I’ve done some whittling before – I own my own bushcraft knife and, for safety, a pair of kevlar gloves – but the other day I went out in the woods to learn how to carve a spoon. I was looking into bushcraft but ultimately, it’s all stuff I’ve done before (firelighting, shelter-building etc) or foraging & filleting and the whole food thing gets harder every year so that’s a flat no. I looked at one particular company, turned down their bushcraft day on the grounds that it was all stuff I’m already trained to teach plus food, turned down their bushcraft weekend on much the same grounds and then came across their spoon-carving day. Yes, that is new to me. And I think I’m going to do their basic carving weekend course next year.
But once booked, I started to have bad feelings about it. It started when I got nothing but an automated “order received” email after I booked – no instructions, no kit list and in particular, no directions to “our own bit of wood near the Hampshire-Dorset border” and not even the name of the course I’d booked onto. I emailed the week of the course and got a postcode and a “look for the black and white wooden building” but when I arrived, there was nothing but a rutted track likely to take off the bottom of my small car. I knew tools would be provided but I do own a whittling knife and the lack of information made me decide I’d take it just in case – not specifically to use as a weapon in case I really was being lured to the woods to be murdered but you know, just in case. Call it being prepared.
I’d arrived quite early so I drove down the road and found a place I could park a couple of miles away to wait – sometimes leaving time to get lost backfires – and I’m sitting in the car writing this while I waited for the clock to tick on to 9.20am. By the time I get back, surely the “member of the team will be waiting” by the wooden building to show me where to go and if they’re not, at least I know now I can pause the car off the road there to call the number and see what happens next.
Well, there was someone there! I was directed to follow the horrible rutted track but twenty-odd yards on there was a car park, or a clearing with a car already in it, anyway, and Craig, in branded embroidered jacket and trousers led me into the woods. Two or three hundred yards, it’ll only take a few minutes. Just going to that tree line there. And into the trees… and it all seemed fine but we still hadn’t reached wherever we were going and I was still glad I’d brought my knife with me.
And then there we were, at the camp! It was real and there were other people and a campfire and a lot of tarps over semi-wild camps and a tall man was actually going to teach me to make a spoon! I was the only person on the one-day spoon-making course but I had three playmates who were there doing the advanced carving course who’d arrived on Friday night – this was Sunday morning. Their task over the weekend was to make an eating spoon, a cooking spoon, a ladle and a spatula and although, spoiler, they did all pass the course, two them hadn’t finished their third spoon and the other wasn’t even that far on. While the others got on with their second or third spoons of the weekend, my private lessons started.
I was going to be carving with an axe! John, my teacher and owner of the company, gave me a piece of log and said it’s quite easy, you just cut away anything that isn’t a spoon. So I practised with the axe. I had a vague idea axes were involved but I thought it would be splitting wood, lift it over your head and hope you hit the wood and not your own leg. Oh no, I was to hold it just below the head and swing it backwards and forwards gently in my hand, making lots of little cuts and then use the axe to cut away that entire feathered section. Then I was given my actual piece of wood that I was going to turn into a spoon by the end of the day. John split it into a usable size, although without swinging the axe over his head, and then I had to spend a while with my axe flattening it until it ceased to be a kind of triangular wedge and became a nearly rectangular thing wide and flat enough to trace my spoon template on.
Carving with an axe! I’d never imagined such a thing! And ok, flattening the front of a piece of log isn’t exactly Fine Art but I’d never imagined doing anything like it. The axe did make my arm tired after a while but there was no particular hurry and I could take a break if I wanted. Meanwhile, my playmates were mostly finishing off their latest spoons. They were shaping the bowls and finessing the handle and John talked them through finishing cuts and tool maintenance, two things that don’t come into the one-day course. I couldn’t quite see and I didn’t entirely know what some of the talk was about but I listened, over the sound of my open chopping.
I had an interesting work bench. It was a smallish piece of log on four spindly legs that weren’t all that well attached, which I managed to knock over once. Then it was surrounded by a piece of bark that looked like aged rusty iron and it supported a kind of raised arc on the back of the bench which you use to hold your wood at an angle. I had a stool as well, also made from log and spindly legs which I was glad to get to sit on once I’d finished with the axe but which soon made my right knee seize up. It would have been nice to sit on the floor but it was a bit muddy and if I’d put down a groundsheet, I’d have put my sharp knife through it sooner or later.
So I got my wood nice and flat and then John offered me a choice of templates and I drew a spoon. Now I had to use the axe to carve as close to it as I dared, which meant cutting in and splitting down the grain and using a bump cut. That means embedding the axe in the wood so you can lift the whole lot up at once and banging it on the bench to force the axe down. So eventually I had a very rough axe-carved spoon. Incredible what you can do with an axe.
Now it was knife time. I had to smooth out the handle and make everything very square but also cut out my neck. That took a while – I liked one side but the other didn’t match so I redrew the edges and tried to carve down to them, only to find I’d managed to make it a different shape to the good side and would have to start again. John drew round my template again, since I’d carved off most of the pencil lines and I reshaped the top of the bowl and to be honest, I would probably have been quite satisfied to go home with a mere spoon-shaped piece of wood.
