The vast majority of times i've hitched it has been a highly pleasant experience, some of the best encounters of my life have been hitching.When someone picks you up it is an absolute joy, it's exciting to travel so fast and to meet someone new, to chat and share an hour or so in someone elses company especially if you've spent the last few days alone. It also feels good that they wanted to pick you up, that they have added to that pot of positivity we all rely upon to make life good. But you don't need to feel the burden of debt to them because it is no bother for them, it's one of those perfect win win situations.

That said I was pretty gutted not to have been picked up the other day when i was trying to get up North. especially as, though now i am settled i have access to a car, i didn't have any money to put petrol in it, but it was an important trip so i borrowed money and drove, if i had planned i would have been able to book a cheap coach or something but i hadn't.

 I had decided i wasn't going to hitch anymore, basically i was pissed off that for 4 1/2 hrs nobody had bothered to pick me up. But luckily whilst i was driving up the M5 there was a hitcher obviously i always pick up hitchers (all hitchers do). This man was absolutely fascinating, he had been on the road for 20 odd years and knew the country and it's roads inside out, he also knew a huge amount about what he called Freeman Laws, during the hour or so he was in my car he gave me a whole wealth of information about living on the road that is of great use to me. But my lasting impression was that these old laws most of which still stand made a lot of sense and were designed to protect the individual.

A lot of my moral beliefs are based upon individualism and i passionately believe Laws should protect the individual who can be overwhelmed by the greater powers that exist. So it is good to know Laws still exist to protect a person (man or woman) and that it is legal and right for a person to exist and make his or her way in life.

Whenever i am asked to join a community or travelling band i decline, part of the joy of being on the road for me is being alone, but that does not mean i do not support their cause, making a persons way of life illegal is a very dangerous thing, and if we make it impossible to exist as the lowest common denominator, we lose part of being human.

Anyway i will be back hitching again, and i'll stand there with my little cardboard sign out and if someone wants to pick me up they will and if they want to shout Pikey! swear at me, spit at me, or throw food at me (all of which has happened), i will stand proud knowing i have done nothing wrong that my lifestyle is just as moral as theirs and i will do my best not to hate them because hate gets us nowhere.

As far as i'm concerned the only thing that is important when it comes to using a knife is that it's sharp. Don't know whether any of you have had a go with a flint knife but my view on knives completely changed after using one. It was flint that a friend had knapped and to me it looked for all intense and purposes like a little splinter of flint. But carving with it was an amazing feeling someday i'm going to save some cash and go flint knapping with John Lord and may never use metal tools again! Ion Constantin looks like he is using a hacksaw blade stuck in a bit of wood and i've been told by Robin Wood that he sharpened it with a file!

At the moment i use a Frosts 106 for most of my carving. Previous to that i had been using a 120 which i had to make a handle for - after cleaving a tough bit of wood with it i twisted the handle right off! That said I find these swedish knives have the perfect handle for me, and i only carved myself a new one because the old one broke.

When holding the knife with a standard forehand grip it is more comfortable and gives you more power and control if the handle fits snug in the palm of your hand, i was teaching a four year old girl some knife cuts not so long ago and although she was quite competent she would have found it much easier if the handle had been shaved down a fraction so that she could close her grip. i don't really get all the so called ergonomic grips you see on different knives because i change the position of my hand quite frequently up and down the handle and in reverse i find a symmetric one very useful.

