Transcripts
1. Introduction: With a single knife and a piece of wood, you can make beautiful heirloom items that are going to last longer than we'll stay alive. I'm Anne, I am a woodworker, a farmer, and a general tinker of all things. My name is Josh Nava. I am Anne's business partner and friend, and I help out here on the farm as well as teach with her at School Of All Trades. Today, we are going to learn to safely use the tools that we need to carve a lasting item out of wood. We're going to design a spoon based on whatever skillet or pan you have handy, but the carving skills that we are learning today can also be translated to all kinds of other projects as well. What we're going to learn today using the tools that we're going to learn was something that I could do on my couch. You don't need a table saw, you don't need a bandsaw, all you need is a small branch and a couple of knives and you can make things that will last the rest of your life. For someone who is feeling really intimidated, for someone who thinks it's really weird to go outside and to find a branch and to turn it into something useful, oop, that was a bad idea, goodbye; this is the perfect class for you. Though these tools are sharp, they are intimidating and they can be scary for people, but you're going to learn a lot about how these tools work. Having that, armed with that understanding, you can confidently use them safely. We cannot wait to see the spoons and the spatulas that you're creating, so make sure that you post pictures of them down in the Project Gallery, because we're going to be there. Thank you so much for taking this class. We are so excited to get started carving with you. Let's do this.
2. Materials Overview: Let's go through all of the materials that we'll need for this class. We are going to need a piece of wood or probably a couple pieces of wood, but don't worry if you have never gone and picked out wood before. We have some instructions that can help you pick out wood, where to find it, what it looks like and things like that. We're also going to need a saw at some point. This is not really a special saw or proprietary saw, you just need a saw that can cut some wood. You will need a special size piece of wood and the sharpening sandpaper that we are going to have linked if you plan on sharpening, but if this is a one and done project, don't worry about that one. This is a carving class, so we always want to have a little bit of first aid available, though if we learn to do this safely, we won't need it. We'll need a tape measure or something to measure our wood. We'll also need some sort device. I love Sharpies for lots of reasons, but you can also use a pencil. For the carving portion, we are going to use a Sloyd knife. This is a special carving knife just for carving spoons. But if you'd like to really get into this, we're going to show you how to use a hatchet as well. When it comes time to design your spoon, you're going to want a spatula or a spoon that you like using in your kitchen already and your favorite pan, so we can design your spoon to use with your pan. Then, because this is our first time doing it, we're probably going to need some sandpaper to smooth out some of those rough edges. This seems like a lot of stuff, but I promise it's not and you actually don't need all of it if this is really just going to be a one-time project. But, remember that all that stuff is linked below. We have special instructions for how you can get it all as well.
3. Woodworking Safety: Let's talk about safety. It's always a good idea to have some first aid on hand just in case, but hopefully, you won't need it. This is probably one of the sharpest knives that you've ever held in your hand. I don't say that to scare you. A sharp tool is actually way safer than a dull tool, because when a tool is dull, you have to exert a ton of force to make it work the way that it should, and when you're exerting a ton of force, things stop being as predictable as they should be. One really important thing to remember as you are using any tool is to think about the full path of the tool. If you're pushing on it or pulling on it a certain way, what would happen if your wood were to disappear? Think about where your fingers are, where your arms, where the rest of your soft bits are as far as that path goes and also what's there to stop the blade from continuing to go right into your skin. When it comes to using a knife, for example, in one of our cuts, we are going to be pulling the knife towards ourself, but we have a handy-dandy stop because we have our elbow tucked in, so the knife can't keep pulling back towards our soft bits because it's sliding up against our body, and so, there it is. It's got a stop. We also want to think about what would happen if the knife were to slip. Let's take that same cut for example. As I'm pulling the knife towards me, if the knife does slip, all of my fingers are protected because I'm using the piece of wood to always be between the knife and my soft bits. What would happen if the wood suddenly disappeared? Because sometimes wood splits or acts differently than we think that it should. In the same cut, we are going to think about the wood disappearing. So we are cutting right here at the hilt of the knife so that if that wood disappears, that knife can't slip down into these soft bits down here. Another thing that we can think about that's going to help keep us safe is that our tool-holding hand needs to act like a machine. This needs to learn how to do these cuts and these motions repetitively and predictably enough that we know the full path of the tool, so that we can protect ourselves. We also want to move it predictably and then we are going to use our work-holding hand to produce the wood to the cutting surface, not the other way around. That's also going to help keep us safe because we know exactly what this knife is doing and we're using our other hand to move the piece of wood around as it needs to be moved. That becomes a lot more obvious when we're doing something like with an ax. If we're moving our ax very predictably like this, then we can see the full path of the ax. If our wood that we were chopping were to disappear, then we are still safe because the full path has the ax going past our body, so our body is always out of the way. Our soft bits are always out of the way of the path of the tool regardless of what tool we're using.
4. Sourcing Your Wood: What if we were to go and get our spoon wood in the wild, what would we want to look for? What would be a good tree or a bad tree? Or a good branch or a bad branch? Well, this tree is a good example of bad spoon wood. You see it's got lots of knots and it's not very straight, and there's lots of branches coming out, and it's also not very big, so this is going to be bad spoon wood. When we're looking for spoon wood, we really want straight grained wood, and obviously this is a tad large to think about spoons for, does have some interesting indicating factors about what is actually on the inside, and you can tell by looking at this bark. You see that the bark follows these little wavy patterns and it's twisting around. It's very likely that were we to cut this down the wood grain inside would actually twist around just like the bark is doing on the outside. Up here, it's got some S's in here, and as you go up it gets a little bit straighter up there. But even if this was not an enormous tree, we probably still would not want to use it because there's going to be a lot of interior tension, and a lot of places where as we're cutting the grain is going to act really unpredictably. With this bark having so many funny rivers, and valleys, and pathways, we would know that this is not good spoon wood. This right right is a fantastic spoon curving tree. The diameter is pretty much perfect. We'll be able to split it, get the pith out, and still have plenty of room to carve. If the bark is any indication about the wood beneath it, it is nice and straight grain. There's no branches or anything coming out. From here down this is a truly fantastic piece of wood for spoon carving. We learned to carve with softwoods like pine or poplar, things that we can get from our home store, because they're really easy to get and you don't have to live in the middle of the forest or by a fruit orchard to be able to find them. But when it comes to actually really getting into carving, what we really want to carve is green or freshly cut hardwood. I really love to carve walnut, cherry, apple, pear wood. Any kind of nut or fruit wood is going to carve absolutely fabulously well, especially if you can get larger diameter pieces that have really straight grain and no nuts, or notches, or branches coming out of it. This is a great example of some walnut that just blew over in a storm recently. It's very, very straight. It's going to split really nicely. The grain is going to act really predictably as we carve it. This is a piece of persimmon. This is a fantastic fruit wood that carves nice and hardens up as hard as a rock as it dries, but you don't have to live in the forest or by an orchard to be able to get this wood. In fact, if you live in a city, it's really easy to call your local arborist and say, " Hey, are you cutting any hardwood trees down, and may I have a few branches?" Because a lot of arborist actually have to pay to dispose off their wood, so they're more than happy to help you get it for free. In fact, that's exactly where this stuff came from. I asked them to cut it in links about this size, because this is as heavy as I can carry, and it also happens to fit in the back of my car. But these long links are perfect because I can cut them as I use them. Because wood dries from the ends in it'll last longer the longer it is or I guess it'll stay wet longer the longer it is.
5. Preparing Your Wood : If you do find some good wood to carve, what do you do with it? You'll notice here that this piece of persimmon has started to crack out at the edges. What I'm going to do first is I want to cut back an inch or two at a time behind that cracking till I get a nice fresh piece of wood. After that, I'm going to want to split it in half, then split it in half again, and then probably split it in half a couple more times. Then the most important thing I can do right off the bat is to get rid of this center portion, which is called the pith. You'll notice that all this cracking on the log starts right in this center bit right here, and that's because it's the smallest growth ring and the most tension is around that little ring. So if we get rid of that, we'll have some nice usable wood in sections like this that we'll be able to carve our spoons from. We could actually probably even get a little bit more out of it if we move back a little bit this way, we can get ourselves a nice cooking spoon right out of that. Here we can get a little spatula out of this. We can get probably two spoons out of this right here. That's basically how we'd use it. Whenever we're splitting wood, we want to have equal amounts of weight on both sides of the splitting wedge. But now let's take a little gander at what it looks like to split this. Let's go ahead and split this persimmon just like we would if we're going to carve some spoons. So I'll put the wedge in it, we'll start going, and it's really important that you split your spoon wood rather than just cutting it on a bandsaw or something. Because a bandsaw is not going to follow the grain of the wood. The way that we get really really strong spoons is by splitting them along their grain and then taking advantage of the way the tree grew to get the strongest spoons possible. You see here that it opens just like a book, and that's that straight grain that we're looking for. But you see, there's actually a little problem in here, a little branch or something that got covered up by the outer growth. So this would be a less desirable piece here. Speaking of undesirable splits, this is a piece of cherry that I cut recently and it looked really great from the outside. I had very high hopes for it. But once I split it open, it just cracked really unevenly and there's just all kinds of inclusions and weird grain on the inside that made it pretty unusable spoon wood, and that's just the way to cookie crumble sometimes. From this half, I'm going to split it in half again, and then I'll split that half in half and then that half in half again, and I'll see what I'm left with. Perfect. From here, we're ready to take it inside and do our best. If our log is big enough that we need to split it more than one time, we'll split it in half, then we split that in half, and then we keep splitting it in halves until we get to more manageable sizes. Then we bring it in here. We split it up further with a tool called a froe, and then once we get to about this size, we're ready to use an ax to make it square, so then we can start designing our spoon. Josh is going to show us how we do that. But really the reason for all of this is that when we split the wood instead of cutting the wood like with a saw or something like that, we're able to follow the grain of the wood and that will ensure that we've got grain lines running through our entire spoon, which is going to give it the most strength that it could possibly have. We get so much strength from making spoons this way and designing them with the grain of the wood that we are able to refine our designs and have super super thin, elegant lines rather than fat, clunky things. Because we know that that strength is inbuilt into this spoon. The other big motivator for splitting our own wood is that we can get it when it's freshly cut or green, and that is when it is easiest to shape. The moisture still lives inside of the wood and it will cut with a knife, pretty much like a hard cheese or a hard pair. Then it's pretty easy to ax up and carve our spoons. Cutting green wood helps us to use free wood, super super efficiently and it's just a whole lot easier on our bodies to carve fresh cut wood. So let's do this. After we have used this froe, we use it like this and it acts like a wedge hammering it into the wood. Actually, we can go ahead and even do that because this piece is a little bit thick, so I'll go ahead and split it. Way this works, is basically a giant dull knife. We'll use a piece of wood to smack it in, and then we should at some point be able to use the leverage to just split this and it will carry along the grain lines. Wood fibers act like long straws that go up and down the tree all the way from the roots, and the middle part of the tree is where we want to get most of our wood because that's where those fibers are the straightest. I'm going to take a look at these, pick the one that's the right thickness. I'm going to go with this. Then I can use a small hatchet or an ax in order to take this down very quickly to the size that we would use it. We can go pretty far in when we're actually axing out these blanks. First thing I do is I remove the pith of the tree, which is the middle part because that's where all the tension is. We're trying to act as predictably as possible, and I'm only hitting in about the same spot, and my hand is basically a machine that's just raising this up and down in the same spot as close as I can and then it's the wood that actually is moving. So I remove the pith. Then I'm going to remove the bark. Instead of just using all of my strength to make this thing work, I'm using inertia or momentum because the head of this ax acts like a big weight on the end of a lever, and if I swing it and I let it snap, it's going to actually dig into the wood on its own. I don't have to be very strong as long as I can just keep this motion going. I've removed the bark and then I'm going to square up the blink. That just means make this triangle into a rectangle that we can start to work with. The way I'm going to do that, is just get rid of one of these edges here. I'll flatten this side as well, so just we have a clean working surface. I'm not working more than 2/3 the way up the piece of wood. My hands are protected from behind. I'm taking care to understand the full path of the tool and there's in-built stops, and my arm is moving like a machine, and again, the wood is the piece that's moving around and being cut in different ways.
