sutton046

What a delight! On Sunday Feb 9th I ran the first "Intro to Green Woodworking" Workshop at Earthwise in Subiaco. Fantastic. My trip to the USA last year was all about this - to increase my skills and experience in this exciting area so that I could then better share the joys of green woodworking with others here in Western Australia. This workshop, the first of many I hope, was the result of 3 years of dreaming, reading, learning, upskilling and preparation. A truly joyous day! Carving spoons from green wood is a wonderfully relaxing activity. We spent the day under the big mulberry tree at Earthwise. A very nice and appropriate location. Why no green wood tradition here in Australia? In North America and Europe, there is a long tradition in green woodworking going back many centuries. However here in Australia there appears to be very little tradition in green woodwork in our European history. Here in the early days of the Western Australian colony, roofin...

While spending Christmas/New Year in Albany, Western Australia, I gave a hand to help with some gardening in a friend's garden. (For those of you readers in the northern hemisphere, this time of the year is early summer. While you were hunkered down hiding from the cold singing carols around the fire in your winter woollies, we were having Christmas lunch at the beach under a gazebo to save us from the scorching sun.) One of the garden plants we were cutting back was a Eucalyptus caesia. This species of eucalypt is grown as a decorative garden plant, with silvery leaves, drooping foliage, and beautiful bright red flowers. In its natural habitat it grows in arid areas as a sparse spindly small tree or mallee. There are two main forms in cultivation: the really weeping version and a more upright version. The one we were cutting back was the more upright. The wood is very dense, even outside of its normal habitat. An example of the version with with a more weeping habit. Pic thanks to...

Sometimes, an old saw is just not worth salvaging. Sure, if good enough, the handle and bolts/nuts can be all be saved to use again when repairing or re-building another saw. There are times when it is the saw plate that will be utilized instead. Amongst my huge pile of old saws awaiting rebirth, there was a very tired post WWII  Disston panel saw which had a ruined handle. The saw plate had a bit of surface rust, but nothing too drastic. I had a need to make some more curved scrapers for spoon carving, so set about cutting up the saw. This was initially done with a guillotine. Saw meets guillotine ...  Dividers were used to draw curves on the ends of the pieces of saw plate, and the guillotine and  heavy tin snips were used to remove much of the waste. The rest was done with a bench grinder, to create the final shapes of the scrapers. The first few scrapers taking shape. Once the required shapes are made good with a bench grinder, the scrapers's edges need...

I love carving wooden spoons. And I'm not even Welsh. Over the last few years, Spoon Carving would be one of the most popular of the public workshops that I run. It is a wonderfully tactile process and a lot of fun. In the Northern Hemisphere, wooden spoons are predominantly made from green wood. We don't have such a menu of suitable timbers here in Australia. So we do some things differently.  I use mostly hardwoods for wooden spoons. This requires different tools to the green wood spoon makers. Hardwood spoons are incredibly durable as kitchen utensils. As decorative items they are great to carve, take a finish well, and are pretty tough. A sample of spoons ... such fun to design and make! The sample of spoons pictured above are as follows, from the top down: The first spoon I made, 1990. WA Blackbutt. Rather mechanical in nature. Sugar spoon, WA Blackbutt.  Kauri Pine spoon, recycled from old fireplace surround. (See below...!) Cooking spo...

At last, I have finally organised the March 2013 round of public workshops. The delay came about when I was unable to secure my normal venue, Earthwise in Subiaco. However I am happy to have secured an alternative venue - the PVI/CIA Workshop space in West Perth. What a great line-up of workshops! The ever-popular favourites are there, including Carve a Wooden Spoon , Make a Kitchen Chopping Board , Making Cajon Drums (Parents and kids together), and Make Kitchen Spatulas & Salad Servers . In addition to these, there are a couple of new ones: Make a Small Picture Frame and Carve a WELCOME Sign will be fantastic opportunities to push your woodworking hand skills into new territory. Make a Traditional Wooden Stool is one of two workshops being run at times which may suit people while their kids are at school - an experiment in accessibility. For those wanting to discover the wonders of planes, there is The Plane Facts: Learn to choose, use and enjoy hand planes - an exciting...