Carving Kitchen Tools

By Moa Brännström Ott

Carving Kitchen Tools is the beginning of your woodworking journey and is a practical guide to creating your own beautiful utensils.

From the all-important wooden spoon to butter knives, salad servers and spatulas, Moa Brännström Ott shows you how to create kitchen implements that will bring individuality and personality to your home. As well as this, Carving Kitchen Tools explores the variety of different woods, their properties and the whittling techniques to which they are most suited. With step-by-steps to illustrate the correct grips for knife and wood, tips on how to source your wood and details on the tools you need, this book is the perfect guide to this surprisingly simple and mindful craft.

Projects include:
Butter knives
Frying utensils
Straight spoons
Curved spoons
Salad servers
Kuksa cups

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Oct 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781911682653

Moa Brännström Ott

Moa Brännström Ott is a Swedish crafts carpenter and has whittled since she was a child. She has a diploma in furniture carpentry from Capellagården and has earlier written the book Wood (2017).

Book preview

My hands’ desire

I don’t carve wood because I need another spoon. Neither do I carve to make my next object better than my last, or quicker to complete. For me, it’s the process that’s the whole point. It’s always a bonus that I end up with a finished object.

I am a comfort carver. I can sit with the same spoon for several hours, several days, and carve tiny, tiny facets. I carve a little, touch it a little, look at it a little, carve a little more.

There is something magical in how a simple piece of wood, that doesn’t look like it’s much more than a humble log, can attract a human’s full attention – sparking the creative urge and desire to spend hours transforming it into a spoon. Absolutely fantastic things can hide in those pieces of wood. The happiness you feel when you find a piece of wood, cut it and start carving it, and when you get to see the different hues in the wood, the pattern of the growth rings and other details that only you as the carver will notice – it’s like striking gold!

Let your crafting be exactly what you want it to be. You carve for your own sake, not for anyone else’s. The principal aim with crafting nowadays is to fulfil the desire of your hands and your soul. Regard this book as an inspiration and a guide on how you can go about it, then try to find your own way and your own expression. It doesn’t have to be unique and it doesn’t have to be perfect. The most important thing is that it makes you feel good and you find joy in your creative practice.

IllustrationIllustration

Cross-section of a tree trunk.

Wood

Most people will know that you can find out the age of a tree by counting the growth rings. This is because the tree grows at different speeds throughout the year, and the different growth stages will give the wood a different colour. When the ground thaws in the spring, the tree’s moisture content will increase and the wood will become softer and lighter in colour – this is called spring wood. When summer arrives, the wood will become darker and harder. It’s the tree’s growth speed that determines the distance between the growth rings. Slow growth will give denser growth rings and stronger wood, quick growth will give more sparse growth rings. This way the cross-section of a tree trunk will tell us about climate variations through the years, and whether the tree has been exposed to damage or disease.

If you look at a cross-section of a trunk you will see that it is made up of several layers. The tree’s outer bark gives it protection from the surroundings, for example rough weather and diseases. Thereafter comes the inner bark, which transports nutrients to the different parts of the tree. Underneath the inner bark is the cambium layer, where the new growth rings are made.

The younger, lighter wood closest to the bark is called sapwood or alburnum. It transports minerals from the tree’s roots to the crown. Within the sapwood is the older heartwood, where nutrients, oils and resin are stored. This makes it darker and harder than the sapwood and it doesn’t contain as much moisture, giving it a higher dimensional stability. Heartwood is the best wood for carving and carpentry. The heartwood continues all the way into the pith at the core of the tree.

GREEN AND DRY WOOD

When talking about wood for carving, you refer to it as either green or dry. You get green wood from freshly cut down trees, or freshly cut off branches. When the tree is freshly cut down it contains a large volume of water. The amount varies depending on what time of year it was cut down – it will contain most moisture in spring, and least in winter.

When the wood is green it’s a lot softer than when it’s dry, which makes it easy to work with using an axe and knife. The wood’s fibres are a lot softer and stringier, which makes it easier to see and understand how the grain moves through the blank (blank is the name of the piece of wood that you will use for carving).

But green wood is also more delicate than dry wood. You will need to take into consideration the drying process, which will start the moment it’s cut down. During the drying process the wood will shrink and can therefore warp and split. You work the wood roughly while it’s green, meaning that you carve the dimensions and shapes you want but leave the finishing until it has dried. This means there’s an allowance for adjusting any warping or other changes that might have occurred during the drying process.

How long it takes for an object to dry isn’t possible to pinpoint; it will completely depend on how moist it was to start off with and the volume of the wood. Larger and thicker blanks will dry more slowly than smaller and thinner ones. The easiest way to find out is to touch the wood to check whether it feels moist to the touch.

When the blank has dried, you can carve the finishing cuts. Now is the time to adjust any warps, clean up the surfaces and carve the details. The carved surface gets a completely different sheen and becomes a lot more beautiful once the wood is dry. Make sure that your knife is freshly honed so that you get a nice clean surface.

When you carve wood that is already dry, you don’t have to worry about it splitting or warping. That risk has passed, so you don’t need to make allowances for this when carving, meaning that you can carve the object completely straight away. The disadvantage is that the resistance is a lot higher in dry wood than in green wood, and the wood won’t be as responsive as when it’s green.

If you are carving dry wood, you can try to remove as much material as possible using an axe or a saw before you put your knife to it. Because it’s harder to carve, you won’t be able to remove as much as efficiently using a knife as you would when green, so if your blank