6. Basic Knife Cuts: Introduction: Now, it's actually time to use our knives. In so doing, we are going to learn two things. First, how to keep ourselves safe always, because as we talked about this is a very sharp knife. But we are also going to learn how to be efficient with the knife. We want to learn the tools that we need to be able to remove lots of material, to be able to remove material very intentionally, and then of course, to refine our design as we shape our spoon. Let's do that. The first two cuts that we're going to start with are going to be our most powerful cut. There's a lot of force being directed towards the cutting edge of the knife. We want to make sure that we are safe in doing that. The reason that we start with these two cuts is because with these two cuts, the blade goes out into the ether. It is not towards our body or towards anything important. It's good to start with knife cuts like that, that are going to actually give us room to practice and build our confidence, but not cut anything important. First of all, this is the handle of the knife, and you might notice that it's shaped a little bit differently than your pocket knife handle or a kitchen knife handle. That is because it's designed to fit in your hand just like this. If you were to imagine the way that you might turn a key in an ignition of a car, that's a little bit how we're going to hold the knife for lot of these things. If you like to think about the knife being a pivot point, we want to use our thumb and our forefinger as those pivot points. Then these ones here just go comfortably around the rest of the knife. As we're going through these cuts, it's going to be really helpful for you to be asking yourself lots of questions, and to do some self-evaluation that's going to help you to replicate the movements that our bodies are making. We have some checklists for all of our cuts that we'll go through. We're going to start with what's called the power cut.
7. Basic Knife Cuts: The Power Cut : This is our most powerful cut. Josh, if we can just show them how it goes here and then we'll talk a little bit about it. This cut has a few little aspects to it. But with all of our cuts, we are going to have a reset point. With this cut, the reset point is, if you'll imagine with wait for a second, what it feels like to lean on a cane. If you were to actually just stand up and lean on your chair, you might make a few observations about what your body is doing. In so doing, you'll see that your arm is straight, you'll see that your body is out of the way so that you can be putting gravity where it needs to go. Your wrist is locked in one position and then the only thing that could probably move in this is if you were to relax your shoulder. This little shrug motion is the only movement that comes from this cut. Note that if I'm balancing my body, if I were to relax my elbow or move my elbow, I suddenly don't have nearly the balance that I had before. That's our reset point. If you're having problems with this cut, I want you to literally stand up and lean on your chair and feel what it feels like to lean, and then come back and apply the other bits of information we're about to give you. With this one, we are holding the knife like this, we've got the knife tip is facing towards the inside of our body. The bevel or the sharp point of the edge is facing away from our body so then when we come out here and lean out over where we can shrug with a straight arm, the knife is just parallel, almost, with the legs of my chair. If you're having problems with this, you may be leaning back, we don't want to do that. It's often really helpful to move your foot forward so that you can have a little bit more leverage there. Then before you make a cut, I want you to just practice shrugging your shoulder. Feel what it feels like to have a straight arm, a locked elbow. Then the last thing I want you to do is to make sure that the knife tip is pointing up towards the ceiling. A friend of mine always says that when you're holding a tool, you should pretend that the tool handle is a baby bird. You want to hold it tight enough that the baby bird doesn't get away, but you also want to not crush the baby bird. That's a really helpful thing to think about here because when we're exerting a lot of force, it's really tempting to want to squeeze really hard, but that's going to introduce a lot of tension and joint pain and probably error as well. Be careful to keep a nice loose grip on that knife with your thumb and your forefinger as that pivot point. Then the next thing that we're going to think about is that we're always cutting corners. I'll be the first teacher that's going to tell you your success in school and carving is going to be always cutting corners. We have a little mantra when we're carving spoons, we cut the corner, the corner, and then the middle. It helps us to make a three-dimensional design that matches on both sides, but it also makes it a whole lot easier to cut because if you want to try to just go ahead and cut the whole front face of your piece of wood, you might notice that it doesn't work super well. That's a lot of wood to remove at once. But if you just turn it on its corner, you can suddenly remove a whole lot of material. Now we go back to our shrugging motion and we've got a straight arm, our knife tip is pointed up towards the ceiling, we've got a nice loose grip holding it mostly with our thumb and our forefinger there, we've got our foot forward so that we can lean properly, and then what we want to do is we want to take our work holding hand and put the wood up against our body where ever that knife is moving. I talked earlier, in the safety portion, about making our body like a machine so that we have predictable movements and our knife hand is moving in a predictable and the same way every single time, and the only thing that really moves or changes is the wood that we're putting up to it. I've got the wood securely up against my thigh there and then I'm going to start taking some cuts. As you start to cut, you might notice that, well, it's really hard to cut. There, we get to practice a little bit of motorcycle driving. I like to think about the way that we open and close the throttle of a motorcycle is the same way that we open and close the depth of our cut. If we throttle way up, we're going to be making a really deep cut. But if we throttle way back, we're going to make a shallower cut. If you get to a point where your knife is stuck and it just won't go any further, that's a good chance to come just above where you were cutting and try to rotate your knife out a little bit and take a little bit smaller cut. Then remember our mantra, corner, corner, middle, corner, corner, middle. You'll find that you can quickly waste a whole bunch of your little pine scrap that you're using here in a hurry. But we also want to remember that little piece of advice I gave at the beginning about keeping a three-dimensional design going equally. When we have started to make some cuts on one side, we want to flip the piece around, we want to reset our position here, check and ask ourselves all the questions; is my wrist locked? Is my elbow straight? Is my knife tip pointed up? Am I positioned so that I can shrug here? I'll tell you a lot of my students in classes want to just go like this because it's comfortable. I mean, our eyes want to see the knife making some cuts. But really we want to make sure that we let gravity do its job here. We have so much more strength to offer when we're using leverage to our advantage. Here, all we're doing is leaning. We're shrugging our shoulder and we're leaning down, and in so doing, we have a ton of power that we can offer because this hand is resisting the cut and this hand is making the cut. It doesn't actually matter if I'm really physically strong or not if I'm able to use leverage to my advantage. You see, you can quite quickly make a large block of wood. Josh has made a beautiful little vampire stick, so congratulations on that achievement. I'm going to keep it safe. To point out some of the important bits of what Anne said, it's really vital that we follow the movements as described. Most people when they put a tool in their hand, their brain takes over and they just want to see a cut happen and so that's why we often see people switching from what we described to this movement because they want to see the tool cut. I want you to think of Mr. Miyagi in the Karate Kid. He taught Daniel-san Karate by first doing some other actions and painting the fence or sweeping the broom, those were things to trick him into learning the movement and practicing that as described, instead of just attacking or just doing karate. We're trying to teach you that here. First, make sure you get the movement right. Instead of focusing on cutting, what we often will tell people when they're having trouble, is just put the metal of the blade on the wood and see if you can maintain contact the whole time before you cut. See if you can do the movement and just let the metal slide up and down on the wood. Because if you can do that and you can do it consistently, then the only thing that we need to do is just make a small micro adjustment using that throttle motion, where I'm just going to come to the top of this cut, make a small adjustment, throttling in or tilting that bevel towards the wood, and then I'm going to lean in. If I've done it correctly, I actually don't need to use very much muscle in order to push this through because the knife will catch the wood and then want to naturally follow the long fibers through the wood, carrying itself through. If I feel like it's too deep or it's too hard, I'm just going to throttle back on that and so that way I'm taking a lighter cut and also making sure that I'm not taking too wide of a cut, that I'm not taking too much wood, and in doing so, attempting to cut not just the layer we're working on, but also hold the layers underneath. That's why we work on the corners. If you do it correctly, it will actually be relatively easy. Another little thing to just mention here is, how much of the wood we're actually cutting. That is an important thing here because if we're going to try to cut 10 inches of material at a time, then obviously we're going to be tempted to move our elbow or bend our elbow. But the path of this cut is really whatever happens when you're shrugging your shoulder. For me, that's about five inches. I also want to be really careful during this that my work holding hand, I'm always paying attention to where those fingers are. We always try to make sure that we're cutting well below, maybe two inches below where our fingers would be so that we don't accidentally reset up too high and then cut ourselves on accident. Another really important thing to think about here is that we keep this knife tip pointed towards the ceiling because that's what's actually going to keep us safe with this cut. If we were to point down and then put a ton of force against the knife, if the knife were to catch in the wood, what would happen is our loose grip would force the handle into our hand and then put our fingers in a lot of danger of getting sliced red open by that blade. Keeping the knife tip up helps keep our fingers safe, but it also presents another really important opportunity. That is that just having that knife tip up allows the knife to naturally make a slicing motion through the wood fibers, and not only does that make it easier to cut through the fibers, it also makes a cleaner cut. With all of these things, we're talking about safety and efficiency.
8. Basic Knife Cuts: The Chest-Lever Grip : Now we're going to move on to the chest lever grip. I'll mention again that with these cuts, we want to start with the cuts that are most powerful with the blade as far away from our body and our soft bits as possible. When we are doing the power cut, we might realize as we're doing our corner corner middle routine, that we run into some grain direction issues. We're going to talk more about grain direction later on, but for right now, we have another tool when it comes to tackling our grain direction and that's called the chest lever grip, and Josh and I are going to show you that really quick. This is also known as the chicken dance cut or the way that you make yourself look as ridiculous as possible while carving a spoon. Let's just talk a little bit about the body mechanics that happen here. Just like we had that reset point with our power cut where if things aren't going right, we stop and lean on the chair and think about what's happening with our body weight and our elbow and all that stuff. Our reset point for this cut is going to be that our fists never ever leave our body. We are going to be very careful that the motion from this cut comes from our elbows and nowhere else, this is why it looks like I'm doing the chicken dance during this cut. We also have a couple other questions we're going to ask ourselves when we run into trouble is, can we see all 10 of our fingernails when we look down? Is our arm straight here? Are our palms up? The way that we hold the knife for this cut is a little bit different than we do for the power cut. We want to have our palm up and we want to lay the knife down in it with the bevel or the cutting edge facing towards our body and the knife tip on the outside of our body. So that then when we close our hand around the knife, it looks a little something like this. Then, we are going to open our hand again and turn using our elbow, our arm around so that our fingertips are pointing directly at our chest, and then we're going to close our hand around it and bring the knife up to our chest. As we close our hand around the knife, the only part of our knuckles that is going to touch our chest is this part of our knuckles right here, so as we use our elbow to rotate our hand around, we look down and we confirm, yes, we can see all five of those fingers. Then we start with the knuckle of our pointer finger, touching our chest first, and then we can just practice using our elbow to rotate slowly so that then the knuckle of our middle finger, then our ring finger, then our pinky finger touches. As we do that, this is the full range of motion for this cut. Then, we're going to grab our workpiece and we're going to grab our workpiece the exact same way we did our knife. We're going to have our palm up, it's going to be having about four inches facing out past the outside of our body there, and then as we rotate it around with our palm up, we are going to bring our pointer finger to touch our chest, and then the action of that cut if we're to do it in slow motion, first has this with a very awkward collapsed chest situation here, but as we rotate our elbows with our wrists locked, we are rotating the knuckles of our hands on the chest, and that's creating basically a giant pair of scissors. This is allowing us to use our body to create an enormous amount of leverage so the strength from this cut does not come from actual muscles, it comes from us being able to use our body as a lever. If you were to imagine maybe breaking a stick for a bonfire up against your chest, which I know this is probably not something people do, but what you would do is you would take it and you would use your chest as leverage to be able to snap that stick and that's exactly what's happening with this cut. We are using our chest as leverage and it is so important that the motion comes from our elbows and not from us moving our wrist or going like this, because we're going to lose control which makes us unsafe, but it also makes the cuts that we're making a whole lot less predictable as well. As you're practicing this cut, I want you to be asking yourself a whole bunch of questions. I want you to ask yourself, if I look down, can I see all 10 of my fingernails? When I'm making this cut, is the motion coming from my elbows? When I'm making this cut, am I removing my wrist at all? Because it makes it a whole lot easier to make this cut if we're moving our wrist, but then it introduces a ton of strain into our wrists, which is going to cause a lot of problems down the road, and it also is not nearly as powerful of a cut. With this cut, I'm also going to ask you to remember the things that we learned with the power cut, are we doing our little mantra, corner corner, middle? You'll notice that this hand does move a little bit, it does rotate and change, but that's because if we are using our body as a machine, if we're making this motion repetitive and if we're actually doing this correctly, we are only wanting to produce the wood to the cut and we're never moving the cut to meet the wood, which keeps us safe and makes this really predictable. The other thing too, is that when we introduce this second movement with our other hand and we actually start using this like a pair of giant scissors, we end up actually getting twice the force because we are now not just cutting the wood, which we can do like this, we are also creating more leverage by using the wood to resist the cut. That is, like I said, a great way to look ridiculous, but it's also a great way to remove a ton of material in a very controlled way in a hurry. It's also a good way of throwing