Spoon Carving Workshop @CreativeMan

Spoon Carving Jam at the Den

By Bjorn Jacobsen 18/10/2019.

Early October we had a little spoon carving workshop at the Creative Man warehouse in Brookvale, or the "Den" as we call it. 

Jesse, Riley, Jamie and myself from Creative Man and Rowland from Skateshank all made a spoon or ladle each, with a short and sharp 90 min lunch break at Nomad, the local brewery. (hard work this spoon carving).

We used a combination of dry birch wood (Thanks Kev Slattery!), green stringy bark (Thanks Keith Fludder!) and in the case of Riley: "mystery eucalyptus" that was in our fireplace when we moved into our house in Narraweena 5 years ago.

Riley went for the Mystery Wood and split off a piece. Note the state of the art chopping block, a couple of 2x4s on the ground. No one managed to hit the Granfors Small Forest Axe from Kilmarnock Forge in the ground even once, very impressed! 

Bjorn hard at work on a piece of the dry birch log that had died due to swearing and muttering in the back yard of Kev from Kev's Forge in Canberra.

We started straight after the kids had been to Nippers, not quite at the crack of dawn but 11 am is still a respectable time on a Sunday, we reckon.  A hard hour or two of spooning, then meat fest at Nomad brewery around the corner. There is this awesome Brazilian (?) meat truck there, with beef brisket, pork belly, cheese kransky, pulled pork and spicy chicken wings. 

It was a challenge going back to work after this stop but after a too brief lunch and barely a beer or two (Jesse and Jamie both had some kind of strange, sour beer. Rowland was in beer heaven, finding a Yeasty Boys pale ale, Riley and I were the only reasonable ones, each going for a stout) we got it together and headed back to the Den.

Rowland from Skateshank brought his little burner torch and this was a great idea. Loved the scorched look on the handle from lightly burning the carved wood, before we slathered the spoons in our newest concoction CoCoBee Mix (Organic coconut oil and beeswax). See, we did work! Product testing is work. Kind of.

Jesse using the hook knife on the back of his spoon. This photo is actually from the pre-workshop the weekend before but he was wearing his pants then, so thought it safer to use this photo.

My birch big spoon or small ladle (?) made from birch, lightly torched and sanded before smearing it with CoCoBee Mix. The little Lappi knife is proving to be my favourite whittling knife, the Scandi grind making it easy to touch up on the EZESharp system to get back to very sharp. The hook knife we touched up by wrapping sand paper around a wooden dovel.

Riley's result, a beautiful scoop in Mystery Eucalyptus.

These gloves are "cut resistant" meaning they will give some protection against slicing yourself but are not exactly bullet proof. Better to use this especially when using the Mora double-edged hook knife than getting sliced though. (not mentioning any names here, but let's just say we had to get the first aid box out. More than once)

Having a beer with some mates on a Sunday, not a bad day eh! Even got some spoon carving done.