One thing that Ben Orford a tool maker pointed out to me is that with laminated blades people tend to make the bevel more and more shallow because the harder metal abrades away more slowly, i have found this to be the case with my knives though i do like the angle to be pretty shallow for softer woods. I usually tell people that the laminated blades are better because they are quicker to sharpen but i think i'm just repeating what i've heard elsewhere and is not neccessarily true. Fritiof had some 120's rehandled and a home made knife in hard steel (sorry i don't have more information than that) His short knives had large bellys this is something most people reduce by accident when sharpening. The belly of the knife is extremely useful for reaching the middle of large flat areas and for slicing cuts with a thumb push, and for getting into nooks and crannys. All people are differenmt and have varying techniques, i at present am still sold on longer knives, but Fritiof made the point that most of the wear on the knife is towards the hilt and when sharpening a long knife you have to sharpen the whole length which is harder to do the longer it is. When doing big powerful long slicing cuts i find i don't use the length of the knife at all, but i do use it on levering cuts and you get much further travel that way. Often when doing a reinfrorced pullstroke i have my hand all the way up the blade with my thumb in contact with the last inch or so, on a 106 this part of the blade is small to get around tight corners but also remains sharp for doing long finishing cuts. Fritiof had a knife with a fatter bevel for cutting knotty bits etc, this is a very good idea and i intend to do so now i can have a few more knives at my disposal. Especially as i usually find i'm sharpening because of hitting a knot and rolling the edge, i think having knives like del stubbs with the back of the blades rounded and polished is very nice for your hands but also good for pushing back knackered edges (always use lubrication!)

getting bored now, i will probably write more on this and try edit it so it reads better.

hopefully more photos on tumblr by end of day http://barnthespoon.tumblr.com/

I now have some photos of spoons on Tumblr barnthespoon.tumblr.com some of these photos you may have seen on my blog and many are from my facebook account which i have now closed. i intend to keep the tumblr account just photos of spoons. Tumblr is much better for photos than blogger so i hope to be updating them quite frequently but there will not be much if any information with them just photos. I'll post tomorrow morning about knives.

One of the first questions people ask me on courses is how green the wood needs to be, this seems such a strange question to me now. But as a child turning wood on an electric lathe i used to turn green wood in the round (wood that has not been split in half or quarters but has been left whole with the pith running down the centre)  beautifully long (40/50 foot long) and dripping wet shavings would stream out the end of my roughing gouge and make a heap on the floor, i would take whatever object i had made inside with the knowledge that over the next few days it would dry and split. But that was ok because for real projects i would order wood from craft supplies (the Home of Woodturning), they would send various shapes and sizes of different woods from European Cherry to African Pink Ivory. Their wood was magically square sided and have wax on the ends, unfortunately it took several years before i understood that shipping endangered species across the planet wasn't what i wanted, and that virtually all the wood growing in this country has a use in woodwork and is very simple to convert to useful wood.

When wood is living it is full of water, probably something like 50% of it's weight, as it is worked into some form of product such as a spoon or a plank water evapourates from it's surfaces and depending on the dryness of it's new environment the product will continue to lose water until it reaches some kind of equilibrium.

As the wood dries it skrinks, gets harder and is less readily split along the grain. Because wood is made up of tubes the water evaporates from the ends of the tubes more readily than the sides this is why the wood from Craft Supplies came with wax on the ends. The wax prevents moisture leaving the ends of the tubes and therefore the moisture has to leave through the sides this is a slower and more even process. If the moisture is allowed to escape from the ends of the tubes that wood will skrink faster and may cause splits to occur this is notable on the ends of logs and can be prevented by painting them with wax/pva.

Wood skrinks more tangentally than radially (radially is from the pith outwards) and virtually no skrinkage occurs longitudinally. Tangental skrinkage is often twice as much as radial and in some species as much as five times. This differential skrinkage causes wood left in the round to split. If the wood is cleft into quarters and then turned round when the wood skrinks it should not split but will skrink to an oval cross section.


Green Wood Pros
It is readily available (grows on trees)

It is easily cleft along the grain into usable blanks
It is softer so is faster to shape and is kinder to razor sharp tools

Green Wood Cons
The wood skrinks so that whatever is made green will be a slightly different shape when dry (this varies considerably between species)
Depending on the species the surface of the wood can oxidise (not sure whether it is actually oxidising) this changes the colour of the wood, if the product is then reworked when dry it will have a different colour making it patchy.

