Carving spoons as a small husband and wife cottage industry.
I love wood. I love the sound a fresh green log makes as I split it with Froe and Mallet and the excitement of seeing what lies within. I love the feeling of my drawknife as it slices away, the shavings curling into my lap. I love the smell of air dried cherry, like roses. I love working with the grain and color and the contrast between the deep cinnamon heartwood and the bright yellow sapwood of a piece of Honey Mesquite. I love working with the shape of a piece of wood as I cut until a final shape starts to emerge. I also love to cook.
Not many people can say they make their living at a shaving horse in the 21st century but we do. I started carving spoons in the fall of 2001. I was already a certifiable wood nut. At the time I was doing custom stairs and hand rails and custom finish carpentry. I was really interested in doing something with found wood that would be a break from the highly technical stair and cabinet work. I was also intensely interested in harvesting and drying my own wood. I started going to tree trimmers to look through their waste piles and I found treasures. I found Apricot wood with rippling oranges and reds, Apple and Plum and Cherry wood and beautiful Logs of Black Walnut that once grew along tree lined streets in Denver. I found some wonderful English Elm wood that came from a tree cut down on the School of Mines campus in Golden. Soon I had small planks leaning up all over the shop drying that I had band sawed out of small logs and limbs of these waste woods. I started carving spoons and using them in my kitchen. I gave them away as gifts and soon people were calling me out of the blue to ask if they could buy them. I started selling them through galleries and they were hard to keep in stock. My wife Gwynne started having to help me to keep up with demand. She became very good at the final shaping and finishing, working at our shaving horse "Rosinante" . I started our Etsy shop in January 2011. Now Gwynne and I work side by side in our shop which is in an old dairy barn with a fantastic view looking out over Barley and Potato fields to the 14,000 ft. peaks of the Sangre De Cristo mountains in Southern Colorado. We are surrounded by thousands of pieces of wood that we have collected and that people have brought us over the years. That is half of our inspiration. The other half is our love of cooking and I think that aspect really shows in the utensils we make. I know if I enjoy using a design that others will too. We are constantly tinkering with the designs in our kitchens.
I start the process by selecting the wood for each piece. I shape it on the Bandsaw first doing the contours as much as I can, using the bandsaw as I would a carving knife. I make my decisions about where to remove wood quickly, "in the span of seven breaths" as the Samurai would say. I keep on removing the parts I don't like until the shape is close to being finalized. I hollow out the bowl and then give it to Gwynne, who gives it the final shape and sexy lines with draw knife, spoke shave and fine pattern maker's rasps at the shaving horse. The whole process is done by eye and by feel. Then she sands them to a silky smooth finish, raising the grain with hot water between grits of sandpaper. This removes any loose fiber ends that could become rough during use. Then the spoons are bathed in 160 degree mineral oil and Beeswax and then polished. Each spoon is individually wrapped and packed in wood shavings specially made with a #5 Stanley Jack Plane from scrap wood.
. The best part about having an Etsy shop is interacting with the customers via convo, so please feel free to contact us with questions.
Below is a link to an article about us from last year.
http://veranellies.blogspot.com/2013/01/buy-handmade-v-44.html
