Blog - JoJo Wood

A long break

26th April 202626th April 2026Mental health, My life, SpooncarvingLeave a comment

(content warning for bad mental health and suicide mention)

Hello internet, long time, no see

So… I had a covid breakdown. It was probably a long time coming really. Honestly I don’t think I ever really got over the mental health problems I developed in my youth, just got used to masking them better – cheers for that, late diagnosed autism!

So I had to take a break. Social media is a horrible cesspit of terrible feelings. Particularly when you struggle with feeling inadequate. I tried unfollowing everyone but that didn’t work. And even now when I have to look something up on Instagram I can feel a tightening in my chest, starting to make me feel horrible again.

I quit spoon carving for a while as well. I can probably count the number of spoons I’ve carved the last few years on my fingers. Ironically for someone who co-founded a project that primarily uses spoon carving to help with folks’ mental health, spoon carving is absolute horror to my own mental health. Too much baggage. And it is so second nature to me now it doesn’t distract my brain at all any more, it just distracts my hands, leaving my brain to ruminate.

The last big comission I completed for Fortnum & Mason came a full circle. I have a picture I use in one of my talks from when I first started to get seriously into spoon carving, in my teenage years, sat on my living room floor carving a spoon in front of my laptop, watching Glee!

Working on the comission I found that I could not sit and carve spoons to the sound of my own brain. I spent a lot of time on Rise Up & Carve – a lovely online carving group. And when there was nobody online to carve with and keep my brain company, I sat on my bathroom floor (tiles much more sweepable than carpet) with my laptop and my headphones. Anything to distract my brain.

So for probably over 5 years now I have only carved with other people at our Pathcarvers groups. I had to stop leading most of those too, we now have a lovely group of facilitators who took them over from me (thank you). The one I kept, and the thing that kept me going for a while there, is Martineau Gardens. What can I say about Martineau Gardens? They are everything to me. They run a Therapeutic Horticulture program through the week. And the gardens are open to the public for anyone to enjoy. They are right in the middle of busy Birmingham, but are a little oasis of calm. Usually when I wake up in the morning and I feel terrible I just want to stay in bed and avoid the world. When it’s a Martineau day I know that all I need to do is get myself to the gardens and everything will be ok. They are such a warm, kind, welcoming group of people. Being surrounded by nature, sat by a roaring fire, copious quantities of tea, lovely wholesome food, and the best company. How could you not feel better? I have always said that being there is better therapy for me than any of my actual therapy has been.

I wasn’t sure I would ever come back to carving, and I still don’t think I would want to make it my full time job again, but when Rob asked me if I would teach at Spoonfest again last year, I thought, you know what? I think I might just be able to do that. So I did, and it was lovely seeing old friends again, and being around people enthused about making. I nearly wrote a blog post after that… I might manage to dig it out and post it after this one. We will see.

I have drafted a lot of come-back posts over the years. For a while there were more suicide notes, but thankfully I never “published” any of those either! I haven’t written a suicide note for a while now though, and my last 2 draft blog posts have been actually on my website rather than scraps of paper or notes on my phone. So I think this might be the one that actually gets published. If I have managed to hit the button, and you have read this far, thanks for reading along..

So what has changed, to get to this point? Well, not much, and an awful lot, really. A lot of work on myself. A lot of fighting the mental health system to be treated (endless thank yous to my partner for that). A lot of trying of different medications. More recently, the things that have worked have been art psychotherapy – thank you Julia – which has been a really lovely gentle reintroduction to being creative again in a more positive way for me. And a PMDD diagnosis. It really is terrible how fucking hard it is to get taken seriously for “women’s problems”. I cannot tell you how many times and how many people I have been in tears to trying to explain how bad I feel around my period. Well I finally got through. After trying every type of hormonal contraception under the sun (none of it worked) I got referred to gynecology. Even there they wanted to dismiss me until my partner (a man) spoke up for me. And they gave me an injection to stop all of my hormones and put me into a chemical menopause and my world changed. Sure, I get a bit hot. But I have regained my life!

Spring is here too, which always makes everything feel better. Sitting in the sun listening to the birds sing energises me.

