A couple of spoons commissioned by a local potter and made to her designs. Really fun to make, the large spoon is 30cm long while it’s little salt spoon brother is just 7cm total.
A small commission of wooden spreaders has gone off to London to be given as Christmas presents. The customer asked me to replicate one she had brought back from New Zealand and liked so much she wanted to share the design. Mine are handcarved from Cherry from the Sizergh estate, just down the road from me in Cumbria.
Some of you will already have noticed that I have brought my Scytherspace site and blog into the SteveTomlinCrafts site.
As well as making them easier for me to manage this will mean that you now get posts all year round and I hope that you will be as interested in both seasons of my work as I am to have that variety.
On the site itself you’ll find the main blog in the menu as usual but with two drop down options which will take you to either the woodworking or scythe posts, making it easier to browse and find what you’re looking for. I’ll also be sending out an occasional newsletter with details of courses, exhibitions and events to watch out for.
Thanks for following, I feel really lucky to have such interesting and varied work through the year and love sharing it with you on the blog. I hope you’ll enjoy what’s to come just as much but, if you change your mind, you can always unsubscribe by clicking the link in your email or at WordPress.com.
Three new eating spoons freshly out of the oil* this morning. These are my standard eating spoon shapes but I thought they were worth sharing for the beautiful colours, especially the spalted birch.
These will be in the Spoon Shop if you’re interested in buying one.
l-r: cherry, birch, birch.
* My kitchenware is finished with food grade cold-pressed linseed oil so there’s no nut allergy issues. If you’d prefer something unoiled that’s fine, please email me.
So Simon Thomas of Staff of Life had the dough bowl over the weekend and tweeted the whole process of mixing, kneading and proving 3kg of dough in my carved bowl.
This is a multigrain loaf with malted & rye flours and caraway. The dough was proved for approx 40hr due to Simon teaching artisan baking to a group on Sunday.
According to Simon: “The doughbowl is very easy to mix in and contains the rise easily too. Remained very stable while mixing. I put a damp tea towel under to stop it slipping on my steel worktops. I do like it.”
I will be carving more of these bowls, if you’re interested in finding out more please email me.
It certainly tasted good.
This morning I took the new wooden dough bowl over to Simon Thomas at the Staff of Life bakery. It was a lovely busy place with plenty of activity and a steady stream of customers and a great atmosphere.
Simon thinks the trough will be big enough for about 5lb of dough with space for rising which is a good amount for home baking and he liked the solid feel of it. He’s now going to take it home and put it through it’s paces before reporting back.
Some images of a new carved bowl that I finished earlier this year. Carved and finished by hand from local birch it measures 19″x11″x5″ and is designed as a dough bowl (or trough) for mixing, kneading and proving bread dough in. For scale, the final picture shows the some of my cherry cooking spoons which are just shy of 12″ long sat in the bowl.
I’ve been talking about dough bowls with Simon Thomas, owner of the Staff of Life bakery in Kendal and we’ll be working together to come up with the perfect design for modern home baking.
A couple of gratuitous spoon shots from the weekend of my own spoons which I’d taken along to the course to inspire. There are eating spoons, serving spoons as well as a couple of little scoops. Some of them were made a while ago and others, like the willow server I was making during the individual tuition with Gareth where I’ve deliberately left the marks from the hook knife in the bowl, are brand new.
I spent this weekend teaching a spoon carving workshop for London Green Woodworkers based in Abney Park, Stoke Newington. Abney is a beautiful old cemetery full of headstones and monuments which has reverted to woodland over the years and is very atmospheric.
The group had all carved wooden spoons before but wanted some additional tuition to develop their skills and improve their spoons. Spoon design, sharpening, carving technique, ergonomics and finishing all made for a full and busy couple of days which I enjoyed a lot. One of the things I wanted to put over was to look more at their work as they carved and we made one of my eating spoons the focus of the weekend with everyone aiming to produce copies of it. This is a great way to learn and develop new shapes and techniques and the results all came out different and individual which represented each carvers own style. On the course was Joseph Bloor who is currently carving a spoon a day for a year and was keen to learn to improve his skills as part of that project.
We finished the weekend with a session of a Spoon Club game in which each person carves a spoon for 5mins before passing it to the person to their left who continues the work. This can be a challenging and exciting way to work as you’re faced each time with a completely new spoon and can’t get too attached to a piece. After an hour we each got our own spoons back, carved as a collaboration of the group.
It’s great to find such a fun and keen bunch doing greenwood work in the middle of London and sharing what they do through free drop in sessions
For any of you who missed it or would like to see it again, here is my appearance with Paul Heiney on the ITV Countrywise programme.
I’m pleased with how it turned out and think I managed to put my points across pretty well. Paul had a few attempts at his parts but I didn’t get any advance notice of what the questions would be or a chance to re-record what I said so it’s all off the cuff.
Watching it myself it’s interesting to see that Paul, like a lot of folk, expected it to be easy to use a scythe and the production team turned down my offer to spend some time teaching him how to scythe properly. Instead I had just a few minutes to show him the principles of the movement and I was actually quite pleased with his progress. During my Learn to Scythe courses, I make sure you have plenty of mowing time when I can watch and adjust your technique. Just like Paul, you won’t be an expert by the end of the day but you’ll have all the skills and knowledge you need to practise on your own and enjoy the process of improving your technique.
