Carve a spoon by the campfire // Woodworking

hi I'm Annabel trades and because I recently showed how to carve a spoon from dry wood I figured it was only fair to show you how to carve one from what wood as well so let's get started my hands my favorite things about spoon carving with green wet or recently harvested wood is because the wood is usually free if you live in a city you can call your local arborist and ask them if they have any branches you can have or if you have acreage like I do you can wait for a tree to fall and then harvest some of the wood yourself because that log has been sitting for a little while I want to cut a fresh spot and I'm actually going to look and see if there's any branches or anything else that we're coming out of it because that's going to make the wood a little bit harder to carve a lot of people are going to wonder why I'm using a battery-powered saw and that's because basically battery technology has improved greatly over the last few years and quite frankly I'm not using a saw often enough for me to justify taking the time to maintain a gas engine so this thing make a little bit slower but it has a lot of power and it'll get the job done just fine actually note that there's a little knot here so I'm going to get rid of that and I'm going to avoid this knot here and I'll get plenty of usable wood for a spoon right in between [Music] blargh then the only negative of using battery power is when you forgot to change your battery power before you went up and you have to karate kick the rest of the cut to finish it thankfully though back up at the house we've got plenty of batteries once you've got a round that's when the real spoon past sickness starts to begin so we want to just take a look at this log in general yep so in the center of the log here we have what's called the pith the pith is the centre of the wood and we want to avoid using that at all costs and so to be able to get the absolute most of this log we would want to make some cuts somewhat like this or if you want to have a specific parents to your spoon like for example having those growth rings within the bowl of your spoon you would consider that with the way that you chop your wood so the nice thing about green woodworking is that you generally have quite a lot of log to deal with so wasting some to be able to get the best possible outcome for your spoon is not that big of deal plus it all ends up being firewood so you know a log like this potentially has about 300 spoons inside of it however I don't have the time or capacity to be able to carve 300 spoons before it goes bad but I can pick the best parts of the log and choose the best parts for the spoon and then burn the rest and stay warm all winter long when it comes to actually getting those desirable pieces of wood out there are a lot of different ways you can do it you can split it up with an axe and then bandsaw it or you can use what's called a fro which this is a fro and this is my preferred method my favourite branch for throwing just broke so I'm forced to use this until I can go back out into the woods and find a better one the fro gives you a very controlled split of the wood and that is going to allow you to use the strongest part of the wood for your spoon if I have some extra wood to spare then these little outside pieces are basically worthless to me so I'll go in and take the inside pieces and then also because there's this little knot here I'm going to get rid of that entirely so I'm going to end up using basically this little chunk for a spoon and throw that little chunk away get rid of this little bit while I've still got more mass and I'll get rid of that little knot while I've still got a little bit more mess and then that becomes garbage and this becomes my spoon blink if you don't have a fro you can also use an X and then you just have to be a little bit more controlled with your axe blows but knowing that I want to get rid of the pit there I'm going to make sure to try to hit it in such a way that I don't lose too much of the rest of my wood or if I am extra confident I can also get rid of this round a bit as well so I want to always start with the smallest cut that I have to make and then move into the larger cuts so now I can try to split the pith away as well so that's going to give you a pretty decent carving block as well let's talk for a second about wood grain the huge benefit other than getting free wood for using green wood is that you're able to find within the forest wood that matches your design aesthetic that you're going for so for example if you want to carve a ladle with a bowl like this like my friend Lee Stouffer carved you need to find a piece of wood that actually bends that way and carve it rather than carving it out of a super thick piece of wood and just cutting out that shape because were you to just cut it out of a straight piece of wood when you put any kind of pressure here the spoon would just snap so here you can see that the wood grain actually follows the curve of the scoop perfectly and the way that you're going to do that is by finding a branch or a crook that follows that curve the same way once you have your block of wood ready it's very important to know where you're trying to go my friend and it made me this pattern sheet which was really awesome to be able to get some design ideas another thing that I did a while ago was buy some spoons from a spoon Carver that I admire not so that I can copy their designs per se but basically so that I can get an idea of what to look for shape grain Direction wise etc and the other thing too is that if you can replicate something that someone else does then you really know that your skill set has been honed to a certain level that you can start creating designs of your own and that's where we all want to go eventually for this video I'm going to use one of my friend Pat spoons as a design the reason I've chosen him is because he is a production spoon Carver who does this for a living he is able to whip these out super quick they have some very interesting design details and it's just a fairly easy shape size and everything else pets information is linked below let's get this design onto wood so I want to get the outer design as well as the side design because this is where I really learned the most as far as spoon design goes getting the crook or the angle here right has always been one of my biggest