Next on my list is to start tackling my giant box of unfinished objects, or “UFOs” as my lovely friends who helped me dig my workshop out from under my depression/ADHD chaos mountain called them (thank you Jane and other friend who prefers not to be named – you know who you are). And I have another friend who I am hoping I can tempt out of photographer retirement to come and take some pictures with me..

I am going to try and be less perfectionist, and spend less time worrying that my work is not good enough – that I am not good enough. Which I am hoping will make it easier for me to create more and to share more.

Other life updates? I have been working in finance. I always joked that unlike most of the other folk who come to woodworking as a second career after having a midlife crisis and quitting their office job that they hated, as a 2nd gen woodworker for whom it is a first career, I would have my midlife crisis and quit woodworking for marketing. Well I didn’t quite make it to mid life (I hope) and it turns out that the thing I hate most about woodworking is the marketing. I love spreadsheets though. And there is actually a right and a wrong answer when it comes to adding up numbers. Which is much more pleasing to my autistic brain than the ambiguity of trying to be creative. Oh and it turns out that I struggled to self motivate when working for myself because I have ADHD. The doubly whammy, yay.. So having a job with clear set tasks and a time limit is a joy on so many levels. I currently work for another charity in Birmingham, The Old Print Works, where I had a workshop for a couple of years.

I have also been fostering cats and kittens

And dogs too. Meet the newest member of my family, foster-fail and professional bin thief Olly (for anyone who knows me, yes, this is the same name as my brother, I didn’t choose it, he came with it!)

And long term foster Shadow, who is adoptable from Hope For Podencos, although I am sure my partner will say please don’t because he wants to keep him

Spoon Carving in Marrakech

16th August 201816th August 2018Spooncarving, Woodwork10 Comments

In June 2016 on a family holiday to Marrakech, my father and I went searching for the spoon carvers. Anyone who has visited Morocco before will be familiar with the traditional wooden spoon – they are sold on every street corner throughout the city. We just knew that somewhere there had to be a group of people waist-deep in woodshavings, making thousands of these Moroccan spoons.

We found them out in the mountains, in a small village where most of the industry is centred around the woodwork. In a cool barn at the end of the street we come across the spoon carvers. There are four carvers, who work in teams of two to carve 120 spoons a day between the pair of them.

There are two older men who have been carving spoons a long time, and also two younger men, close to my age at the time, in their late teens, who have only been doing this for a few years. They are all incredibly skilled, working sat on the floor with a range of razer sharp adze.

The adze are a very clever design, super simple to make and handle.

The spoons they are making are a traditional soup spoon, with some remarkable design similarities with a welsh style of soup spoon – the Cawl spoon.

Notice the round bowls and long, tapering handles attached to the underside of the bowl?

We arrived in the afternoon, after they had spend the morning doing the rough carving on their pile of spoons for the day, and were working on finishing. One of the carvers showed us how they did the rough work, sawing the piece of citrus wood in two to get two spoons out of it, and using a large adze to carve it down to shape. A slightly smaller adze is then used for some finer detailed carving, and to start hollowing out the inside shape of the spoon.

At this point they then switch to the afternoons work. One of the team uses a tiny adze with a pushing action along the handle of the spoon to smooth all the surfaces out, while the other uses a double-edged spoon knife to skillfully hollow the bowl out, clamping the spoon using the feet. This process takes under a minute!

And the finished spoon, alongside the other half of the piece of wood –

The spoons are then usually transported into the city where they are rasped and sanded to the finished spoons that can be bought across Marrakech, but we just LOVE the beautifully smooth tooled surface that the carvers leave, so we bought 50 of them straight from the pile to bring home with us. After taking 50 spoons from spoon mountain, it didn’t look at all different!

A Grand Opening at Pathcarvers Workshop

15th August 2018PathcarversLeave a comment

As those of you who follow me on Facebook and Instagram know, lately I have been doing a lot of work with my social enterprise, Pathcarvers. For a long time now I have talked about the links between creativity and mental wellbeing. I have noticed myself in my own life, and also in others as a teacher, how fantastic the act of making can make you feel. Pathcarvers as a project helps try and spread that further.