We had half an hour off for lunch. The others packed up their camping stuff and fiddled with their spoons while I sat by the fire and flicked through a book of spoon art and looked at the camp. I began to think how nice it would be to have a bit of wood. Maybe Catherine and I could start a business – she could do her rewilding and art stuff and teach people about nature and I could have an archery range and an axe-throwing range and we’d both do firelighting and maybe I could even teach spoon-carving and we could hold camps. It’s a nice dream. Obviously I’d do the admin because I’m an admin kind of person and Catherine would be doing the majority of the actual woods-related stuff.
Then it was back to work. I was given a crook knife and it was time to start digging out my bowl. A crook knife is a knife with a curved blade, designed precisely to dig out the bowls of spoons. I didn’t get on great with it. John demonstrated two ways of using it and I failed at both and resorted to digging. I admit that he did most of the work on actually getting some depth but I did scrape it out to a deeper depth and dig out the sides. John complimented me on my tenacity – most people would have decided “ah, that’s deep enough, it’ll do” but at that point, my spoon wouldn’t have picked up much soup and I kept going probably for another half an hour on it. John showed me how to use the crook knife to cut the sides to make them a steeper angle, which is what I was trying to achieve but again, I couldn’t quite master the cutting so I continued with the scraping.
And then that was the bare bones of my spoon done. The weekenders had gone by now and it was just the two of us in the woods. John was working on salad servers and butter scrapers (“oh great” says his wife, “just what we need. More spoons”) and I’d gone back to my straight knife and was tidying it up, rounding everything off, smoothing the handle, rounding the bottom of the bowl and turning it from something quite square into a nice roundish spoon.
It’s a good solid lump of spoon. It’s 13 inches (33cm) long and the head is two and a half inches wide. It’s definitely a good chunky rustic spoon, nothing like the delicate things everyone else was producing. One of the weekenders had dug out his bowl so deep you could see light through it and I couldn’t figure out how John was making his butter-spreaders so fine and so flat with nothing but a bushcraft knife and a corn brush.
By the time he’d packed up his bit of woodland, I was more or less done. That is, I could have stayed another lifetime, perfecting and nitpicking and reshaping. A handmade wooden spoon is something you can never refine enough and even now I could pick up my knife and make it a bit more beautiful. But eventually you have to call it finished. Now I had to leave it to dry for a while and then sand it. It’s not wet but it’s been a log on a forest floor so it is a bit on the “green” side. So I took it home and sat it on my desk so I could show everyone at work at our Monday Zoom meeting.
Having spent the day there, I’m a bit more uncertain about the weekend course that I blithely declared at the beginning of this post that I was going to do. I have a blister on the middle finger of my right hand, I have the faintest white line on my left thumb where I caught it on my crook knife two or three times, something that feels like a miniature blister and a sort of soreness that yesterday looked like a massive purple bruise. Plus having seen the delicate and beautiful things the others were producing and looking at my cauldron spoon, I don’t think I’m ready for it yet. But John sent me home with a piece of wood and at some point I hope to have a go at making another spoon.
Would you like to meet my tools? I invested in an axe and a crook knife to go with my straight bushcraft knife.
This is my straight knife. It’s a Mora Basic 511 which I was recommended on the hour-long introduction to whittling at Try Inspire Qualify 2018. It has a big plastic handle which doesn’t look as woodsy as the Mora 106 I used on the course which has a wooden handle. It’s a good sharp knife which I showed to John and which he approved (“whoever recommended it to you advised you well”) and it clicks into a plastic sheath from which it won’t fall out. Having just made a second spoon on my own, unsupervised, in the back garden, I’ll say I prefer it to the 106, although it’s possible that it’s because it’s sharper – mine is basically unused whereas John’s knives are used by beginners all day every day. But it’s got a nice big thumb guard and it’s a bigger blade and I just think it works better. It costs somewhere between £4 and £8 at the moment depending on where you get it from.
My crook knife is the John-recommended one. It’s a Mora 164 (right-handed) and I opted not to buy the leather sheath for it, since that was £8. I’ll do what the manufacturer of the axe recommends and make it a sheath out of corrugated cardboard and ducktape. It has a curved blade for digging out bowls and spoons and it’s only sharp on one side, hence right-handed. I like the idea of a double-bladed one, where both sides are sharp, but I’m guaranteed to grab the top edge and slice my hand open so I went for the single-blade. As it is, I pressed my right thumb into the blade for more traction and only realised what I’d done, and how stupid it was, when I started to notice splodges of blood on my spoon. John said this should be about £15 but I reckon he hasn’t bought one in a while because I couldn’t find it for less than £23 and often it was more.
And lastly, my axe. My gorgeous, gorgeous axe. I never thought I’d be a person who’d own an axe. My dad has one and I went in the garden and examined it when I got home but it’s far too big and heavy for carving. This is the Carving Axe by wood-tools.co.uk, also recommended by John. It’s got a 12.5 inch handle and it’s designed for small delicate work like carving rather than chopping down enormous trees, although it’ll also do a pretty good job of cutting wood before you get to the carving. As you can see in the picture below, you hold it just below the head and it’s more of a rocking action to chip the edges away than a terrifying “lift over head with both hands and smash!”. I did invest in the leather sheath for this one. This is currently £43 and the sheath is £11 if you buy the two together or £17.50 if you buy it on its own.
Hopefully by the time you read this, I’ll have found a piece of log to use as my own cutting bench. There’s a nice piece down outside someone’s gate by the main road but I suspect they wouldn’t appreciate me appropriating it. Still, I live in the countryside. I’m accustomed to badly-painted “logs for sale” signs on the side of the road and maybe I’ll have to go and enquire.