Well, Peening Day is done for another year; I hope you got your blades nicely cleaned and sharpened ready for the mowing season. Peening is a vital part of using a scythe, without it you’ll find the blade not cutting as you want no matter how much you hone it.
In the UK, peening is a pretty unknown skill, we don’t hammer the edge of any other tools so there’s a lot of learning to be done. I’ve been lucky enough to learn to peen scythes from some real experts in Austria and have taught many people through the learn to peen courses I’ve run in Cumbria. Like with my other courses, I’ve been taking apart the process to find the best ways to teach people how to peen and explain the method. I’ve had lots of success with students and plan to write a few posts here to try and help those of you just getting started.
First, here’s a few starter questions to ask yourself if you’re struggling with peening:
1. Do you understand the geometry of the scythe edge, which side is beveled, what the cross-section looks like and why it’s like that?
2. Do understand how the peening jig and anvils work to form these shapes under the action of your hammering? At the scythe festival last year I did a 1-to-1 for someone who was smart enough to say that hitting a curved shape with a flat hammer didn’t make sense to him. Once I’d explained and he understood it, it was much easier to start to learn the peening process.
3. Do you do any other craft activity that involves hand-eye coordination in the same way as peening?
4. Can you peen with the jig? People often underestimate what you can achieve with this tool and how important it is as a method for progressing to the anvil.
5. Do you have a decent setup for peening and, most importantly, can you see what’s happening when you strike the blade – do you know what to look for?
6. How much time do you put into learning to peen; how many blades do you have and how often did you peen them last year?
From time to time I get together with my mate Phil Bradley, who is a terrific basketmaker, for a day trying something out. Sometimes he is showing me, sometimes I show him and sometimes neither of us know what we’re doing. They are wonderful days and in my opinion, extremely important for craftspeople. All too often we are working alone and stick to what we know. There’s a kind of fear of trying new things, not just of failure but of wasting valuable time that could have been spent making familiar work. Taking time out to experiment and spent time with other makers should be a regular activity for more of us, it can stimulate all kinds of ideas, leading to new products or simply reinvigorate creativity and curiosity for a material.
A new addition was the Spoon Carving Chair which was occupied by various makers and gave people the opportunity to watch the likes of Fritiof Runhall, Jarrod Stone-Dahl and others carving at their normal pace. This is very different from seeing folk carving when they’re teaching and gives a better insight into their actual methods and way of working.
Also making it’s first appearance was the Spoonfest oven which was built as a course in the days running up to the weekend under the guidance of Martin Hazell, seen here giving it his blessings. The pizzas were certainly delicious.
There are times when you want to have your own craft course on a 1-to-1 basis.
Although Mike, Malcolm and Charlie had come for different reasons they all wanted to spend their time learning more about carving wooden spoons. Over the past 5 years or so I’ve seen spoon carving really take off in popularity which is fantastic as it’s a wonderful introduction to working with wood, a great way to learn to use simple tools and the possibilities of design are endless. I’ve been carving since 2000 and teaching since 2006, increasingly offering opportunities for improvers to develop their skills at events like Spoonfest alongside my regular 
All three had some previous experience but were wanting to get a proper understanding of how to carve so we started with some axe and knife techniques on practise blanks. I think everyone can benefit from going back to basics and spending time just making cuts for practise without thinking of making something. That way you can be more daring and positive in your motions since there’s no fear of ‘getting it wrong’ and your whole focus is on technique rather than the spoon. Mike in particular was impressed with how far it’s possible to carve a spoon using just the axe, making the knifework much easier. He has a house and woodland in France but comes over to see his beloved Liverpool FC play so tied in two days of spoon and some fan bird carving with the trip.
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