We run craft courses which funds work with people who wouldn’t usually get to experience craft, helping them gain access to the fantastic benefits to help with mental, social and physical difficulties.

Earlier this year we moved into a workshop in Stirchley, Birmingham. The space is my workshop where I make and teach, and also a creative space for Pathcarvers. We have a weekly carving club, where we open our doors for likeminded people to come and carve together, we run courses in a range of crafts, and we have a growing shop with a range of wonderful hand-made goods, which helps us support both the project and also other artisans.

Although we moved in earlier in the year, we have yet to properly celebrate, so this Friday 17th we are having a Grand Opening. We are opening our doors and inviting people in from 4.30pm – 8.30pm. We will have drinks and nibbles, craft demonstrations and a string quartet – Aphrodite String Quartet

We will also be talking about who we are and what we do, so if you are in the area please do come down and see us on Friday!

Spring Spoon Carving Courses

26th April 201826th April 2018spoon carving course, Spooncarving, Woodwork1 Comment

April has been a month of education. I have been SUPER busy. After the latest spoon carving course I am just catching up with my pictures and finding time to reflect..

We started a couple of weeks ago with a beginners spoon carving course in Edale. Unlike my previous Edale course we had lovely weather, the first sun of the year. We spent one evening sat outside the village pub, shivering, but determined to soak up that vitamin D.

Peter & Jörg (above) had travelled all the way from Switzerland for the course. Apparently there is not much spoon carving in their country – they are going to take their skills away and kick things off.

The spoon knife is the trickiest of the tools to learn. We learn the knife grips in the afternoon then have a rest and sleep on the techniques, before putting them to practise the following morning, refreshed & ready to go.

Always a firm favourite part of the spoon carving course – lunch! I spend my evenings making a big pot of soup to eat, so everyone gets to experience eating with a wooden spoon. Piles of bread and cheese, pickles and salad, to keep our energy up – carving is hard work!

The end of the course. Eight happy people and their spoons. Ready to send off into the world, and make even more spoons.

My following course was in Birmingham – an eating spoon carving course. We were a smaller group & spent two days getting down into the nitty gritty of spoon details. Everyone was already well versed with the axe and knife so we got to spend our time getting into the depths of spoon nerdery. Steve (2nd from left, below) had attended my very first Birmingham course, and was back again to learn some more, which was lovely.

This course was run back-to-back with my following course (for less tidying up!) which was a day course.

Another lovely group of people, who got well stuck in and carved some fantastic first spoons.

I have just one final course this spring, before I head of travelling for the summer. See more details here. I will be in Sweden teaching a class in late May, then Greenwood Fest in June, followed by a few weeks of travelling across the US.

Talking at the Heritage Crafts Association Conference 2018

22nd March 201822nd March 2018HCA, Heritage Crafts Association, My life, Press, Public SpeakingLeave a comment

I will be talking about my life and my work at the 2018 Heritage Crafts Association conference “Crafts for the Future” in London on Saturday 24th March. Here’s a sneak peak…

JoJo Wood aged 4 months on shave horse with Nicola Wood — On the shave horse aged 4 months

JoJo Wood, aged 17, turning a wooden bowl on a pole lathe — First turned wooden bowl, aged 17

jojo wood teaching an advanced spoon carving class in america 2016 — Teaching an advanced spoon carving course in the USA, aged 22

I will be talking about how I became the craftsperson I am today, the difficulties I have overcome, and where things will be going in the future. Also speaking will be a fantastic selection of other inspirational people. Check them out at the HCA website below. It will be a conference not to miss.

Book your tickets for the HCA conference here.

BBC Feature

4th March 20184th March 2018Press, Spooncarving, Woodwork2 Comments

I was thrilled to work with Riyah at the BBC recently on an article about young people in Craft. The article is out today, and includes some thought-provoking commentary on the subject, as well as this short film of me doing some carving.

Look at what you’ve made me do, Follansbee

6th September 20163rd February 2017UncategorisedLeave a comment

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.

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.

Bent wood means CRANKY!

This one with a lefty bias.

The real star of the wacky show

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..