Seasoned Wood Pros
In theory no skrinkage though there will usually be some change this is much less than Green Wood.
Dry wood is hard and therefore a razor sharp tool can leave a smoother surface than on Green Wood.
No colour change.


Seasoned Wood Cons
Expensive
Not easily cleft
Harder to work
Blunts tools quicker


Fritiof made a big point that when doing fine knife work like signing a spoon it is much easier when the wood is bone dry. In fact all fine work is better done when dry this is because the wood has much less "give"/flex when you try to cut it. If the wood flexs half a millimetre when you are trying to cut a quarter of a millimetre wide incison it is not very good. Fritiof was not a fan of half dry wood, he liked the wood wet and to either rough shape with an axe and then finish when it it is bone dry or to start and finish all in one go.

When i sign my work i tend to just make 2 incisions but there are times when i  make 3. I'm not certain what Fritiof did but i'm fairly sure he was using 2 cuts. The incisions he was making seemed almost vertical, at some point i'll do a long post on my engraving techniques, but a top tip is to not angle the cuts too shallow as that makes the grain tear more easily when turning corners. He was using very sharp tools which were hollow ground on a Tormek then honed. The problem with using the tip of your normal knife for engraving or detailed work is that most people aren't very good at sharpening and getting the very tip (by this i mean the last quarter mm) of your tool razor sharp is not easy, i think it is better to have a couple of different knives unless you have reason to only have one knife. Incidentally Fritiof was using short knives for virtually all of his work, these knives are easier to maintain an edge on. I use a frosts 106 but this is mostly because i want to have as few knives as possible, i keep that razor sharp then i have an old frosts "bushcrafty" knife i use for rough work and non spoon work. next post will be a bit about knives. More on knives next.

Fritiof seemed pretty sold on Birch, i brought with me a load of spoon blanks because in theory i was going to sit in the corner and carve spoons whilst the course was going on, in the end i only made 16 spoons during the whole course, several times Fritiof mentioned that the wood i was using was too hard and my tired hands agreed with him! Some of the wood i was using was London Plane and not only is it hard as nails but the grain switches direction laterally very frequently this is beautiful when finished but hard work/good practice. I too am sold on Birch it is a beautiful wood, it was re-introduced to me a couple of years ago after one previous bad experience with it i had discarded Birch as no good (woops!)

The other blanks i had were cherry and alder, the cherry was unusually hard but had fantastic colourings as did the Alder. I think Alder is a fine spoon wood like Birch it is extremely forgiving whilst carving with a nice close even grain though not as hard as birch i consider it to be harder wearing than willow. I was pleased to hear Fritiof was a fan of Hazel which is definitely in my Top 5 favourite woods, recently i have been staining hazel spoons with tea it really brings out the grain.

I like cherry but it's uneven skrinkage is a irritating, i tend to make my spoon blanks with tangentally cleft wood so that the top of the bowl is orientated towards the bark. If the wood is straight and you allign the spoon so that you get nice symmetric rings in the bowl then the spoon should shrink symmetrically if you don't you get what i call a wonkey donkey (these spoons deserved to be loved too though). I also make the spoon wider across the bowl because cherry tends to skrink much more in that direction.

When travelling i use whatever wood i can get hold of = smaller diameter stuff, which will have more knots. If you have larger diameter wood then you can split it into quarters and then split out the middle bit than contains the pith, this usually removes most of the knots as well. This wood is of a better quality as the tree has a larger canopy which means it needs to lay down stronger wood and also has the resources to do so. The wood at the base of the tree is much tougher and has a more "intertwined" grain on some harder more fibrous woods this can be a hassle to carve but on Birch it is lovely. Now i am settled i am hoping to use larger diameter stuff.

From a sales point of view i find the spoons sell much better when i have a variety of different colour woods, one of the problems with pale wooods like birch/sycamore/willow is they show up dirt more easily, each time someone picks up a spoon i find myself hoping they've got clean hands. Being sat on the street it can be hard to keep the spoons clean - a lot of black dust comes from roads/cars i'm sat next to.

