Spoons, Spoons and More Than Just Spoons

Every so often you get asked to do something that's just a shade out of the norm or absolutely not the norm. Making spoons is quite normal for me and making 35 is not quite so normal even though I have made thousands of them through the years. My first spoon was made in Texas when a Texan said he needed a mesquite spoon and a mesquite bowl to eat his oatmeal from. That was somewhere in 1988 I think. Back then 50% of my earnings came from turning 50% from furniture making. Mesquite trees surrounded me for hundreds of miles and was my chief supply of free wood for both making and heating. It is the only wood I ever used that could be turned green without cracking or checking, even if the piece was not hollowed out. Anyway, my first spoon sold for $20 and every spoon I sold after that started at that price and went on up depending in the intricacies of carvings etc.

Some of you wrote me and asked for pictures of the recent order and so I have just stacked them up for you to look at. I did enjoy making them and thinking about the people who would receive them as Christmas gifts. Cynthia, the lady who ordered them for staff and friends of the health care clinic she runs, came to one of my month-long courses as a beginning woodworker where she made the coffee table and the rocking chair. In one month and with no prior hand tool woodworking experience she became a competent woodworker in her own right. You judge it. How many woodworkers get to make this quality of furniture after a three-day introduction and without turning on a machine.

OK, enough said, here are the spoons I made over the past few weeks in individual format.