Last week I took you through the starting process of making a spoon and I had only dedicated an hour to it that day. You can see that post here if you missed it.
In the days that followed I was able to put in a further three hours of carving work on my spoon with my sharpest bush knife and it started taking shape nicely.
I decided against burning out the bowl of the spoon with a coal as I didn't think it would look all that nice so instead I tried to carve it out using just my knife as I wouldn't have a bowl carving knife out in a SHTF scenario...I'm just not that prepared. It was the most difficult part to get right as the tip of a knife can be used in the centre and swung round the right hand side to carve it out a little. The left hand side was more difficult as I certainly wasn't going to have the blade facing towards me as that could lead to a nasty accident. I ended up having to carve both right and left handed to try and get the bowl carved but even now, a more curved blade would help tremendously to carve it a little deeper and get a better bowl shape.
Carving with your non dominant hand is not adviseable and was the only time that I hurt myself doing this - when the blade slipped off the wood and the point punctured my finger. It only bled a little bit and I didn't even bother putting antiseptic on it, but in a SHTF situation, I probably would have put a band aid on it after cleaning it with Dettol because in that scenario my blade probably wouldn't be as clean as it is now and my immune system probably wouldn't be as healthy as it is now. It's something to always keep in mind as a small infected cut without treatment could lead to septicemia (blood poisoning) requiring medical intervention as well as anti-biotics.
All things considered though, for three hours of extra carving work, I think it came out okay. It's about the size of a teaspoon but due to it's shallow depth, it only holds about 2,5ml of liquid, so it would be ok for making coffee but it would take a long time to use it for eating soup for example.
The front of the spoon was also quite difficult to carve as the wood there was exceptionally hard (the hardwood essentially), so I had to carve it from all sides in small sections to get it down to the correct size and shape.
The handle was actually the easiest part even though I thought that taking off that much wood would be a lot of work, because I had sharpened my knife, it glided through the material like a hot knife through butter and with the long strokes, it went by pretty quickly. I left the handle quite thick so that it would be stronger than if it was only 1cm diameter as it may be more prone to breaking then and it's still a comfortable enough size to hold.
All in all it was a good exercise to know which parts would present the most challenges and which parts would take the longest. I've decided that it can now stay in that bowl with my other decorative spoon for now, but maybe if I need to get out of dodge it'll earn a place in my kit.
What would you have done differently if this had been your spoon? Let me know in the comments.
The image is my own