Tomorrow i'll write a bit about Green V Seasoned wood.

It was a real pleasure to meet Fritiof a spoon carver from Sweden at a course organised by Robin Wood his meeting has brought about many ideas which I thought it might be good to blog about. I generally try to blog about things not covered by other spoon bloggers because i know most of you read all of them so the next few posts will be stuff that stood out for me. One of the first things i noticed about his spoons were the beautiful long carved facets, Fritiof usually creates most of these with a drawknife on a dumb head shaving horse. I have often wondered whether the more bushcrafty of you out there have come across these contraptions? they are wonderful machines, if you have had a go on one and didn't find it good then the the one you used wasn't any good (or blunt drawknife). A shave horse makes things much faster, as you can clamp the spoon rock solid but you are also able to change it's position very rapidly and you can hold the drawknife with both hands giving you a greater amount of control. On a shave horse you use most of your bodies muscles from feet to hands which creates a lot of power and removes wood fast. You obviously don't need to use a shave horse and we had no horse on the course, but when at home making large numbers of spoons he does. I tend to use a shave horse when available for the back of the bowl, this is particularly for spoons made from straight wood, this means that to shape the back of the bowl you need to cut across end grain which can be hard work. I tend not to use the shave horse for other parts of the spoon as the type i have is not so good at clamping them (i have one with two arms rather than a dumb head), a horse that is very quick to make and quite a good comprimise between the two is the Mike Abbott lumber horse, though on his design i would prefer to replace the soft wood with hardwood for the arms and use good strong fixings. I was interested to learn Fritiof also uses a curved drawknife as i do, the curve should not have a tight radius, but allows you to round things more easily and also removes wood faster as the shavings on a round will be wider. wide + long shavings = fast. I also find concave drawknives very useful because they can get into a much tighter curve than a straight one. When on the road i cannot take a shaving horse around with me but i will get my one from storage soon enough, particulalry for increasing my ouput for the christmas market.

Had a great time as ever up Edale way with mr Wood (can't believe he changed his name to Wood just to sell more bowls). This time was particularly special as it was a very rare oportunity to meet someone who has carved more spoons than i have. I'm going to put up several posts over the next few days whilst thoughts are still fresh in my head, needless to say it was a very rewarding trip. It was also great to see Steve who has as diverse a background in green woodwork as anyone i know and is mower extraordinaire. It was also great to meet some other people in the flesh i had previously only known online.Many thanks to Robin for the invitation, spending a few days in such good company carving spoons is a beautiful thing.

Declaring the summer was over caused a heat wave, which has been fantastic. In the photo below is my new eating spoon, my last one broke after experimenting with using a dishwasher, i now don't recommend putting wooden spoons in the dishwasher! This dark brown spoon was made in birch and was the last one i couldn't sell from a large batch. I've been using it since August and it's been stained from making coffee and has now been oiled with walnut oil.

Thinking a change might be good i tried several different designs of eating spoons but i couldn't find one that worked better than my standard octagonal handled ones. Having said that i have been making extra long versions (between 9-12 inches) which have a lovely recurve in them, the recurve prevents you holding the spoon upside down by accident when in the dark, this only happened to me once and was hilarious, it also has a lovely balanced feel to it, has a greater reach and is brilliantly flambuoyant. When i get round to it i'll create a page of spoon photos and you can see a lot more of my different designs in more detail. The Spatula was a moving in present for myself i now own five or six spoons of my own, the other spoons in the rack are my friends spoons i made a few years ago.

I've got hold of a load of lovely London Plane which has a fantastic grain and some amazing bends that i'm turning into ladles, the knots are destroying my knives but sharpening now i'm in a house is ridiculously fast.  This is because i can store more tools such as my japanese waterstones, they cut so much faster than the DC4 ceramic i've got which is so hard it takes a lot of toing and froing. It's so good being able to use all my different spoons for research and development.

