I've made another spoon over the last few days (another Christmas present made). I used some cord looped over a square wooden board clamped in a vice as a quick and easy way to try
@Inspector 's suggestion. It worked well to get things started and knock off most of the excess wood.
I've also bought a couple of spoon gouges and a spoon knife and they made cutting a deep spoon hollow easier. So another step forward I think
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A nice spoon, that.
Almost exactly one year ago I took up the spoon carving after seeing and using some wooden eating spoons when having dinner at a friend's house. Love at first sight! He spent a few evenings over the next month teaching me the basics.
I say "basics" but the necessary skills are many and various. In particular, the actions of axe and knife cuts, along with the various workpiece hand-holding grips, are fundamental. They seem awkward at first but, as with everything else, practice (and persistence at it) makes perfect. It really is worth learning and practicing to ability to hold a spoon with one hand whilst working it with a tool in the other. Not least, you'll avoid slicing your own flesh. But it also creates a somehow more satisfying creative process, free of unnecessary doodads.
There's lots of good YouTube vids demonstrating and explaining the modes of holding and applying tools to hand-held spoon-chunks of wood. Barn the Spoon has a good website demonstrating theses techniques and a whole lot more. £60 per year when I last looked but new joiners can get a "free" gift worth at least that much. (I had the axe head and handle, which is a very fine item indeed for £60).
A vid about knife actions on a hand-held spoon:
Barn the Spoon's Spoon Club website and its many instructional vids:
https://www.spoonclub.co.uk/
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To date I've made just over 60 spoons, spatulas, forks, ladles, spurtles and sundry other kitchen/eating items, from willow, cherry, beech, apple, hazel and a mystery log. I've followed the extensive design advice available (I find books best for that aspect) so the things are primarily form-follows-function. But I also try to add a little bit of decoration and elegance (not really my forte, though, those aspects).
When the bug bites, as it can, one extends the range to bowls, shrink pots, kuksas and perhaps treen in general. New aspects of woodworking arise (as well as a lot of illumination concerning wood structure and edge tools that's useful in cabinetmaking too) so I've learnt, for example, how to spalt a log to a condition where the patterns and colours of spalting are obtained without the punky rots. I've also begun a bit of decorative chip-carving and kohlrosing (drawing pics and patterns on the surface with a knife tip then colouring them with, not coal dust but, ground coffee or cinnamon powder).
In short - don't assume that spoon carving is a "simple" kind of woodworking with not much to learn. It's a door into a vast realm of wond'rous techniques and creative possibilities.
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That all rambled, there are methods for holding spoons in forms of vise to allow actions such as gouging. I like best a small Parrot vise with home-made jaws of softwood lined with thick rubber got from the discarded inner tube of a tree-murdering machine in the local forest. (That makes it "green", see). This vise swivels and can be used flat as well as upright. It auto-locks in place when the jaws tighten on the workpiece.
https://www.axminstertools.com/axmi...6192?queryID=2a1784e82a9a5859f35672b49f5aa26b
Perhaps I can post more later, if you're interested, including a pic or two, of spoons, tools, work holders and everything!
