaller one I gave to my friend Andy in Bellingham.

NOTE: the small alder spoon I used for the template was toasted to that darker brown color, and these later alder spoons were not toasted, but simply cured deeply with coconut oil, which left their natural bright tones shining through.