shavings at your friends. True. Well, I'd have to use my other hand for that. You can get really good at it. We teach a lot of spoon carving classes and lot of our students see us doing this, and then we see them doing things like this. If you will, with me, ask the questions that we were talking about before to see, what is Josh doing wrong here? Josh, can you see all 10 of your fingernails right now if you were to stop? No. Maybe then what you would want to do is, I think go back to the beginning of the cut. When we hold the knife in our hand, we have our palms up, the knife tip is on the outside of our body and the bevel is facing towards our body. Then as we curl our hands around it and we use our elbows to rotate around those palms stay up. Maybe if we're having trouble with this, a good way to do it is to hold a knife with an open hand and try not to drop it. Then when we're in the right position, we can just close our hand, move our knuckles close to the chest, and then do this. The power from this cut comes from our elbows doing this rotational motion here. Josh, try flicking your wrist and see what happens. We don't want to do this. This makes us, A, not safe at all. It also puts a ton of strain and pressure on his actual wrist there. That's going to cause a lot of fatigue as time goes on. Really we just want make sure that when you're looking at yourself and you're doing that self-evaluation, you ask yourself the questions that help you to do what we're doing. I've actually found it super helpful to just feel myself. I'll put my phone there and I'll take a video, and then I'll watch it back and I'll say, Oh, it felt like I was doing what I saw them doing. But actually, somehow in the process I had turned my hand over and I was doing this, or I was really just actually trying to do this. Actually, this is not a horrible cut to do. But this is again, taking half of the strength that we have available with this cut away because we're not actually using any leverage to accomplish the cut. Yeah, it's really difficult. We're not used to observing ourselves in this way. Most of the time people are doing it wrong, not because they just think it's better, but just because it probably feels more comfortable. Granted, a lot of the cuts we're going to teach you today are going to feel awkward or uncomfortable at first. We all are asking you essentially to do the chicken dance here, so that feels weird to begin with. But if you can do the movements like we've instructed, there is a tremendous amount of power and efficiency as well as safety embedded in all of these cuts. We are going to have a really hard time cutting ourselves if we have our hands against our chest the entire time. That also gives us the leverage, but it also makes it, so it limits the range of motion that this tool can even go on. I have to have to really bend my elbow over to even get the knife close to my chest. The other thing is that if you are doing it, once you start to cut you should feel your hands actually pressing into your chest a little bit. That is the leverage being generated. As that pressure builds and builds, and builds, it results in the night pulling through the cuts. But then because our hands are against our chest as well, we are limited again where that knife is even going to flick off to. We are always asking ourselves these questions, not just to do the movement right, but also to keep us safe. Sometimes just the way our mind operates is we can actually practice this motion and practice this motion. The minute we grab the knife, we just forget everything that we just learned, and just like, Yes, let's make some shavings. But really, if you're really having a hard time with this, a great thing to practice is to actually put your knife down and grab two pieces of wood instead and then go through the things palm up. The point is out that way, we're going to try to do this without dropping them, we're going to close our hands around it, we're going to look to make sure that we see all 10 fingers. We're going to ensure that this is a straight line and that it's not curved or curled, weird, that's going to make it harder. Then we're going to think about getting punched in the chest and how weird it would feel if we did that, and so then our body is going to curl forward like this, and then we're going to take a deep breath and go. In so doing, keeping our fingers on our chest, they're able to rotate the way that they should, and we're able to practice this motion without the stress or excitement, or whatever it is that has the knife doing what it's not supposed to do the minute we put it in our hand. By taking the risk out of it, it helps us to actually get back to focusing on the movement. Yeah, taking two pieces of wood looks ridiculous in your hands, but it does remove the threat or just the tension of having a sharp tool in your hand for a moment so that you can see, okay, this is all it needs to be. Then what you should be doing is listening to the way that that feels. I know that sounds weird, but that's the best way to describe it. How does this feel? When I stop, my forearms stop on the sides of my ribcage here. The pressure that I'm generating by rubbing these two sticks together is not really a lot. It's comfortable enough that I can keep a firm grip on both of these pieces of wood without them feeling like they're digging into my hand or they're wanting to jump out. When we are paying attention to those things and taking things slow, then we're able to make the observations that help us to self-correct, which is a vital part of learning, especially on the Internet, because you don't have an expert there or a mentor or a teacher to say, "Hey, stop for a moment, let's try it this way." It's really up to you to remember all of these little details and then have them in a form that you as you're doing it, you can go, "My hands are on my chest, my elbows are pulling back. I am making a scissors motion and I see all of my fingernails." That gives us a checklist that then keeps us on track and allows us to correct ourselves, getting us closer and closer to doing it right and efficiently. You've said something that also is really important. We're going to say this over and over and over, and any carving class that we do is, you're going to see josh and I doing these cuts and it's going to look easy and we're going to be doing it in a hurry and removing a ton of material in a hurry. But if you are trying it for the first time, slow it down, try to do it in slow motion so that you can really observe every single motion. That's why I talk about having our knuckles on our chest and then just feeling what it feels like to have this knuckle, then this knuckle, then this knuckle, then this knuckle, just make that rotation with our elbow. If we're able to move slow enough, if we're able to get rid of our desire to just make shavings and slow down, then we can really learn how to do it right which is how we then become fast. Because the more we can ingrain these motions and make them automatic responses when we're in this position, the less our brain has to think about, and that then allows us to do this really quickly and efficiently. In the military they have a saying, slow is smooth, smooth is fast. This is what this means. When you start out, you need to go slow and you should be able to do this cut moving slowly. I can pay attention to how thick the shaving is or where the knife is, or if it's about to come out. As I continue to do this and I continue to practice and make those observations, then this becomes smooth or steady. Then your brain goes, this is exactly how it needs to go so that eventually, without really a conscious thought, you can make this movement and you're safe and you can move through it very quickly.
9. Basic Knife Cuts: The Pull Cut: The reason that we spend so much time with those first two cuts is because that is where our least amount of risk is. The knife is going out into the ether and we're not that worried about cutting ourselves. But now transitioning to what we're going to call the pull cut, this is when things start to get a lot more dangerous, and so we want to have practiced those other cuts and understand the safety and the body mechanics that keep us safe so that then when we go to do this next cut, we are actually safe. Because I'm pretty sure if you've ever held a knife before, someone's probably told you don't cut towards yourself. But with the pull cut, that is exactly what we're going to do. This cut is actually what we use for 80 percent of our spoon carving because of the versatility and the opportunity that it creates for control. With this, we are going to hold the knife just like we would with a key and a cognition, but this time a lot more of our focus is going to be on that thumb and forefinger pivot point. Some people find it comfortable here to even grip the back of the blade between their thumb and forefinger and then position the rest of their hand like this. It really just depends on how big your hand is to be totally honest about how you hold it. With this, the thing that keeps me the safest is having a inborn body stop. I'm going to tuck my elbows up against my body and they are never going to leave my body. What happens as I'm cutting is I'm sliding my knife back and forth on my body like this. You'll notice a few things if you go back and ask yourself some of the questions that we were talking about before. The knife tip is pointed away from the direction that there would be force applied to the knife. That is very, very important because where are we to do this, then some soft bits might become poked. The other thing too is that, as I'm doing this, this is rotating here. This is giving me a very, very predictable movement, which then allows me once again to be using my body as a machine and then to move the workpiece. However, it's convenient to do so for what cut I need to make. Again, that's why we spend so much time while we're spoon carving using this cut because we can have a lot of versatility and we can be moving the piece of wood constantly while we're making this cut. Another piece of safety is to think about your work holding hand. When we put the wood up to our body, we find just a comfortable place to put it on our sternum. We always try to not use our vampire stake for this for obvious reasons, but when we find a comfortable place to rest this, then the only other thing we really have to think about is, where are our fingers? We always want to have a piece of wood in between the cutting action and where our fingers are. I don't want to grip the wood like this and then potentially be in danger of getting myself a little nail trim. I want to basically use my thumb and my forefinger and then the rest of my hand as a balancing point. Then you're pretty much off to the races. One other thing too is that we want to leave about two inches here. We don't want to try to be cutting out here at the tip because it is a little bit less predictable to do so. We're always going to stay behind the cut. The only other important piece here is that we always are cutting in about this one-inch area of the knife. We are never sliding the knife down as we're cutting because what then would happen is that the knight could slip and then we would be in a lot of danger of cutting a very important vein in our other arm. We don't want to do that. We keep that knife tip pointed away. This cut, again, you'll notice, just like in all the other cuts, my arm is basically a straight line. I'm not moving my wrist like this. Moving my wrist is also like adding in potential danger, not just because we're then suddenly pointing with the knife at ourselves, but also because then the knife is acting less predictably. If we can make our body like a machine and just make the same cut over and over and over, then we don't even really have to pay a whole lot of attention to what the knife is doing. We just then pay attention to watching the silhouette of our design or the shadow of our design as we're carving our spoon. This cut is primarily used when going against the grain. We use it most in the middle part of our wood piece. We don't use it on the ends because again, one end is being held by her fingers. The other end is against our chest. It's right there in the middle. The other reason is because the way that grain works, where you're having to come at it from both sides here so that we are going to build up these little feathers, as you can see here and we're not going to try to force our way through those because what will end up happening because we're going against the grain is that, this green line will actually want to split off or break where it just follows the fibers of the wood and just breaks itself off before the knife even has a chance to get there. What we're doing is building up these fibers. Then with these little feathery bits, we flip it over and then come from the other side. We take a cut and then come right behind that cut, right behind, right behind. You'll start to see the other side buildup that way as well. This is what allows us to get inside curves on our spoons or any design as well as curve the next and scraped nice, smooth inside curves, which you wouldn't really be able to do with any of the other cuts that we use.
10. Basic Knife Cuts: The Thumb-Lever Grip : Our last two cuts are actually also kitchen cuts. If you ever do any cooking, you'll find these very handy and useful there as well. But these are cuts that we use at the very end of our spoon carving process, once the shape of whatever it is that we're making is already nearly complete. That's because these cuts offer the least amount of power, but the most amount of control. You'll see a lot of times spoon carvers will have these little things that are called facets, these little shapes at the end of their spoons. The way that we make those is with a cut called the thumb lever grip. It is shock of all shocks, using your thumb as a lever as you're cutting. The way that we stay safe during this cut is we always keep a thumbs length worth of wood extending above where we're cutting. We don't want to be here and doing this, because if we're too close here, we're going to cut the fatty bit of our pointer finger there, we don't want the knife to skate off the top of the piece of wood and then skate down into your knuckles. Just like we have been, we always keep a piece of wood between where the knife edge is and where our fingers are. This knife cut at its simplest form, looks like a pair of scissors. You're just rotating these two pieces of wood like a pair of scissors. But the more advanced version of this cut actually allows us to skip any sanding when it comes to finishing our spoons, because as we were talking about with a lot of our other cuts, the way that we're going to present the knife to the work is going to cause the knife to slice the wood, which leaves a much, much cleaner surface. But that involves a little bit of extra body mechanics, that we'll talk about now. First things first, let's talk about how we're going to hold our knives for this cut. First of all, you'll notice that my palms are up and the knife is angled, starting at the fat of my finger and ending out towards the middle part of my forefinger. The reason for that is that it gives me a very nice point here, I almost think of sword fighting or something like that, that little poke. As I'm doing this, this elbow is rotating, which allows that scissor motion to happen and gives us a little bit of leverage to work against, and it's pivoting on our thumb like that. Then we're using our work holding hand to actually curl and bring the wood in towards the knife. We're not just doing this and we're not just scissoring, we're actually more moving the knife from the tip up towards the hilt, not the other way around. Because if we're pulling from the hilt towards the tip, then the knife tip will leave the cut and skate across and cut something. We start at the tip and we move towards the interior. If you can really master using that thumb as a pivot point and pushing that blade from the point towards the hilt and curling your hand back so that it's presenting the wood to the knife in that way, then this becomes a very efficient cut and you're able to continue your lines and turn them into little facets at the end of your cut. This is also a really useful cut as we come down to the end of our spoons to form the back of the bowl, or like, for example, in this case with the butter paddle, we're just getting rid of a lot of that material down at that point doing our final shaping there. I will also say, that this cut is what a lot of people think about when they think about whittling, and because this cut offers so much control, this is the cut that I spent most of my early spoon carving days doing. But I was using a cut like this to cut little glitter sized pieces of wood to come up with my final spoon design, which is what made spoons take me nine plus hours to carve because I was using my tiniest tool to do the brunt of the work. I say all these cuts are keeping us safe, but they're also making us way more efficient because if we know what tools we have available, then we'll be able to apply them to the jobs that we have at hand.
