Hello internet, long time no see (again).
I’ve had a pretty busy summer. One of the things I did was travel to the US to teach at the very first Greenwood Fest. It was pretty great. So great, in fact, that I only have one picture on my camera from it.
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| The last stragglers at the end of ‘fest cleanup. |
That chap there trying to hide behind his beard is Peter Follansbee. You might have heard of him. He did a lot of blogging about the event, you can find it all
here.
I spent quite a while with Peter and Jögge about choice of timber. For some crazy reason, Peter seems to take pleasure in carving the twistiest hardest bits of fruitwood he can find. Whereas I just LOVE my nice, clean, straight birch.
So a couple of weeks later, back home sorting through the woodpile, I come across a couple of twisty bendy pieces of damson. Rather than throwing them on the firewood pile, as I probably should have done, I thought…. oooh, maybe there are some spoons in there? And maybe I could blog about them?! And now here we are. Look what you’ve made me do, Follansbee.
Pictures don’t do it justice, but the colours were GORGEOUS. It’s always the colour that seduces me into carving fruit wood. I think “oh it’s so PRETTY!”, decide to carve something, remember how much hard work it is, curse a lot, and swear to never do it ever again.
With Follansbee in mind and some wacky twisty bits of wood, I set to carving.
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| Bent wood means CRANKY! |
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| This one with a lefty bias. |
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| The real star of the wacky show |
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| That spoon you never knew you needed, for serving things round corners? |
There are a few more still in various stages of completion. Now that I’m home I have some time for carving, so they might even get finished and onto the website sometime soon! And then I’ll never carve damson ever again (til next time).
There are also a few more blog posts in the works, so keep an eye out..
