More Spoon Carving: Red Maple Serving Spoons

Here are photos of two spoons I made at my

mom's house during my Christmas holiday. On my first cruise through the woods, the morning of December 21st, I found an overtopped cherry tree that would yield a couple of good crotch-crooks as well as a dozen or more straight blanks. Blocking the trail to the cherry, though, was a two-stemmed red maple that had fallen sometime in the fall. At the beginning of the trip, I expected a bandsaw to be delivered so I could mass-produce knife-ready blanks. I bucked the red maple into short pieces and rived it into blanks, thinking I was working my way towards the cherry. By the time the red maple was converted into blanks, I realized the bandsaw wasn't coming, so that maple was all I'd get to this time.

The two blanks I made these spoons from were face-to-face in the tree. Fortunately (since it was the only tree I got to) there were many nice spoon blanks in the maple. For several days, after sundown I worked with my knives on two spoons: one with the heartwood up, and the other with the heartwood down. I think I prefer heartwood down. Early in the carving process, my mom mentioned that everybody in the family has one of my spoons except her. So these became the first I gave her, and she seems to like them. The night before I left for Georgia, I put them into their new home in her kitchen.

These spoons are based on the basic design shown in Wille Sundqvist's Swedish Carving Techniques.