11. Basic Knife Cuts: The Scoop Cut : Our last cut that we'll learn is called the scoop cut, and I'll be honest, I don't actually use this cut very often when I'm cutting flat things but it becomes super, super useful when it comes to using another knife called the hook knife, when we are carving out the bowl or the rounded inside portion of a spoon. With that, we want to hold the knife in the top portion of our hand. We're gripping it with our four fingers there and then the entire motion from the cut basically comes from closing our hand. Our work-holding hand then actually just becomes like a balancing hand because all of this happens by using our thumb as a leverage point as we cut, and as we open and close our hand, this makes that scooping motion. But you'll notice too that I have, once again, a thumbs-length of wood always above where I'm cutting because, I'll tell you, people using this cut to do these kinds of things cut themselves more often than not because they try to keep their thumb too far forward here and then when the knife slips or the wood slips, then they go directly into their thumbs. This cut becomes very, very dangerous if you are not extremely aware of the fact that you need to keep a piece of wood between the entire path of the knife, even if it slips at all times. We can use this cut on our flat ware to do some of these facets and things at the end. We can use it to shape this little curve here. But as we're doing so, we have to think about where's the knife going to go if the wood disappears. What's the full travel of this cut as we're cutting and how can we make it safe for ourselves? With this, like I said, we can use it for those facets, but really what we would use it for is when we introduce a hook knife, which, just notice, has the same exact handle as my knife. I'm going to hold it exactly the same way and then I'm going to present it to the wood in such a way that I can then squeeze my fingers and make those round cuts there. But you see too where my thumb is. This is also how so many people cut themselves with this cut because they want to be up here because it gives more feeling of control, but it also gives you a ton of potential danger because this blade wants to skate up and come into contact with the fleshy bit of your thumb there. This is a cut that we use all the time with leverage, and when we get into a more advanced version of spoon carving, we can talk a whole lot more about that one. Now that we know how to use our knives safely and efficiently and have gotten a little bit of practice and given ourselves a little bit of self-feedback, now comes the fun part. We get to design a custom spoon for our own needs that we'll be able to use in our kitchens for the rest of our lives, and then we actually get to carve it.
12. Designing Your Spoon: Let's get into the design of our spoon. Now, it's useful before we start to just make some simple observations. That's why it's fun to go into the kitchen if you have like your favorite tool that you often grab, ask yourself why, why is it that you liked that one? Hold it in your hand if you're cooking, you ask yourself, what is it about it that makes this more enjoyable than others? I have a basic spatula here, silicone, something you'd get it just a regular store. This is what we would call an average design. When they come up with design for this, they're thinking of if 100,000 people use this, what's going to work for all of them? What's nice about being able to design your own tools is that you can make it change things and make it work for the way that you work. Give you an example, I used to make waffles for my sons every morning, and I would always get the standard butter knife outs, go into the butter dish, and I would put the butter on very standard. You all know what I'm talking about. But as I was doing it and as I was designing all these spoons, I started thinking what would be a better way of doing this? I remember thinking back to when I would paint with my grandmother, when we apply the paints on, we would hold our paint brushes like this, instead of, you don't do it like that, like you're Tom Sawyer or something, painting the fence white. I wonder, what might a butter knife look like that I could hold like a paintbrush. I took a piece of wood and just stood at the place, the kitchen counter that I was at, and noticed how I would naturally hold it and then how I would naturally use it to scoop the butter out and put it on the wall phone, so I came up with this butter paddle design. The angle that is here is the same angle that if I step up and I hold it like this, it sits flat against the surface that I'm working. Little details like this, make it so that these become the tools that you reach for more than any, most of design is subconscious. We're not really aware of why we're picking things over the other except that it feels better, and if we can make our observations about feeling explicit and actually put some words to it, then we can take those feelings and actually put them into other tools, which is what is so amazing and cool. So when I'm holding this spatula, again, the first thing that I noticed, it's heavier on the handle than it is on the front, so it allows it to balance really nicely, versus a tool like this where all of the weight of the wood is down here on this side and it's constantly wanting to flip out of my hand. That's one thing I'm going to think about, how is the tool balanced, and do I need to put more wood on one side than the other? Another thing that's really important would be to think about what pan do you use all the time? What's nice about being able to design your own cooking spoon is that you can take the pan that you reach for every day, and we all have this experience. Let's say you've burned the eggs, you're trying to scoop everything in one spot and what happens? The corner of your tool doesn't fit inside your pan, so you're going to awkwardly change things. This inside shape here is something that we can actually imbue into the design so that it works perfectly with the pan that you use every day. We're going to look at this shape and how we can transfer that onto a tool as well, so that's another aspect. One other thing is how you like to hold your tools, I always hold my cooking spoons again like a paintbrush, and I'm constantly doing things like this. Most people, they like to push it around, observe yourself. When you go into the kitchen, watch how you naturally like to work. The difference between holding something like this and holding something like this will mean a sharper angle or a flatter surface. We're going to look at all those and put that into our cooking spoon as well. After we've made a bunch of observations and we've collected the little details that we want, let's talk about just some basic rules of design that we can apply to this. Now, these rules are going to involve a little math, so don't be scared. I'm going to use the word geometry, but as somebody who failed terribly at math, I can assure you that this is easy and you can do it. Let's look at a simple way of designing a spoon. This is the method that I use for almost all my spoons, there's lots of different methods, but I'm going to also teach you the underlying principles so that you can come up with your own and have a set of processes that you can follow so that regardless of the size of spoon that you have, you're going to be able to do this. Let's say I have a length of wood. This is my board, and the first thing I'm going to do, is I'm just going to find the half, make a guess wherever half is. I'm going to say, it's about right there. This doesn't need to be perfect, we're going to be cutting away a lot of this and we're even redesigning it, so don't worry about that. I have half and then I'm going to find half of half of each sections. This is just simple fractions, this gives me four sections to work with. Label those 1, 2, 3, 4. The next thing that I do is I'm going to mark a center line, I'm going to make sure that I know where the middle is, and usually I will cite down my board, which means I'm just going to look at it from an angle like this, and that's going to tell me if I've made a straight line, this one, not a straight line, but again, it doesn't matter too much. That's my center line, this is also going to help me with symmetry. That way if I'm taking away or trying to match one curve on this side, I know that the end of that curve ends right there, so I can just come up here and try to do my best to match it over here as well. You can also do the trick that we all did as kids, where I fold a piece of paper in half, then you only have to design half of your spoon, cut it out, unfold it, and you have a perfectly symmetrical thing. But I don't know what we're going to design yet, so I'm not going to do that. The next thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to make my width into divisions, and this is called working by ratios. I'm going to have four parts along my length, and six parts along my width. This is a simple grid system and there's all different ratios. The golden ratio is probably the one that most people are most familiar with, and we use it all the time because it's pleasing to the eye. But like I said, there's all kind of different ratios, there's three parts to five parts, four parts to six parts. Even, when you go to the movies, that widescreen, the width and height of a TV screen is 16 parts to nine parts. If you took a tool called a pair of dividers and you worked out on your TV, you would see that that's the case. It doesn't actually matter what the actual measurement is, as long as the heights and the widths are equal. This is going to be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. A lot of times I'll do different things with these different parts, but the only thing I'm going to do with that right now is that, this middle third right here, this is going to create a box that my handle is going to live within. Then the first part is usually where I have the head of the spoon. This is going to be the head, and the biggest part of it is going to be somewhere in this first section right here. Now because this is wider, then I would like it, it doesn't feel balanced to me. I'm actually going to bring the widest part right here to match with my first sixth right there, so that way it feels a little bit better. I'm going to do that same thing right there, and that's looking good. This is nice because if I want to match this later on, I can now know that all of my spoons are going to be two-thirds of the width, that's the widest part. My handle is one-third, and I can replicate that over and over and over again, even if I have different designs. The widest part falls in the head in that first quarter right there, and then I do a transition. This transition is just a curve that eases things one into the other. When you're working with wood, you don't really want sharp angles just because of the way that the wood grain works, just like we looked at with this spoon. If this has too much pressure put on it, it will just split off because there's a hard stop. We actually want it to ease one line into the other, but we can get a little bit tight even with something like this, we can see that taking place and we call that a radius, and what radius means is it's just a part of a circle or a section of an arc. If I have my circle, this is the part that's going to be called the radius. When we have radius right here in the neck, and that transitions into my handle. My handle though, this isn't going to be this wide, it's just going to be inside of this. I'm actually going to fair it out a little bit, and I'm going to create a curve like this. If you notice this curve starts right here in the middle of this third, and then it ends right here at that part. I can replicate that on the other side. Again, take that design elements and carry it into different spoons and it'll make things look the same, even when they look different. This is about where I sit with stuff for the most part, anytime I get a wood blank, I'm going to find half, half of half, and then I split it into six parts, and that allows me to start to separate out things so they look balanced to our eyes.
