If some of the conversations I’ve had with fellow spoon carvers are any indication, it seems that more than a few of us have one hanging around their shop somewhere…if not, as in my case, on the wall of their living room. I carved my own rat-tailed bathtub – seen here on the left – just a little over seven years ago. It was January 19th, 2017 to be exact. I know this because I wrote the date on the back of it in pencil and I can still just barely make it out.

Most of my tools were crude and cheaply made. And although I’d had some very generous and patient tutelage from a friend of mine and a couple of veterans online, I’d had no formal training whatsoever. And so I set to work as best I could, slicing away chips of wood and hunks of skin with almost equal fervor. 

Compared with one of my more recent spoons on the right, finished just before last Christmas, it’s obvious that the result of my first attempt at spoon carving is as much a victim as it is a product of the external forces that shaped it. And yet I remember being very proud of it at the time. To be honest, I still am in a way. While I could go back and retool it a bit, I prefer to keep it as it is. It reminds me to let the process do its thing; to allow the material and the carving tools to guide me; and to remember that sometimes the spoon itself has the final say as to how it all turns out.

In the years that have followed since that first cold morning huddled next to a struggling electric heater in a cluttered garage that would soon become an only slightly less cluttered woodshop, the number and quality of tools at my disposal has grown. Most, in the vernacular, are “Big Boy Tools”, and as one might expect they allow for more refined work. And yet despite their craftsmanship, they are sometimes quick to remind me that without constant attention to the quiet and often demanding voice of the wood itself, they are at heart little more than highly sharpened pieces of steel ready to teach me the importance of that lesson. 

There’s humility gained in the unfolding of this work, and a scar or two to mark the achievement of it.

And also there is a sense of continuity. Like the hatchet between the spoons in the picture, the edge of which has touched practically every single spoon I’ve ever carved, there’ s a certain sense of discovery and child-like abandon that has carried everything along from the beginning…