The knives I use are the Mora Companion Heavy Duty and the Mora Wood Carving Erik Frosts 164. I 've had good experiences with Mora knives during my merchant navy days and only read good reviews on them. Those reviews proved to be true for me. The knives are sharp, retain their edge well and are not that expensive at all. Carving is a lot of fun when you have sharp tools to do so.
The wood I used came from my mother-in-law's garden. There used to be a fig tree there. She wanted to get rid of that, so I chopped it down and reduced it to chunks for my fire place. That was over half a year ago.
So last week I grabbed a few blocks of the now dryish fig wood just to see if I would have any fun carving stuff out of wood. No sense in going out to a shop and buying premium wood if you don't even know if you'll like working wood in my opinion.
I started out simple with a few spoons. A few days and bandaids later I got these spoons done. Carving spoons can be done quite quickly if you have a bit of experience. I think I can do one in about an hour or two once I get into the routine of it. Maybe more. Those will be quite crude ofcourse, but usable. I sanded down the results and oiled the spoons with olive oil right after carving. They probably won't last very long, but that is mostly due to the wood not being propery dryed out before I carved it. There were a couple of deep cracks in the blocks that I had to get rid of before making the actual spoons. Apparently it is quite handy if the bowl of a spoon is actually water tight :p Anyway, here is a picture of the resulting spoons. The wood grain came out really nicely with the oiling!
Tada!
Tools used: Two knives and a bit of coarse and fine sandpaper.
The first spoon I made is the big one on the left. It is quite chunky and bulky, but functional. The little one on the right is a bit more refined already. The last one I made is the one in the centre. This one is a lot thinner then the other two and again a bit more refined. I think I'm getting the hang of this carving thing. Time to head out to the wood shop and get some proper wood to work on!