13. Protoyping Your Spoon: This is a little complicated, but let's look at how this actually plays out and how we can use this information in order to design something that works for us. I'm going to need to stand up for this. I'm going to set this aside, I'm going to look at my pan here and we're going to just make some observations and go through what's called the prototyping process. The best definition of prototyping that I've ever heard, this is a question embodied. What does that mean? That means that I'm asking a question if I hold my tool this way, does it reach the inside of the pan? The way that I'm going to even check that as I need to actually get something physical so that I can check and answer my question. With this one, the answer is no. If I hold it like this, because one of my constraints is that I want to hold it like a paintbrush or hold it like this, it doesn't fit unless I bend it like that. Now I know this angle is not what I want. To really do this well and to prototype quickly, which is really what we want, to get to our final design we actually want to have what's called a lot of iterations, or a lot of versions, but we want to do it quickly. If I had to carve a spoon every single time that I got an iteration, it would take a long time. Luckily, I did do that over the course of a year, so I got a lot of experience, but we're going to use the prototyper's magic material, which is cardboard, to get us there. I'm going to take a piece of cardboard and I'm going to cut it at the right length that I want. One thing that we don't notice is that a lot of these tools are almost the same length, particularly when we're working in pans because the length allows our hands to sit at a safe distance away from the heat. As we're making these observations, another thing that we could observe and notice, I don't want to make something that's this long when my hand is working next to a hot skillet. Even though I might like the design or the visual look of a short tool, I actually need it to be long, so this is another thing that I'll need to add. I'm going to say, as I'm using stuff, this is probably longer than I want. I happen to have one that I carved right here, and I want it to be about that length. I don't need to pull out my tape measure, but it is good if you don't have your tool next to you or your piece of wood next to you, to after you've designed, measure off how much you need because you will need that much wood in order to do it. I don't want this to be as long as this, there's some limitations that are in our spoons, so I'm going to use this one that I've designed before, lay it on there, and that's going to be my outer limits and tell me how much of this I'm actually going to be using. There's that, set that right back there. Now, I'm going to find half, which I think is about here, and then I'm going to find half of half. Half of half again. Then I'm going to find my center line. I'm just going to, again, site down the middle here. I'll use my trick. This is too much. I'm going to actually cut these ends off that I'm not using so that way I don't get confused about what I'm looking at. I'm going to use my knife, which I don't recommend you do because it's not good to cut paper with these things, but I know how to sharpen, so it's okay. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to find my width here. Again, I'm limited on how much I actually want to be able to do, so I'm going to roughly draw what I think is a good width. I can even check that if I look at this spoon, it's looking good. Now, I cut this out, so again, I don't have to deal with all of looking at the rest of this stuff. Get rid of that. Now I'm left with about the size of whatever my wood blank would be. That's pretty good. I'm going to go ahead and make a few more marks here. I'm going to mark off my width. I'm going to try to find third. Don't know exactly where that is, it's okay, I'm just roughly guessing. It doesn't have to be perfect. Now I will mark off the section where my handle is. I'm just going to go ahead and drag my finger, start, find my width using this little trick where I drag my finger along the edge, hoping I don't get a paper cut, and being successful in not getting one. Then also trying to come to the other side. That becomes my rectangle, again that my handle lives within, and then my head is going to be somewhere in this section right here and here, and here, and here. Now I have found that I'm going to cut that off. Now I'm getting really close to what my final design is going to be. Let's go ahead also because all I have left really is to decide what I want to do with my head here, so I'm going to figure out where my transition point is going to be, which is about right here and I'll just cut off this part of the handle, so again, I don't have to look at that and I can more accurately judge what my template will be. Now, let's make some decisions here. I'm going to draw, let's see, just a straight line because I wanted this to be geometric. Let's go ahead and see what it looks like if I draw just a straight line down to my handle from both sides here. Sounds like the dogs are barking at something. We are on a farm. This is just what we live with out here. I now have a rough outline or a prototype of my spoon. I can even pull my pan back in and see how I feel about what that is like, fits in the middle, but something about this shape I don't love. I think it just looks a little bit light and also this is a weird head, so I'm going to redesign this a little bit. But this doesn't mean that we've failed at all, in fact, this is the prototyping process. Because we did it in cardboard it means that we can make an adjustment much, much easier than had we spent all the time to actually carve this out, then test it and decide, I don't like that. Doing things in a low cost and low res way means that then you can make decisions much faster and actually iterate your way to what you're actually wanting before you decide to spend the time doing that stuff. Let's pull in another piece of cardboard. Looks like I'm going to have to trim this one down, and we'll use my handy-dandy knife. Now I can just put this back on here. Instead of redrawing everything and putting my divisions back on there, I'm just going to go ahead and trace this out but also start to make some changes here to my design. I know that this is what I want to keep. That's nice. The handle is also about where I want it. Let's go ahead and keep that as well. But now I am thinking that this is a little bit too light and it needs to balance out a little bit more. Also, it's not really clear which is the top and which is the bottom. I need to also make sure that that changes. Let me give you also some of this because I think I said that at some point there. Then I add something above the bevel. Let's actually straighten this out. I'm just going to make this come back a little bit more like this. Then I'll make this go a little bit flatter. I have changed it a little bit. I've cut this down. This is the middle part and you notice that there's one side on the other. Go ahead. Then I also want to make this a little bit more angled, I believe, so I do it like this. Now, I'll cut this out here. Are those dogs barking at? Foxes. That's what they're barking at. I'm almost done here. So now that's looking a little bit better. I'm liking the way that it looks, probably don't like that little curve inside. So when I go to actually transfer onto my piece of wood, I'm just going to make this a little bit more straight or maybe bring that up right there, but that's looking a lot better to me. So far I have made it match the inside of my pan. I have made it so I can hold it like a paintbrush. I've left a little bit of weight on the end here so that when I carve that, I'm going to make that a little bit thicker so that I have nice weighted handle. It has some geometric hard lines. It's not as smooth or graceful as some of these other ones. But I think this will end up being like a real workhorse. I can't figure out what the angle is to scrape things off yet until I actually start to carve. Let's go ahead and let's transfer this onto our piece of wood. I have a piece of poplar here. We got this at the home center. Usually, I work by cutting everything down like we did before, from a split blink or an actual split wedge from the tree. This is dry and so we're going to have a different experience in carving it. But when I'm looking for stuff, I want to make sure that it's nice and straight. This one we picked out is nice and straight, has only a slight curve, but that's going to work perfectly for what we're doing. When I'm lining up my templates onto the piece of wood. I want to make sure that I have at least one grain line that goes from the handle all the way through the head down my center line. Whatever we carve still retains its inherent strength because all of those long fibers are still held together. When I'm banging this on the side of the skillet, try and get all that stuff off, it's not going to then crack or fall apart on me. I see my grain line, there is a bit of a curve. I'm going to find the straightest part here. But I'm going to make that go all the way through. Remembering that I did want to change this other side here, I'm going to make this a little bit wider and maybe stop right there. Maybe give it one little curve, down to my handle line. Transferring this on, even though we did do a template, it doesn't have to be this perfect. Again, we're going to be using a knife to cut away most of this. But this marker, once we do decide what our line looks like, the marker is actually what tells us and preserves the outline or the main shape of our object. Even though this is rough, oftentimes I'll just scratch out the outline like I did on the chalkboard over here. This marker line is actually helping us because it's the thing that's going to preserve the outside shape or the silhouette of our tool here. That's what really we see first. When we're looking at things, the main thing that our brain registers is not the fact that this is yellow, but the fact that this is a rounded rectangle and we see the outlines of things. We do that with almost everything. The very first thing that dominates or dictates something's shape is the outline. This marker, as we start to carve, we're going to try to leave this intact as much as possible because it's the thing that's going to keep our spoon or our utensil looking that way. Now, I will need to make sure that this is where I want to go with this. If I want to do any adjustments, this would be the time to do it. I'm going to pitch this forward a little bit maybe like that. That's going to off balance that just a touch. Then I'm going to clean up this line. Just like this. Make that a little bit straighter. I tell you what? I'm liking where that's going. I might also, because this is looking a little bit more wonky than I want, first I'm going to do it in pencil so that I don't have to commit to something. I'm going to try to balance out this head. This I can't exactly tell you the reasons for unless I had gone through that whole like using the dividers and the compass sequence for things. Because then I could walk you through exactly why this isn't feeling right for me. But just know there are some reasons underneath that. Right now I'm using long experience to just feel it out. Maybe I'll pitch that and we'll see where we go with that. This, I think, is ready to cut out. Let's do that.
14. Beginning to Carve: We've designed our spoon, transfer onto our piece of wood, and you've designed one. What did you come up with? I used one of my favorite kitchen spatulas. Has a heavier handle, but then matched another design from a sentimental spoon that I have to the bottom of my pan, and came up with this and, it's a little rough, but I think as we shape it, it'll get a lot more cool-looking. Now, your grain does twist out a little bit, but I see you incorporate that in the design. Yeah, absolutely. You always want to have as much grain running consistently throughout your piece as possible. If you have a wonky piece like this, like me, then you want to make sure that you put your template on your wood in such a way that will make the strongest spoon possible. Well, let's get into it. First we need to cut off the ends so that we're not trying to work this much wood, and then we are going to start to rough shape this down. Cool? We are using just a folding saw and these work on a pole stroke, we're going to cut off the end pretty close, but not crossing our marker line, and then cut off this bit as well. Anne is going to show you how to remove a whole bunch of wood if you don't have a saw, but we'll do it this way right now. If you don't have a friend to hold this down and keep it steady, there's actually an old woodworkers trick. Usually we do this on a saw bench with a real saw, but you can just actually put your knee on it and sit over it. Actually the better way to do your cutting. Just like that. What if you don't have a stump? Yeah. If you don't have a stump, you can also use a chair, something where you can put your knee up, and basically lean on the piece of wood. Your body acts like a clamp. Having a saw just helps us to get rid of the bigger pieces of wood. Using the right tool for the right job is what we're always about to just remove the amount of effort that we need to use on some of our smaller tools. Now, I am going to put something called a relief cut right here, so that as we start cutting this direction, we don't run the danger of actually cutting into this, and then this whole part breaking off. All this is just a cut that doesn't go all the way through. Now I'm going to stop right there at the lowest part if I have any type of curve. Anne, do you want to cut yours? I was going to help you cut mine. Oh, you're going to make me cut it. Let's do this. Now, if you don't have a saw and you only have a knife, there are ways of getting around that, and we learned the power cut before, which is a really useful cut for removing large amounts of wood and Anne's going to show you how to use that. If you don't have a saw, you can remove a whole lot of material using the power cut. This is actually a modified power cut. I'm still doing the exact same motion. I'm just using something to balance again and I'm still just doing this in a standing position instead of a seated position. One cool thing, as we're working our corner, corner, middle, corner, corner, middle, come down below it and make some cuts below it. One cool thing about the way that the grain of this is going, is it actually, it's possible I could split that, and if the grain does what it should do, it would actually split along that whole line. If I put my knife here, I'm going to give myself a little grace because I don't want to accidentally ruin my whole spoon. But if I put my knife here, and tap it in there, then. Help out here? Yes. We're going to pause before we do that so that we can make sure that it is going to split the way that the wood goes. But it's good that we stopped because even though the grain comes this way, this split is wanting to dive in here. We're going to stop so that that split doesn't carry all the way through. But we can then take our saw and cut that right there and this whole part will come off. Even though we are learning how to look at wood grain, sometimes it's not as easy as that. It's good to be careful and take things slow. There we go. Now, I really get to use my power cut, and remove that material, and also incidentally, it's a little easier to hold now. There is that. Our order of operations here is we're going to start with our power cuts to remove the bulk of the material, then use a chest lever grip to sneak up to our marker line. What's probably the most important part is that we don't cross our marker line because, like we talked about before, the marker line is what keeps the outside shape that we worked so hard to make. We're going to work up to that marker line, not crossing it, but keeping it at full width, then we can start to shape things. Now, because we did put a relief cut here, we can hopefully if the grain does go in the direction that we think it's going to go, instead of having to use our knife to try to remove all of this work right here, we can take our knife and something heavy, like a book or another piece of wood, not a metal hammer, because a metal hammer will actually start to distort, or what we call mushroom, the end of your knife. Don't use metal on metal, but this is a nice soft one. I'm going to tap it in, and because I made that cut, I don't run the risk of this split carrying into this, and I can just start to remove this material, and I start, I'm going to notice too, there's a curve here. I feel pretty safe about actually coming up pretty close to my line, and seeing if I can split the rest of this out. That gives me less work that I have to do with the knives. One question that people always ask us is if we need to draw this template that we've made on both sides. It's a little tricky to get them to line up. There are some techniques that we can use to line them up on both sides, but if we follow the method that we've been using, corner, corner clear the middle, and we start our first corner on the marker side, we're going to take our corner down to that marker side, and then bring the other corner down the same amount, so that if we looked on the side, it should be a straight line from this way, from this side to this side, I could draw a straight line. Then if I clear the middle, clear that center, it'll actually automatically transfer the line of where that template is over to the other side. That's how we get around that right there. This is the hardest part. Take breaks if you need to. This is where the blisters come from. Well earned. We're always remembering our mantra; corner, corner, middle, corner, corner, middle because, if you try to take too much wood at once, especially because this is dry wood, you're really going to get yourself in trouble. If you get to a point where you can't do that power cut anymore, then try incorporating your chest lever grip to get rid of some of that material below the cut, so that then you can come back over here, and do your power cut. I just remember those body mechanics. Remember where your body is going to stay the safest, where you're out of the way of the cut, and then use all the tools that you have to get the progress that you need. Our goal here is not to worry about how thick or thin our spoon is right now. We're only just getting down to basically cookie cuttering out of this template that we've made, using both our power cuts on the end, power cut chest lever grip, and then in the middle, we'll also need to use a pull cut, especially if you've made a taper that goes against the grain, you'll need that there. I may use mine. As we get closer to our marker line, we need to now shy away from the more powerful cuts because, I talk about it like on a continuum. We have our power cut that's on this side, gives us a lot of power, but not a lot of control, because there's so much force behind it. There's our chest lever grip, it's powerful, but we also have some control, or pull cut, not as powerful, but very controlled, and then our last two is all control and no power. As we move more refined, we're going to actually move away from power and move into the controlled cuts as well. As we're carving dry wood, we get even more of an appreciation for how amazing it is when we have opportunity to carve greenwood or freshly cut wood because it carves like a dream. When Josh and I first started carving spoons, we thought we could just use whatever wood scraps we had from our woodworking shops to carve our spoons, but realized quite quickly that it was a lot harder to carve kiln dried wood than we might have thought. We started looking for places that we could get greenwood or freshly cut would that still had the moisture from the tree in it and made it a lot softer and more approachable to carve. What I'm doing here is called a modified pull cut, and with that, I have an especially cranky piece of grain right here. It would take too much force to where I'd feel unsafe just pulling it freely towards myself. I take the fingers from my work holding hand and I wrap it around my nice hand and I use that to give a little bit of extra force behind my knife to then clear those chips away. Then I come back here to go the other direction, and then I can come back here and use that force from my other hand to get a little bit more leverage here. Again, I'll go around clear those chips away. Anytime that you're having your wood is just like splitting away and it's leaving these deep cuts right there that are just like stopping points. That's a really good indication that you are cutting against the grain, against the way that the wood wants to be cut. We just come from the other direction and see if it cuts a little bit easier, which it does. How are you doing? I'm good. This is a very hard wood. This little portion here gives us a little bit of a conundrum about getting rid of because it is hard to hold it. How should we tackle that? I would say you would use your pull cuts coming from the far side by making sure that you're really careful that the hilt is where you're cutting from or the bottom of the knife there. I'm not slipping down and cutting any of these soft bits. This is a really good example of what happens if the wood disappears because this wood is splitting off behind my cut. Am I using my body and behind the cut to stop it and keep myself safe? Yes. We always want to be asking ourselves those questions, especially when we're doing things, when we're having to pull really hard or push really hard or do something, it's really hard, we really want to be asking ourselves those questions. If this wood disappears, or if my hand slips, what's going to happen? But thinking about things that way can also give us really good ideas for how else we can use our body to create leverage and things. There's a modified version of what we're doing in the chest lever grip like this by putting a knife on a knee and then pulling the wood back like this, which again, is literally just using leverage to keep our bodies safe, but using what we've got to safely cut tough bits of material. Now, this is the thing we have to be aware of, and it really comes from experience knowing when you make a design where it's going to fall on the wood grain because if we are making something that is going against the grain so that it makes it a little bit more difficult to carve. On mine right here, I arrange this. But again, we were looking at the way that the grain lines fall, so I thought that this was actually going with the grain. But sometimes wood can trick you and it has what's called the interlocked grain. As I was cutting this way, which to my eye reads with the grain, it was actually going against the grain. What are the telltale signs of that? Like Anne was saying, when your wood breaks off instead of shearing or cutting, that means you're going against the grain, even if what you're looking at would tell you differently. Learning how to be aware of what's going on and just observing what things feel like. Do you feel a lot of resistance? Does it feel like it's snapping or breaking or does it feel like it's cutting? Those little details are really what's going to help you over the long run because that'll allow you to then switch a technique. I'm constantly listening to, that feels a little bit too difficult to cut through. I'm going to flip that around now and come from the other side like this. I'm going to help Anne with this part because it is a bit trickier. [inaudible] some greenwood. Now notice, I'm putting a lot of force on this, but what is keeping me safe? I know that if, because I'm not using my wrist to cut, the blade isn't facing me and that even if I'm pulling really hard and this slips, my forearm is acting as a natural brake. I can't actually get the tool near me. When you're first learning, always asking, what's the full path of the tool? What's going to stop this tool from cutting me? Even as this slips through, watch what happens with the knife, see how it taps against the part up here? That means it can't go to the other side. However, if I were cutting with the tip and I slipped out, it wants to go that direction because of how I'm pulling on it. Even where we're cutting on the knife also helps us right here. Though I'm using muscle right now, to really power through this cut, for the most part, that's unnecessary unless you're really trying to go super fast. But we always want to just try to be as efficient as possible and wherever we can try to use leverage to help us with our cuts. Instead of muscle. Yeah. Instead of muscle because this also a tire you out very very quickly. You can tighten them up. As we get closer and closer to our marker line, we need to slow down, start to be careful, and we're going to sneak up on it. Again, we're thinking like a cookie-cutter. We're just trying to slice this template that we've made out of this piece of wood here. If you can't get close enough, don't worry about it because after we start to thin out the piece of wood, it will make some of these parts easier to carve, particularly this area right here in the neck where it transitions. We have to use a pull cut there and we use that modified pull cut where we keep our fingers from our work holding hand on the back so that way we can actually get a much more controlled cuts with our pull cuts, and by keeping our fingers on our hand, the knife also is restricted in where it can actually go. We're protected there. We're also going to try not to be too precious about getting down to that marker line because this is still considered the rough stage. Once you get pretty close and you maybe have just a little bit on the outside, this is a good place to stop, and this is where we can start to switch into refining our design.