Well it had to happen at some point, i had hoped to hold it off until november but having decided i wanted to live with friends this winter when the opportunity arose i took it. It has been a while since i lived in a house but there are obvious practical reasons to do so, having a hot shower every day is a beautiful thing. I am very happy to be surrounded by friends and by paying rent i am on an equal footing, if there has been one thing i have struggled with over the last two years it has been people taking advantage of my poverty. I'm very excited about the new opportunities of city life and there is nowhere i'd rather be than bristol for this winter. Below are photos of my room, the garden i hope to have a workshop in and a days work. I am already planning next years travels, those of you awaiting a visit will have to wait a bit longer i'm afraid.

This shop keeper's got the right idea, loose leaf tea is a beautiful thing, it's great in the woods cos you've not got bags to get rid of. My preferred tea at present is co-op own brand loose leaf, It's nice to have somewhere special to keep your tea, when settled for the winter I'm going to start making some shrink pot caddies to compliment my caddy spoons... I'll post some photos shortly.

Toby and Ali work chesnut starting with coppice they process the wood and install their product, mainly fences and gates. I'm a big fan of chesnut particularly paling fencing it is very functional and beautiful.
I really liked this spoon with it's massive head, it's quite a large serving spoon really but has a small handle, I find a short handle is often much more practical, as it will stay put in the dish rather than falling over the side. These guys live in a converted truck, nice and snug for the coming winter, so hopefully the compact spoon will be useful.

Here's a photo of an unfinished spoon. Actually liked this one so much I was determined to keep it for myself, but some guy made me an offer I couldn't refuse, and he looked like he would be a good home for it. Don't think i've posted a picture of my home before.

But I do mind being a hippocrite.

Its been a strange day!  Its been a long day, I got out selling at 9 after an hour and half walk into town. After around eight hours selling I've made £25, it's not much but it'll do.

For the first time I sold a spoon to a big issue seller, it's interesting that a big issue seller will usually make more money than I do. He was surprised, but I know many people, good people, that sell the big issue and they all make more money than I do. Much of that money will be spent on drink or heroin, but that is not all sellers, and I don't see those "addictions" in a different light to all of our "addictions".

In a good day buskers can make anything up to £100/hr, in a city it would be unusual for a busker to make less than £60 in a day.

One of the really beautiful things about my life is the relationship I have with other people on the street. Whether they are rich patronising people buying my spoons, or wonderful people i've met last year who have bought a spoon before and would like another one not to support me but because they want a spoon, I love my chats with street cleaners, market stall holders, town criers, buskers, the nice man in the pasty shop, they are my community and I love them. I would like to share more with you about these people.

Anyone that knows me knows I likes the coffee, and I tend to sit in a cafe like I am right now to charge my phone, use their toilet, fill my water bottle. I find I am much more comfortable in a big chain than a small independent, I am more likely to get away with being here for a while after i've finished my drink to charge my phone, and less notable in a busy place with air conditioning, particularly if I smell, when I look rough I am less likely to be treated badly too. The price is also considerably cheaper, I have just eaten two rounds of chicken and stuffing sandwiches for 65p from the reduced shelf in tesco.

I hope I have never billed myself as some kind of hero, I definitely don't feel like one. Though I feel like I am winning, is it to the detriment of others? Am I just one big disappointment?

Karen lives up a steep hill and I arrived a bit of a smelly mess, as I walked into her front garden she had loads of beautiful lavender growing I grabbed a bit gave it a rub and put it in my shirt pocket, lavender grows everywhere in cities and is a great odour disguiser. Karen spends much of her working life empowering people, I think her work is massively important.

Made a spoon for a lovely couple Tom and Amanda just outside bath a couple of weeks ago. They have an amazing baby and are living the dream, whilst I was there we watched Robbo v Banksy on tv, it was a really interesting take on it, I for one have got a bit bored.of banksys stuff, it was great when it seemed subversive 10 years ago but now seems overrated.
It was interesting the point they made about the skill involved and at what stage of creation the skill is used. There is rivalry between those that use stencils and those that spray freehand. I much prefer the simple symbolic freehand examples such as the one below from the bristol bath cycle path.

