Saturday 8th February

Anyone who has been following my blog for a while may remember that this is a special time of the year for me – it’s the Six Nations Rugby competition. I really like sport but don’t actually follow any. Following sport requires consistency and routine – something which I struggle to find in my rather hectic life. I would love to be able to buy a season ticket for rugby or football but I can’t commit myself to having the required time available and I’m sure I would end up wasting a large percentage of the tickets. And I’ve tried doing it half-heartedly, just ’dipping my toe’ into the odd game, so to speak,  but it doesn’t quite work – for me there seems to be a certain degree of obsession or infatuation required to get full enjoyment from it – I need to be fully immersed. There’s nothing worse than trying to be part of a sports conversation at work when you don’t really know exactly what you’re talking about because you haven’t been following the sport avidly, especially when the others in the conversation are committed obsessives. Which means I confine myself to those sporting competitions that have a finite time scale to them  - the Olympics, the ashes, Wimbledon, the Tour de France, the Football World Cup, and especially the Rugby World Cup and The Six Nations. There is very little I enjoy more than setting myself up in front of the TV, a couple of billets of spoon wood, my bag of knives, axes and templates and my chopping block to watch/listen to an international rugby game and carve a spoon or two.

So, here is my first offering for this year’s Rugby Six Nations spoon carving effort – it’s not one that I am particularly proud of, in fact I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it yet. It’s a little different and had to be due to the shape and size of the wood I began with. I think it is a piece of laurel, but am not sure as it has been lying in my scrap pile, waiting to be thrown onto the fire for several months now. It just so happens that each time I walk past my pile of fire wood, my attention has for some reason been drawn to this little bit of wood so last weekend I thought I would rescue it and see what I could make from it. 

"Why would take pity on such a puny and pathetic little bit of scrap wood?" I hear you say. I guess I'm just a hopeless sentimentalist.

It was already curved, as you can see, so I thought it would lend itself quite naturally to some kind of scoop, which in effect is what I ended up with. So what is it? Well, it’s a kind of serving spoon cum scoop cum Chinese soup spoon cum shoe horn. It’s about the right size for dishing up peas and I thought looked kind of old-world Scandinavian?

Hanging hook on the back so it can be neatly perched on the edge of your bowl.

Of course, that's not all I've been doing. I wanted to have a go at doing a few spoons in the same design (I've done this before and it's a really good discipline) so here are a few mid production.

There's been some talk on a couple of site regarding the order in which we carve the various parts and stages of a spoon - here you can see that I get a fairly finished outer line before I begin to carve out the bowl.

 

 These are all from locally sourced ash. I plan to make a hanging rack for them too.