15. Refining Your Design: Now once we have the first cookie-cutter of our shape cut out, it's time to start thinking about the next shape that we're going to cut. Making three-dimensional thing is possible without having a whole bunch of different templates and other things that we're looking at. Let me show you a little trick; that's one of my favorite woodworking tricks, but we're going to mark a central line down the middle interior of our spatula. To do that, we're going to take the Sharpie in our hand with our pointer in our thumb, and then we're going to judge where the halfway point would be on the spoon. Then we're going to lock our middle finger right there so that it can act as a guide. We're actually going to then just use this as a guide to mark our central line down the entire piece. Because the flat face of the wood is sliding along my middle finger, it acts just the way a tool called a marking gauge would. It allows us to mark that center line and to make a very straight line that matches that straight face of the wood, whatever distance the marker is projecting out from your middle finger there. With this, this is going to do the same thing that our marker lines here did. It's going to give us a true North, so that as we're removing material from both of the sides we can make sure that we're doing so evenly based on the fact that we have this central line here. Now what we want to do, is decide what the side profile looks like. If want a little bit thinner of a handle right here, or if we wanted to angle up, or if you want to keep this straight and start to taper this, we're going to draw that on as well so that does for us what this marker line or this template did but for this side and then we're going to cut it out. Again, thinking in cookie cutter is just cutting that out, and then we will start to make it a little bit more three-dimensional. Remembering my design I do want to thin this out, but I do want it to be geometric. So I'm going to make this as slightly thinner here, and then try to make a straight line this way. Making straight lines on long pieces of wood is tough, but we're going to go back to the trick that we learned while we were designing. Instead of just trying to judge it, looking at the whole one we're actually going to tilt it up so that we can see the line. We can see one end to the other in our visual field, which allows us to then sneak up on what we want things to look like. This also does another thing for us in that it helps us to match the angle that we created on the other side. The center line again acts as a reference point that we can use. Let's go ahead and do that. Again, none of this has to be perfect because this is still the rough stage, and we are going to end up refining things even further. What are you doing to yours? I want my handle to be a little bit beefier because I really want this to have some weight up top. I'm going to try to use the full thickness here, but then I want it to come and be really delicate right at that transition point into the spatula. I'm going to have it tapered down to there. It's going to come out a little bit. In this short-grain section I have a little bit more meat to work with, so it doesn't snap. But then I want it to taper back down to a very spatula [inaudible] point on this side here. It's going to have a pretty dramatic taper here than it will swell in the middle, then it'll taper down here and then it'll swell again in the handle as well. You knows how thick she made it at the top here. When we are making sharp blades out of wood, we do need to leave a lot of the wood on there. We can't make them as thin as a metal spatula, well, just because of the inherent limitations of the wood. But if we do put some angle like I'm going to do on mine so that I can achieve my design goal of being able to scrape the bottom, it's going to be a very shallow angle. Not something super steep, but something more like that which will make it durable. Stand up to the cooking and scraping along the bottom of the pan. We're going to first mark all that stuff on here. We're again only going to use one side of our template and we're going to use that to guide the other side, but this is just to help us to keep the overall shape that we're wanting. Once you have raft that in and you like how it looks, you can start taking things down. I'm going to add a little end part there. We are going to use the same techniques, we're going to use our power cuts. Then mostly we're going to be using our chest liver grip and our pull cut for this side because we are working with the wide face of the wood, so that means we're going to be removing a lot of wood and so we can't do too much of that without running the risk of splitting. If you noticed, this is actually a pretty thin amount. Again, keeping more in the control side of our techniques then I hope that will [inaudible]. Regardless of how thin or thick you make this, you want to make sure that you don't cut away your center line. Your center line is the only thing that's actually keeping this outside shape intact. If we're going to round off our handles or even put some angles or cuts or curves in there, the center line becomes the top part of our rounded; a handle or the top part of whatever angles that we're going to put in here. If we cut away this center line the whole outside silhouette changes, so do be careful there. As you're cutting, you may notice us stopping and looking at it from different angles. This just helps us to see how much we're taking off in that center line, also it gives us a reference to judge if one side has more wood than the other by closing your eye, looking at it from different angles, and evaluating the outline that you're seeing there. I just want to stop and reassure you-all right now that this is really hard, and it is totally okay that your first spoon probably doesn't look like it belongs in a museum. There's a reason that my mom has so many kitchen spoons in her kitchen, and they did not make it to market somehow. Give yourself a little bit of grace, this is a learning process. I like the accountability of having someone just sit there and watch me do it even as we're carving because this is the first time we've ever carved this design. We're also feeling how it feels in our hand. Up here I want a big hefty handle, but I also don't want it so big that I can't close my hand around it. I'm refining my design as I'm carving and coming in the spots that; holding it the way that I would hold it and seeing what needs to happen. Maybe instead of leaving it huge and beefy here I want to actually have it come a little bit in here, so I can just carve that in as I'm doing this. The template that you came up with is not set in stone or wood as it may be, but as you are feeling it starts to make other observations about it. Like we talked about, both of us wanted a weighted handle so that it felt a little lighter in the hands. Our template might not get us there, so we're going to have to start to carve things away. As we carve, we're feeling, and looking, and maybe even changing parts of our design altogether so that what you had in mind it might be a little different or even considerably different than what you wanted to start with. That's okay because that is part of creating your own design, is those little changes; those little iterations. We're basically inventing a new spoon, and the light bulb didn't take just one try. He carved, Thomas Edison carved a lot of light bulbs. Once we have cookie cuttered out this shape, this side profile, you are still left with a four sided object, strangely enough. Even if we have put a bunch of curves and twists and turns in there, technically, we still have 1, 2, 3, 4 sides. This is the way that we work three-dimensionally, particularly in carving. You're going to start with one two-dimensional shape and then a top view, another two-dimensional shape. Then in order to make it three-dimensional or have those two different shapes blend into each other, we are going to start to fair out the sides or remove the sides here or the corners and that will blend the two different shapes into each other, making two two-dimensional objects into a three-dimensional object. In order to do that and particularly if you want a rounded shape, which is what most cooking tools are just because that's what fits inside our hands and the shape that our hand most naturally makes, we need to understand a little trick of geometry that the trades have used for literally thousands of years. This is my spoon and it is a four-sided object. I can turn this into a circle with a few carving tricks. First, I'm going to make this four-sided object into an eight-sided object, making an octagon. If you want to stop there, that's also a nice shape. Then I'm going to remove the corners of those corners, so taking it from eight to 16 and then 16 to 32, and in very short order, you'll see what happens here. I'm going to try to take an equal amount of these corners off and I'll just do that to the end of this. Now I have a rough octagon here. Now, I'm going to remove the corners of those corners carefully. You'll notice very quickly, we can take that four-sided object and make it round. This is what we're going to do for our whole spoon. Now, my spoon's a little bit more geometric, but I'm going to round off the top. What I'm going to do is, along the length, I'm going to just remove basically a corner and make an equal length all the way down like this on both sides, taking the same amount away on both, like that. Then I will take those corners off as well, making sure to leave the original facets that I made. Having a system or an order of operations will help to keep everything straight and also help keep you from chasing your tail on some of these design decisions that you're making. Because we can spend all day trying to make something round by eye and be left with a spatula shaped toothpick at the end. But if we have a system or an order of operations, then we know, okay, all I need to do is make this four-sided then I'm going to take my corners off making it eight-sided. Then I'll take the corners off of that and it will turn into a rounded or faired object on its own, making it look really nice. This is perfect for both circles or more usefully, ovals, which is what you're actually going to be making on your spoon. You can see how that's already starting to round off like that. I could keep going with my knife, but this also prepares me for sanding. If I just wanted to sand that smooth, then it would make it a very smooth and balanced looking object too and I've already removed the bulk of the wood that saves my sanding for more of the finer step. I have removed this side and I've started to take down the thickness. Now I need to decide where I'm going to put in some of my bevels. This one, like we decided at the beginning, is going to be a little bit more geometric and it's going to be more rounded and have more softer shapes. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take a marker just so I can see where these things are going to be. I'm going to take a marker and just start to put in some of the shapes that I want to include. I want this one to go from here to here and maybe even start to cut that way. Then I'm going to make a bevel that goes from here down like that, like this. This side, this top part, I'm going to keep relatively fixed so that it has a lot of strength to it, but I also want to start also cutting those scraping bits. I'm also going to add a line right here and a line right here and I'll do this on both sides. What I'm going to do is I'm going to cut in a bevel that goes this direction. Now there's nothing to the direction that I'm actually marking these, it's just to help me to know which way I need to be carving on that part. Then what I'll probably do is cut in a nice curve right here. Then this, will have a more geometric handle. This will bevel down, this is going to be my center line for that. I'll also just start to cut in a bevel right there. I can already pre-mark out this bevel by using that marker trick that we learned earlier. By just marking this part here to know where I'm going to put these things. I could go all the way around doing that same thing if I wanted, it does help to make sure that you don't take away too much wood while you're working. I'll go around and do that on all sides just to, again, give me a reference line so as I'm carving, I don't go too far and that helps to make it look real nice. Then so for these bevels, that marker line that I made, I'm just going to try to cut down just to that marker line and you'll see if I go slowly, I can actually control this cut if I use my pull cut and use this modified or reinforced pull cut. If it slips and comes off that line, that's okay, I can come back and catch it a little bit more. Notice how this is just one continuous cut. You probably won't get this right away, but it is something to start to watch out for and it will also help to give you useful feedback as you're trying to get better at carving is to see, how long of a continuous cut can I make? Because the lines that are leftover on a finished spoon, particularly when it is knife finished or the surface is left with all of the tool marks, that surface that just got left behind is actually glass smooth because of how sharp the knife is. We don't have to sand that, which is also really nice. It looks cool too. I have carved a lot of spoons. There is always a point in the middle of this where I think I'm going to have to burn this. It doesn't look right to my eye, it looks rough. But over the course of just carving hundreds and hundreds of spoons, I have learned that if you just keep working at it, just keep going, eventually it yields and you'll get over this hump and it'll start to look like you've wanted to. If yours is looking real tough and rough and you're starting to feel like this was a whole failed experiment, keep going, because you'll get it if you just keep at it.
