OWC Spring Spoon Moot - UPDATE....

Just a quick one to confirm details for Saturday's little get together. So it's Saturday 21st March, starting from about 2 o'clock pm. It's going to be a fairly informal type of event - come along whenever is convenient, leave whenever you want. Bring some tools or don't; bring some wood or don't; bring some work to show or don't. Come if you are a seasoned carver; come if you're a beginner; come if you haven't actually started carving yet and just have a passing interest. Come along and chat, share tips, ask questions - give answers. Ju and I will be carving, join in or don't - does that sound casual enough?

We'll be at my house, in Leicester. It's number 21 - postcode LE2 9TP.

It would be great to meet you so pop along and join in the fun!

Naked Bowls

I guess it goes without saying that I love wood. I've always preferred it in it's natural state. When we started doing up our first house I couldn't bring myself to paint any of the wood work. My father in law (who did all of the building work) kept complaining that it looked half finished, but I just loved the look of the wood au natural. The idea of painting a wooden bowl would have made me spit. That was until I saw the bowls made by Jarrod Stonedahl and realised that painted bowls can look cool. Check out his latest bowls here. The problem is that I then got hooked on painting my bowls. I've had varying amounts of success with this. Some of them looked like they'd been hastily coloured in with a felt tip pen (Richard's words), but after a fair bit of experimentation, I feel pretty confident with my most recent ones.

I particularly like the way that painted bowls, once worn a bit, show up the tool marks in the wood. This is also really nice with carved bowls.

My latest bowls presented me with a bit of a dilemma. They're turned from Sycamore that was very green and the wood is pretty bland, so I was very tempted to paint them, but my wife has been telling me to leave some natural for a while now. Naturally my beloved (I have to call her that or she hits me) won the argument and so here they are in their birthday suits.

My first axe....

I can't give you the technical specifications of this axe - weight, size, etc - because I've sat down to write this post and realized I haven't got them - but I'm going to write the post anyway.

When I first became interested in bushcraft, adventuring and carving, I had something of an obsession with the mountain men and fur trappers of North America and Canada - voyageurs and coureur de bois.





I read a bunch of books about them, histories, fiction and non-fiction, watched some old films on the National Film Board of Canada site and even bought myself a Canadian canoe with fantasies of trapping, smoking cob-pipes, eating rubaboo from a dutch pot and portaging. So you can imagine hoe chuffed I was when, after doing a little job for an elderly neighbour, I was rewarded with a box of old tools, most of which were no good, but which contained this French pattern axe head, not unlike the trade axes that the voyageurs would have used, which I cleaned up and re-handled with shop-bought hickory handle.

It's a lovely axe - a real all-round camping and adventuring axe. I've used it for all kinds of jobs from felling dead standing trees and splitting faggots to carving and whittling. It's not the axe I would choose for carving, but it is easily up to the task and many of my earlier spoons were carved with this axe. It's a medium to light weight axe.

It is also one of the first leather working projects that I undertook and the first axe mask thatI made.

Originally there was a loop of leather through which the antler tine passed to secure it, but it broke and I replaced it with the ugly twist of wire. I'll put it right again one day.

If you are interested in finding out a little more about the voyageurs of old Canada, you might enjoy this rather quaint film:

https://www.nfb.ca/film/voyageurs/

On those rare occasions when I have a 'bed-day' I like to re-watch this film and imagine I'm there.