Using the sloyd involves a handful of grips that are somewhat modified depending on the circumstances. As each comes up in the process, I will break it down, but from that point on I will simply refer to it. The first and probably most important of these is the hand squeeze. Some people refer to this as the thumb push, but I’ve moved away from that name because it’s actually misleading. It’s not pushing with the thumb that makes this cut powerful and controlled, but rather closing the hand holding the spoon itself that pulls the spoon back against the knife edge. If you push with your thumb, you’ll have a fraction of the power and will eventually damage your...
You will notice that I have not said anything about templates, which is because I am emphatically anti-template. I used them early on in my spoon carving, and I feel like they stifled my growth as a carver, keeping my work from undergoing the evolution in both design and skill that pushes it forward. I felt like using a template was shutting my brain off. For the past five years, I have drawn every single spoon and spoon blank I’ve made freehand, and the growth in my work that has occurred in that time has been partly down to this practice. Even when a form feels settled in my mind, and I’ve carved dozens or even hundreds of them, drawing...
The basics of sharpening are simple enough to understand, but when I was learning how to sharpen it took me a long time to accumulate all the pieces, largely because I was task oriented, focused on sharpening this particular tool, and I didn’t have an appreciation for the general principles and how they applied to all the tools in my kit. So at first, here, I want to focus on the overarching ideas about sharpening that you need to have fixed in your head, and then I will walk through the common tools one by one, discussing the finer points. When I say that sharpness is a nuanced idea, part of what is going on is that there is always...
Every woodworker who has kids or grandkids has probably experienced the feeling of wanting to share our love of making things with the kiddos, but we also don’t really know the best way to do it. If you have a shop full of power tools, those are obviously “right out” for a seven-year-old. They’re hazardous and loud and pointless unless you’re in some mode of production. Hand tools are more approachable, but they harbor dangers of their own. Giving that seven-year-old a sharp chisel or hatchet is equally foolish. Working through the final copy edits of M&T’s newest title, Greenwood Spoon Carving by Emmet Van Driesche, I couldn’t help but be struck by Emmet’s clear and thoughtful articulation of this...