16. Finishing Your Design: I've got my spoon about as good as I can get it with my knife because there's some tricky grain things and there's just some rough bits that need to get taken care of. The best way to do that, especially on dry wood like this, is with sandpaper. Just like with using our power cuts to remove tons of material or our thumb lever grips to remove and refine little amounts of material, we want to think about our sandpaper the same way. If we have huge amounts of material that we want to remove, then we're going to use the biggest rocks, the biggest abrasives we have, and with sandpaper that would mean the lowest grit. But because this is pretty good and all I need to do is get rid of some little lumps and some marker lines there, I'll probably start at 150 grit, and then I'm going to sand it to the final shape and everything that I wanted, and I'll refine it further with 220 grit, and then it'll be ready for oil. While I do that, Josh is going to use knife cuts to just finish up his and he probably won't need any sanding. Let's do it. Let's go. Sometimes I like to take little pieces of sandpaper so that I don't crumple up the whole sheet. I'll just fold it up into a couple of pieces so it's a little bit more pliable, and then I want to take this and sand along the grain. This is really important. Sanding along the grant instead of across the grain is going to allow the abrasives to follow the shape of the spoon and not make a whole mess of our finish here. I also really want to maintain the integrity of the knife work that I did, and so I really only want to sand areas that are actual problem spots and fair those out. I have a little nick here that I need to deal with, so instead of just sanding a whole bunch right there, I want to fair that out by sanding along the grain for the entire length here. I had some trouble with some grain out here so I want to smooth this bit up too. I'm going to sand in straight paths so that I can follow the grain of the wood. Then, of course, basically going to use the sandpaper as an eraser for my permanent marker here. As I'm doing this, I'm running my hand along it, feeling for any places that my fingers catch on torn out grain, and I'll take those and fair them out along the shape. As you're sanding, you can actually move your spoon around and try to catch the light. The light will catch on low points or uneven spots, and so you can use that to help you point out the areas that really need to get sanded. While Anne is sanding, I am using my knife cuts to just cut away the marker that I have on here. I'm also using it to clean up the long lines. Just as Anne is using the light to catch the low spots for sanding, I'm also using the light to see the shadows of the long lines of these knife cuts. If you are careful enough and you go slow enough and take a light enough cut, you can create a long, nice knife line that will look really nice in the light, obviously with practice though. There's a functional difference between what we call knife finishing or leaving the surface that the knife makes and sanding. I always think of it like split ends. Split end is when one of your hair, the end of it splits away. It makes it look frizzy or fuzzy, and that's what's happening here. The wood fibers, they're actually being scratched flat. What that does is when you add water, it will make them swell. A lot of times, sanded spoons, particularly ones that haven't gone through the process of sanding, adding water, letting it swell, and then sanding again, will become fuzzy and they'll lose their definition. Whereas a knife finished spoon, because we have sheared the fibers and cut them clean, similar again to cutting off those split ends with a pair of scissors, this will actually keep it surface and stand up to multiple washings and look like this for a very long time. What Josh said about a sanded spoon is absolutely correct, but there is a little bit of mitigation we can do as far as that split ends analogy he was talking about goes, and that is to move up within our grits. I started at 150 grit and I faired out all my edges and I made this nice and smooth. When we're working with dry wood, a lot of times we do have to resort to sandpaper because it's just your grains not cooperating and without, like Josh said, a lot of practice, it's really hard to make these lines perfect with just a knife. We'll mitigate a little bit of that by moving up to 220 before we finish the spoon. I'll tear off a little piece of this. As we move up the grits with sandpaper, we're really trying to remove the scratches. We've already shaped this how we want it to be shaped. Now we're just going to remove those scratches that the 150 grit sandpaper made. While we spent quite a bit of time removing material with that, we're not going to spend nearly as much time with this. We're really just going to refine, smooth it out a little bit more, and then if we wanted to continue moving up the grits, we could. But after 220, it's pretty much ready for oil. Another way we can mitigate that grain-raising issue is to actually raise the grain ourselves intentionally during the sanding process. I'm going to just squirt this with water and let that soak in for a second. If I look closely, I'll actually start to see those little split ends, those little hairs start to appear. I want to just rub this all in. But if I let this dry now, and then come back and hit it again with my higher grit sandpaper, I am going to pet down some of those fibers in a more permanent way. If you do sand your spoon, you can actually come back and re-sand if it ever does get too hairy, if you will. After I've let that grain raise a little bit, I'll come back in and sand it back down. You can actually do this a whole bunch of times, but the law of diminishing returns eventually. Give this one last pass, one last feel. See if there's any high points or anything that I want to address still before we add our finish. One last cut and this one's ready to go. Now you can actually see really clearly the difference between a knife finish and a sanded finish. His already looks really, really polished. He's severed all of those fibers, whereas we've scratched the fibers, but this will pop back out a lot once we add our oil. Now, let's do the fun part. This is really the best part of any woodworking project, is adding the oil. When it comes time to add oil to your spoon, we like to use walnut oil. You can really use any kind of edible oil as long as it doesn't go rancid. So no olive oil, but yes grape seed oil. Yes, walnut oil. Yes, mineral oil. Flax oil as well. Flax oil is great too. Flax oil is a little interesting because it actually can yellow your woods. We like walnut oil because it doesn't do that nearly as much. But I'm just going to apply it to a paper towel, and then I'm going to start rubbing it on my spoon. This is, as Josh said, the most satisfying part of the spoon carving process because you really start to see that grain pop. Usually a painted wood, if you've designed your spoon with your wood grain in mind, you can really, really get some beautiful spoons even out of a really commonplace wood. Now, if I have an unlimited supply of oil, I like to soak my spoons overnight. But with this, the most important thing is that we give the end grain, where the wood is thirstiest, lots of oil. We just keep rubbing it on, pretty generously at first, and then we rub it dry as it starts to soak in. Now, because these are kitchen utensils, you're going to end up washing them. You don't want to put these in the dishwasher, it just gets too hot, too fast. But they're perfectly fine handwashing in a sink, even sitting it in a sink full of hot water with soap and water. The thing though about the kind of food safe oils that we want to use particularly with things that come in contact with food is that all of these are going to be washed away by the modern dish detergents that we have. A liquid soap is made to cut oils and fats, so all of the oil that's sitting on top of the surface, when you go to hand-wash it, it's going to wash away. Some will soak in to the wood, but not that much. As you're using your wooden spoon and it's getting much love and use in the kitchen, every now and then, you just want to take your oil and you can put it on a paper towel. A lot of times what I'll do is just pour a little bit on, and then just rub it in by hand. This will make the color comeback and just keep it from drying out, because that's actually what we're avoiding here. The term for it is hygroscopic. That means it wants to adjust to the relative humidity in the air. This is why sometimes doors stick in the summer when it's really rainy because it's absorbing all of the humidity and it swells the wood. But if that swelling and releasing of wood happens too fast, piece of wood will crack. By putting this oil on it, it just keeps that moisture absorption from being too dramatic and will actually make these last and last and last. All right, my friends. This is a handmade spoon. It looks like you made it.
17. Final Thoughts: Well, you have done it. You have gone through the entire process, from buying your first piece of wood and using your knife to create a spoon. Hopefully, it's a spoon that you'll actually use. This is my great grandmother's cast iron pan, and my spoon fits the bottom perfectly and does exactly what it's meant to do. Josh, how about yours? Oh, my goodness. It's like I'm using a custom cooking tool that I made myself. What a good feeling it is. It's awesome to literally just feel it. I would encourage you to admire your work because you did a really good job. We would love to see the good job that you did, so make sure that you post some pictures down in the project gallery so that we can see them. Ask questions, you'll get answers. We'll be hanging out in the comments section, and we can't wait to see what you do. I hope you learned something. I hope you have a kitchen spoon that you're proud of, that you'll use every single day. We hope to see you next time. Bye. Bye.
