Small Wooden Spoons

For family Christmas gifts this year, I made small wooden spoons. Most are the size you'd use for a pinch of salt or a scoop of sugar or tea leaves or ground coffee, but a few were larger for more universal purposes (though I stopped making those because I found the little ones so much more fun to make. 

The wood species were oak, rosewood, teak, leopard wood, zebra wood, paduk, bubinga, and bocote mostly from scraps I had when I made wooden utensils a few years back (see further down)

It started with being inspired by the carvings of Giles Newman, a UK woodworker who does a variety of leaf shapes as-handles for spoons like these. And for Julia's birthday, I tried my hand at making one. T

hough the handle is an oak leaf, the wood species is rosewood (a scrap piece that I was given for free by a woodworker who had filed chapter 7 bankruptcy and wanted a fellow woodworker to have nice material before the auctioneers came to liquidate everything)

Since Julia is a cook, she uses her spoon for her specialty sea salts. I used mineral oil (which is food safe) to protect the wood and bring out the beauty of the grain.

And for many a December night in sub freezing temps, I was out in the garage woodshop bundled up with space heaters running as I cut blanks, bored out the starts of the bowls, and then carved and sanded and sanded and sanded until I couldn't feel my legs or fingers or until it was too late to be running power tools for my neighbors.

I broke several that were 70%-90% finished, but I still had enough finished so every family member I was gifting got two.

To read a post about the wooden utensils I made family for Christmas in 2022:
https://davidpetersen.blogspot.com/2023/01/wooden-utensils.html