Sanded Spoon!!

Well all of my original spoons 12 years ago were sanded and i was really pleased with them at the time, when i see them at my parents house i also quite like the naive Aesthetic they have. I have wondered if you can make an item functional what is the point in chasing down different designs and trying to perfect them? i think the answer is some of us are just chasers and i think beautiful spoons are a good a thing to chase as anything else. Anyway this spoon is interesting for a couple of reasons, firstly it has been made from a bent branch you may be able to notice the elongated rings in the bowl, if the bend in the branch perfectly follows the curve of the bowl then you get straight grain and no rings at all, in my experience it's rare to find a perfect match, and when you force it it definitely looks forced to me (i don't think that this is a bad thing). But i think it is not neccessary, certainly using a bend even like i have above will greatly increase the strength of the spoon not least because of the ripple in the grain that interlocks and also looks pretty.

So i've cocked up and left my old spoon knife in London, and all i have now are my new (lovely) Spoon Knives, i am still very excited about these, and i'm looking forward to exploring the shapes of bowls they will  make, i am finding that i can finish the bowl of a spoon in about half the time it was taking before with a lovely uniform finish. 

So you may ask why i have sanded the inside of this spoon. Well because the spoon knife is symmetrical it has quite a limited size bowl it can make. When you carve with the grain (which i find faster) you need to maintain enough shallowness to the bowl so that you can tidy up the middle across the grain. I'll forgive myself because this type of knife is very new to me (if you know anyone that uses one like it please get in contact), but i was left with a few fine hairs in the bottom of the bowl and had run out of space to change it. Having recently picked up some old stuff from storage i found some micro mesh that i used to polish my wooden jewelry with, this starts with 1500 grit and secveral grades up to 12000, i did it all in just over 5 minutes, under a warm running tap (hot water from a tap is a luxury i adore), the water lubricates the very fine abrasive as well as keeping the grain from flattening, i let it dry and gave it a quick rub with the 12000 again. As i hope you can see from the photo it leaves a very smooth finish which you can see you can actually see your face in. I used this spoon to eat with last night, and was nervous that i would prefer it to the carved finish i leave on my spoons. Luckily i did not like it at all, and shall not be sanding any more spoons. Disappointingly all my housemates liked it because they think it looked nicer, don't know what to do about that : (