challenges as I've been doing spoon carving so now I've got the shape and the crook marked into the wood it's at this point that you can either move to the axe to remove the rest of your waste or you can take it over to the bandsaw if you are going to use an axe for chopping out your waste it's really handy to have a block like this available I had seen this one time in one of Peter phones of these posts and I've been using it here for a while and I absolutely loved it this block gives you the opportunity to work at a comfortable height but it also gives you a super solid surface to chop against for experiencies sake and because I would love to show you another trick let's take this over to the band [Music] [Music] and here's a really awesome trick I recently learned from my friend jimmy joste you can actually take all of these pieces and put them back together and then really safely be able to make the rest of your cuts I'm making little stop cuts here so that I don't have to back my side of the braid [Music] and now I can take away those and I have a pretty decent shape to work off of once I take my blank from the bandsaw or from the chopping block my next step if I'm here in my own shop is going to be to this vise and basically from there on out it's going to be exactly the same process as I did in my other videos so if you haven't seen that already go check that out right now speaking of this vise and a lot of the other tools that I use for spoon carving I have links for them below but I got them from wood craft and as you know wood craft is one of the main sponsors for my channel and a huge part of the reason that I get to be able to make videos like these wood craft is a fantastic resource that you can go to in store to get expert help or you can visit them online and get the tools that you need as well if you don't have a vise like that you still do have a workbench or another surface that you can use you can actually use a piece of rope as a really handy vise in and of itself this is a trick that I learned from my good friend Tom henge ed who actually taught me almost everything I know about spoon carving and basically I'm folding the rope in half and I'm going to put it up through one of my dog holes in my bench trying to make myself a nice little noose for the spoon basically and then I'm going to take the long part of the rope I'm going to find out where my foot is gonna be and then I'm just gonna tie a knot so I'm pulling on it down there with my foot I can loosen it by moving my foot up or down I can move the position of the knot so that I'm holding it comfortably so now I can basically just use my foot as a gas pedal and hold my work nice and safely as I'm working and then for those that have one another great option for work holding in spoon carving is a shave horse and if you haven't seen that video make sure you go and check that out as well this allows me to raise and lower the head and get clamping power at in a very efficient manner because all I'm doing is pushing with my feet and I can reposition the spoon however I want and of course if you're just sitting by the fire you can use two tools a knife and a hook knife to carve out the rest of your spoon my favorite way to carve when I'm just using a knife is to use supported cuts that have a stopping point whenever possible so a lot of times I'll hold my knife and then I'll actually guide it with my opposite hand and in this squeezing motion I'm able to move the the piece and the knife to be able to get the most leverage possible and I'm always paying really close attention to the grain direction because especially in these little turning points here the wood wants to be carve this direction going down and then this direction going up so I often like to leave a little extra meat there so that I can come back later after I've finished shaping the rest of the spoon and clean that up and oftentimes I'll wait until that wood is fully dry and sand that transition point if it's giving me a whole lot of trouble during the initial carving process again here I'm protected from getting cut because I'm using the strength in my lots to pull the wood apart one of the nice things about carving green wood is that it just carves so much easier than dry wood and so you can actually see as I'm taking these scoops the moisture within the wood so at this point this thing is getting pretty stringy so I'm going to wait for it to dry to do any finished carving that I have to do but if I were sitting by the fire and I needed to have a spoon to eat some beans this is going to suffice just fine and I also wanted to show you - this is what ended up from the pattern so obviously I am NOT a production spoon Carver but I use this spoon as a part as a pattern and I tried to emulate it as much as possible and it still ended up being a completely different spoon so that's the thing about spoon carving it's really good to look at people that you admire and look at designs that you admire and try to emulate them as much as possible and then continue to hone your craft to the point that you are able to actually emulate them and come up with designs of your own so this is a perfectly acceptable spoon that was basically a tree about an hour and a half ago so I'm pretty pleased with it thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video and for supporting my channel in that way if you'd like to support me in other ways there are links for my patreon and merchandise below I hope you leave this video feeling challenged inspired and excited to get outside and do things with your own hands as well Cheers so we'll give it a shot give this a shot whoops well incidentally that actually did go right to my line but we're gonna have to lose a little bit more of this if we're gonna use the X good guy all right good there we go you

Channel: Anne of All Trades

Views: 111,384

Keywords: anne of all trades spoon carving, spoon carving, bushcraft skills, green carving, how to carve a spoon, how to carve a wooden spoon, wooden spoon, carving spoons, spoon carving for beginners, spoon carving tools, spoon carving knife, spoon carving hook knife, spoon carving techniques, how to carve a wooden spoon with a knife, carve a wooden spoon, carving a wood spoon, woodworking how to carve a spoon, learn how to carve a wood spoon, woodworking carving spoon

Id: w8Ba06AqQV8

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 21 2019