18. Bonus: Sharpening Your Tools: Let's talk about what to do when your knife gets dull and how to keep it the sharpest it can be. Sometimes it's hard to tell when a tool is dull except that it just stops working as well, but until you have enough familiarity with your tool, that's not the best diagnostic criteria, because you don't really know when it's not working well. But there are some quick tricks that we can use in order to quickly assess the condition of our blade. The first one is taking the knife in your hand and finding some overhead light that's directly above you or that's going to directly come at the blade. If you look at the cutting edge of the blade, sometimes when it dulls, you will start to see light reflect off of that. It's difficult to see some times but when it's dull it creates a surface, a very small surface that light will reflect off and it will look like glinting or glitters of light along the cutting edge. That's one thing we can do to check. Another thing we can do to check is just looking at it from the side. Upon close inspection, you can see sometimes, like our knives get, you can see it looks almost like a serrated edge. When it's not, it's supposed to look like one clean one. That'll tell you also that it's starting to dull. The other thing that you'll start to notice as you start to use your knife is that, when you make a cut, if the knife starts to dull, it will actually leave what look like scratches in the path of your cut. When a knife is completely sharp and it's cutting, we always use a test. I'll show you right now, but it just should shave the hair off of the back of your arm. This one isn't, so this one needs just touched up just a little bit. When we are sharpening, lots of people use stones, but those get pretty expensive. To keep this low cost and actually to keep it portable and versatile, what we actually use is automotive sandpaper, which is used in the auto-body industry. It's made for cutting metal and polishing metal. We use little sticks and we create something called a sharpening slip. This is something I learned from a knife maker in England. I have a set of them at different, what are called grits. You can think of those as just rocks, different rock sizes. Big rocks are going to remove metal really fast, little rocks are going to remove smaller amounts of metal and start to smooth things out. We refer to them as grits. But the lower the number, the bigger the rock, is like a good rule of thumb. This is the kit that I use when I'm sharpening my knives and it lives in my box that I have all my knives in. I usually will start at 400, then just double my grits. Go 400, 800, 1,500 because there's no 1,600, and then I finished with something called a leather strop. This is a piece of leather that I have oiled and charged, is the term, with something called a honing compound, which is a wax or a paste that has a very, very fine abrasive or rock in it. That will just keep it at the extra little bit of sharpness. It'll also maintain your edge. When we teach sharpening, we usually talk about that there are three phases to sharpening. There's grinding, sharpening, and honing. Grinding is when things get real bad and you need to fix your angles, or if your tool is old and you're starting a brand new blade, you're just going to re-establish the two angles that are coming together. That's all really sharpening is, is actually just two flat surfaces that come to what's called a zero-radius intersection or where there's no round over. They just come to a straight, straight point and meet at the middle at a peak. If we can do that all along the length of the cutting edge, then we have something that's sharp. Oftentimes what actually happens is that, there's a extra little angle at the top that we can't see with our eyes. Even though we may be trying to sharpen, we're actually not getting out to that very, very edge. We have to go back to grinding in order to take things back and meet at the middle. After that, we then do what's called sharpening. I know that's a little confusing because the whole process is called sharpening. But what sharpening is, is after you have established your fixture bevel, then what you're going to do is refine it and make it even so that the scratches that are left with these abrasives or with the sand papers that they are consistent and then they're consistently removed by the next smallest particle size that you use after that. After we do that up to about 1,500, that's all sharpening. Then what we're going to do is just refine that edge and that's just taking that last little bit, truing up the edge. It's also what we do after we've been using things for a while. It just makes it so that those little serrations or those little scratches that are left behind, they don't get worn away and start to get bigger and bigger, which is going to happen as we start to move our knife through the wood, which is what we call dulling a knife. If we can just every so often come back to a honing strop, this will actually make it so that we can go longer and longer in-between sharpening and still have the same quality of sharpness in the blade that we first got it at. Let's look at how to sharpen and then I'll show you an example of how we'll make one of these little sharpening slips and you can make a kit for yourself. It's really useful because, like I said, you can take it anywhere and you can use them on anything. I use mine on my knives, but also axes, garden tools, basically anything that need sharpened, these find their way into helping me. Once you've established, "Yeah, my knife is dull and it is not cutting right." We're going to come to our sharpening slips. I'm going to start and I'm going to say this one, it's not bad, but it can use some touching up. That's also going to tell me where in this process I'm going to start. I'm not going to go to the really big rocks if it doesn't need to be really fixed or repaired or the angle needs to be brought back into alignment. If I just need to re-sharpen and make things sharp again, I'm going to start at some of these higher grits, like 400 or 800. For this one, I'm probably going to do 400. I'm going to take a sharpie, which is a coincidence, but it is the most useful tool for feedback to tell you whether you're doing your sharpening right or wrong. What we do is you're just going to find your bevel, luckily on these knives, because this bevel is so long, you can see it really easily. On something like a kitchen knife, the bevel is very, very small and it's just that last little glint of light at the end. It's much harder actually to maintain those than it is for these, because when I put this down on a surface, I can feel when that bevel actually lands on it. What I'm going to do, I'm going to take my sharpie, I'm going to color in my bevel. I'm going to try to maintain, just keep it on the edge, and then just fill it in with my sharpie all the way. Most people get into trouble while they're sharpening because just like with our knife movements and our ax work, body mechanics is really, really important and we introduce a lot of error just by the way that we use our body. That error might not seem like a lot, but when you're talking about microscopic levels of abrasion where it's taking things off at like 800 grit, whatever size particle that is, a little twitch of your hand can actually change the whole angle of your blade and make it so that it's not sharpening more, even though we are sharpening. We need to learn also how to use our body consistently and to create the straightest and most consistent line that we can, and so that this blade will consistently move across our abrasive surface, evenly sharpening our tool and making it so that the angle is consistent, not just at the part that we sharpened, but all along the edge. I'm going to take my 400 grit. I'm actually going to use these. These are similar to the set we're going to make here in a second. But all I need to do is I need to find a surface where I can stand over it and I can stand with a wide stance. I want to get what's called a power stance. That means I'm making a triangle with my feet. What this allows me to do is shift back and forth on my feet. If I were to hold this line, notice how the piece of wood actually moves in a pretty straight line because I am moving from my hips. This is the straightest line the human body can really make, everything else moving from our shoulders, our joints, those all make an arc, a curve. This movement, even though there is a bit of an arc to it, this makes a very smooth, smooth motion. When we're trying to move something straight across a surface, we want to use that straightest line we can, which is this movement right here. Get your dance moves out and get a little bit of shimmy in there. But we want to stand so that we are going to start on one foot forward, and then we're going to lean or move back onto our back foot. If we hold our hands out in front of us, and I start here and I end here, that's about where I want to be with my sharpening slip. I'm going to stand underneath and if you can get underneath the cabinet, this also helps. But this is going to allow me to lock my hands against my body, hold this tool against it so that I'm not introducing those small errors. Again, if I'm trying to move this in a straight line, just using my arms and my hands, look at how much it's actually moving. Even though I feel like it's relatively flat, my muscles are causing little twitches that are going to change it. We need to make sure that everything else is locked, we're as predictable as possible, just like with our ax and knife work. I'm going to start at the far side, and I'm going to drag it towards myself like this. As I'm moving, I'm going to move down and end at a little bit of a tilt up so I can get on this little curved bit at the top. Our finishing mark, which is going to be right here, is a little bit lifted up off of the abrasive surface and we can find where that is actually by holding our hand or arm against our leg and then grabbing our knife. I can push down, making sure that the bevel is down on the surface here, and this will actually tilt up a little bit. That's actually where I want to finish. I want to feel what that feels like and see if I can find something to reference to help me to make sure that I've done that. If I finish, the knife is going to touch my leg right here, versus if it's not, it's down a little bit more. This gets a little bit tricky, but with practice, you can really hone this in, pun intended. I'm going to start here, and then I'm going to finish here. The sharpie is going to tell me what kind of job I did. Let's just take a test stroke here. I'm going to hold my knife using my middle finger and thumb, and then I'm going to hold it as close to the hilts as possible. What that's going to do is make it that I don't accidentally tilt the knife handle down because I'm trying to apply pressure to it. The thing that's actually holding the knife against the abrasive is my index finger. I'm going to rock it forward onto that bevel, and then I'm going to help my other finger to just hold it in the middle, and then I'm going to drag backwards ending in that spot. Then I'm going to check, I'm going to look to see what kind of job I did. You can see here I got the middle parts, but they're still sharpie at the edge right here and on the back which means that this part of the blade is lower than the middle part of the blade which means that this probably actually needs to go back one step in order to be sharpened or to be ground back so that this whole thing, when I take a swipe, the sharpie is removed evenly. I also noticed I tilted too far forward on that side because if sharpie is left right here, that means I actually did this. We need to make sure as we're moving back and we're doing that tilt, that we just take it a little bit less. Well, let's imagine that this is nicely ground and everything is right and I'll just show you what sharpening is going to look like. Again, we want to be slow and correct versus fast and wrong on this one. I'm just going to put this on a table somewhere where I can lean over it and I'm going to lean back, try not to make any movements. If this is slipping or anything, I would probably want to put like a piece of grit tape or sandpaper, something that I would just keep it from skating around. If I press down hard enough, it will actually allow me to keep it there. Let's sharpen our blades. Notice how much I'm not using my elbow, my wrist, my fingers, everything is trying to stay as locked as possible and if I could get even closer I would probably right here. But for the camera, we'll just stay a little bit out. Every so often I check where I'm at. Again, I'm still coming up too high on that part, so I'm just going to be careful there. When you're first learning how to sharpen, sharpening is a skill on its own. This is something that nobody told us. I thought if I learned wood working, sharpening comes along with it. But sharpening really is something you also need to practice and there's a deep rabbit hole you can go down on your own. These are the rudiments or the basics. If you follow these, you'd be in relatively good shape, but it's always good to learn more. I'm going to keep going and I am looking for what's called a burr to be turned. A burr is a piece of metal or actually the fatigued metal that's getting pushed out to the edge. Though metal is being removed, it's also being moved as well. If I move my finger away from the opposite blade on the other side, I can start to feel what feels like a little catch or a hang. What that is is the metal from the other side folding over like this and I'm feeling that burr with that wire edge. That tells me I've gone all the way out to the edge and that I can actually stop and flip to the other side. With this just because I stay right-handed, I'm going to push and I'm going to start at the bottom here and then come back at the top like this. If you can, it's always a good practice to keep your movements the same. If you were to switch hands and get that practice in, because these are so thin, that would be good as well. Just make sure you're doing the same movement like that. Every time you go to your sharpening slip, it's always a good idea to put your sharpie back on there so you can see how you're doing. It's really the only thing that gives us feedback at the beginning because though we could film ourselves side-by-side, it might look like we're doing the same motion. Our results will show that we're different if we look at the sharpie. So that's the thing that's telling us if we're tilting just a microscopic amount forward or backwards. I'll do this until I feel a burr as well on this side and then that tells me I'm going to go to the next grit. Then from here, I go 400, make a burr on both sides, 800 until I feel a burr, 1500 again. What's going to happen to that burr because it's a wire edge, it's a piece of metal, it's continually being folded back and forth and back and forth and eventually, it'll actually just break off like a wire. If you've ever bent a paperclip and you bent it back and forth, it bends but then over time what happens is it actually breaks and it suffers what's called metal fatigue and that's what's happening with our sharpening. That wire edge is continually getting folded back and forth. Let's say we've gone through all of our grits and we now are at the honing stage after I've finished with my highest grit. First, I start by charging my leather strop and just rubbing this honing compound or a paste onto the leather and I'm just going to very, very lightly drag my cutting edge against that leather. I'm going to do one or two swipes and then drag it the other way as well. We keep ourselves very light right here because leather compresses. Because it compresses, what will actually happen is that as I press down on it, it'll want to roll against my edge doling it. I need to be careful that I don't press down too much and this is just going to touch it up. If I've done a good job, then every 30 minutes or so, if you just come back to this strop and just strop it, you'll get a fresh edge again and it will actually last longer between sharpenings. But if you wait too long, then you're going to end up having to do a lot of work. I will tell you, you don't want to get into grinding. Grinding takes a long time because there's so much metal to move. If you can just keep your knives touched up, you're going to be in great shape. I'm going to show you how to make this on your own. We'll do one together and then it's up to you to put them together. I think you can buy this but really it's better to just learn how to make them. Automotive sandpaper, you can actually get it pretty cheap and a lot of it and these are just sticks you can get from your home center. As long as they're flat, you can check them by just sliding down the line like that and looking to see if there's any warp that this line and this line, it's straight, this is a good piece for making our sharpening slips. Now, what I'm going to do is, I want to line this up on the top and on the edges. I can use my fingers on the top and the bottom like this and just a feel if it's sticking out or if it's lined up correctly and I want it to be flushed at the top so that everything is square as I'm wrapping around. Then I want to hold it very tightly. What's important here is that everything stays really, really flat so that when we put spray adhesive on and we wrap it, that there's no bubbles or anything because any bubbles or the form if there is a warping in our board, that's actually going to transfer and almost become like a mold for our sharpening. We want it to be as flat as possible. I hold it flat like this and then I'm going to once again, double-check that it's square on the top and the bottom. I want to push my finger, my thumb against that edge so it pre-creases it again, making sure that it doesn't bubble up or push it. I just want to pre-crease it all the way up just like that. Then I'm going to take that off and I'm just going to make sure that that's nice and sharp like this. Now, what I'm want to do, I'm going to do that same thing for the sides. Holding it on the edge, making sure that it's nice and tight right on that edge, still lined up. There's no bubbling. Like that. You can take this off. Now, going to take our spray adhesive, I'm going to shake that up really good. This is something you want to do outside, definitely not in your home. If you are on carpets and you do this, you'll regret it for probably years to come. We are going to spray this like spray paint. We're going to start off of the edge and we're going to end up off of the edge. That way it'll leave a smooth and consistent misting of glue. We want to be careful that we don't get glue on this side though because that will cause us problems especially as we're creating metal dust and we'll have to start all over. I'm going to hold this up and give it a good spray. I want to make sure I don't see any big clumps or globs, that this is nice and even and smooth. I can use the light reflecting to check to see where I've done this. That's enough that it's been covered. Then I want to let it sit for just a few seconds and I want to test to see how sticky it is or if it's too slick by just touching it. If I see strings coming off like that, that tells me I'm ready to go. Now, I'm going to start in the corner and I want to make sure that I'm very careful not to let anything else touch, line that up first and then work my way outwards. I'll just get on that edge first. Again, I'm being very careful that I don't make any bubbles underneath. That everything is nice and tight. Work one side at a time. Now, I'm going to wrap it around the corner like that. Be careful that if you have any spray glue on your fingers, that you don't get it onto the thing you're so careful not to get spray glue on. Then again, working from the corners away from that and then to make sure there's no wrinkles that get introduced. Then just give it one last little press all the way around. If you use these dimensions, you'll be left with a little edge right here and we'll just take a utility knife and just cut that off, making sure that we don't cut our wood. This has an exposed edge on purpose so that as we're sharpening, we don't actually start to grind away at the inside of our knife right here. That way we can get all the way up to the edge without then also grinding the part that we don't need. You want to use a utility knife for this. This is what I have. Don't ever do this. Now make that clean and just check your edge, make sure everything is nice and tight. Right where that grit was so that way after this wears down which it will and it's made to, you can then just peel that off, replace it and you have yourself a whole little set of sharpening kits that didn't cost very much or really costs less than the price of just one sharpening stone wood. Keep those knives sharp.
Anne Briggs, Builder, Farmer, Educator