I love the stereotypes that cross my path (or maybe I cross theirs).

I have had a great month taking it easy in old haunts and took this photo in one of my favorite places. The lady in the photograph is feeding the pigeons. I saw her last summer doing the same thing, this year I asked if I could take her photo. She told me of how hungry they are, its because the council keeps everywhere too clean theres no crumbs for them. I love that she feeds the pigeons.

Funny things birds, I know very little about them. in the past I have grown tired of people/greenies that I meet going on about them. I think the assumption that I care about the environment any more than a regular joe irritates me, we all make assumptions though -we can't help it.

having said that there have been times when birds have sunk deep into my mind. Before the real onset of my spoon obsession I got caught in a moment using a beautifully worn turned wooden spoon to pluck eggs out of the pan they were hard boiling in. The simple task of fishing out one egg at a time with this perfect humble spoon overwhelmed me with completed focussed joy, I was consumed in the moment, I was so content. 

Chicken or egg? My love of eggs came well before my love of chickens, but over the last 12 months I have become a big fan of those beautiful  egg making machines. At a friends woodland where they are well set up I had the job of taking the scraps down to the chickens on a loverly summers evening, again I was lost in a moment, a simple task a sense of satisfaction. Having the space in my mind to experience these simple things, without using rational thought, has been a lifelong need, the more space I have for these experiences the happier I am.

I am in london now and it was here that I saw a group of six or so children around the age of five chasing pigeons. I was carving spoons by marble arch, and this motley crew of boys and girls had self assembled in an anarchic co-ordinated hunting party, as if instinct prevailed the children running like driven maniacs attempted to divide and conquer the flocking birds at once huddled together and then airborne again. A strange energy surged through the children the look on their faces as they hurtled towards the pigeons is etched on my mind.

Birds have obvious symbolism in our cultures, for a while  I was obsessed.with the image of a bird in a cage. There is a fantastic bit in the film The Prestige where the illusion of the bird in the cage vanishing is revealed for what it really is.

whilst hitching the other day I saw a pigeon wing beautifully displayed on a busy A road stretched out on the hot tarmac the rest of its body nowhere to be seen.

Strange phenomenon of hanging poo bags, anyone else noticed these, I guess people get bored of carrying them, I see quite a lot of them on my travels.

How to finish a spoon? Moulds are always ready to start eating any living thing, particularly when they're dead. If there is not enough moisture then moulds can't survive, so it is best to store wooden spoons in a dry environment. Oiling is another option that keeps moisture away from the spoon. I think the mould on this unoiled spoon with the yellow turmeric stains looks beautiful.

Heres a swedish style eating spoon i carved for Becky, the spoon is made from Holly, i rubbed some lemon that they had onto it to stop it discolouring, holly is a lovely hard wood it's distinctive smell is very evocative of my childhood days making Holly walking sticks. I met Becky last winter whilst peddling in Bristol. Becky and her man were having a bbq the night i stayed, i awoke to a bacon sandwich and a lovely strong cup of coffee, there was a great sense of team work as the others that had stayed along with Becky and her brother were putting on a small festival just outside Bristol. I miss that sense of a common goal on the road which is generally quite a selfish way of life.

I'm in bristol at the moment, trying out a smart phone before i buy one myself, i think it's working well and will be a good investment. it would mean that i could keep my blog up to date and maybe offer spoons for sale online, the tariff would also probably be less money than i normally spend on OS maps when i'm out and about. I made this ash handle for a file this morning, i've made it to the spec that Chap (short for Chapter 12 one of my new young friends) wanted, he does up a load of old bikes and cars, and this file is usually used for enlarging holes. He's got a load that he needs handles for but it would be so much quicker to do it on a lathe, i'll do the others in london on my pole lathe.