A weekend in the woods
- Ian Ryder
- Apr 8, 2022
- 4 min read
My mythic quest to become a proficient woodworker continued last weekend - with a two day course of greenwood spoon and bowl making in peaceful woodland near Lewes, Sussex.
The course was run by Danny Harling (you'll find his site here), and I can't think of a more pleasant, productive and happy way to spend a weekend. Danny is a great teacher, full of wisdom and enthusiasm, and somehow managed to make us all, despite our lack of experience, capable of producing something we could be proud of.
We were pretty lucky with the weather, which certainly helped... lovely blue skies, albeit a bit cold. The sessions started at 10am and finished around 5pm, with a hearty lunch, tea/coffee and cakes thrown in along the way (not literally). We had around 10 people on the course, and there were plenty of tools, benches and shave horses for everyone. It worked well, starting with bowl and spoon making demonstrations and a safety talk ('I have a trauma kit but don't want to use it...'). As we worked on our own projects, Danny and his experienced helper Peter popped round regularly to see how we were were progressing, so you could always get help and advice whenever you needed it through the day.
I decided that bowl making looked a bit difficult so opted to try my hand at a spoon made from a piece of green cherry (unlike everyone else, who immediately became completely bowl obsessed...). The start was not especially encouraging... but I could still feel my 'inner viking' starting to wake from his slumber...
As time wore on, and I got to work with the knives, gouges and (especially fun) a draw knife, my humble effort began to get distinctly 'spoony' - a useful technical term that we invented along the way, as we admired each other's emerging masterpieces:
To help me get to this point Peter had asked me a disarmingly difficult question - 'what kind of spoon are you making?'. I really didn't have an answer to that, as my primitive intellect had not progressed much beyond imagining a vaguely bowl shaped object with a handle sticking out. With Peter's help, this developed into something a bit more sophisticated, that you might actually be able to use... Along the way, I learned through trial and error how to carve and whittle for best effect (or at least better effect) by taking account of the grain in the wood, leaving the tool marks much more pleasing and less like the aftermath of a mini chainsaw massacre.
Freshly encouraged by returning home with a spoon that did not cause Christine to burst immediately into a fit of giggles, I decided to up the ante on day two, and go full on bowl. Sensing her opportunity, Christine had placed an order for a 'nice shallow bowl or platter, but make sure it's not rubbish' - so no pressure then... Danny kindly picked out a suitable piece of cherry and chainsawed it down to a blank I could start from, securing it with screws to a short plank so it could be fastened to a bench to work on. I marked out the diameter of the bowl, but after looking at the blank Danny advised that I make it a little smaller to allow for the removal of the softwood near the bark on the outer edges of the blank:
Once on the bench, I started to shape it with a gouge and mallet - and quickly found that chipping away at a lump of greenwood was mysteriously therapeutic. By this time, most of the others had started on spoons (a much quieter exercise), and the woods echoed with the gentle hammering of just a few of us remaining bowl makers - like a family of oversized woodpeckers embarking on a new avian housing estate.
By the time the day was over, the bowl was suitably 'bowly' (another technical term, but don't bother to try to look it up) and I had even managed to come away with extra goodies - a cherry mallet (kindly made for me by Peter), some hornbeam to make legs for a carving bench (courtesy of Danny) and a couple of wonderful trout supplied ready-prepared by another Peter, a lovely and most generous chap we met on the course. All in all, it was a truly memorable weekend and we came away with a much better feel for what carving greenwood is all about - plus in my case a real eagerness to carry on.
The wonderful, but also rather challenging thing about greenwood is that it undergoes a lot of rapid change as it dries. I discovered that it feels really quite damp as you work it, but within a week it changes significantly. Also, the look of the wood transforms as it dries, so don't be put off if the variations in the green blank seem a bit OTT, they will mellow during the drying. I am also finding that the easiest way to judge the drying (even though I have a moisture meter) is to weigh the bowl every day - this one has lost around 300 grams since I brought it home, and it probably has another 150 to go before the moisture content (and hence weight) stabilises.
So for the record, here is what my 2 days in the woods got me - along with a lot of happy memories. Once these have dried fully I will do a little more carving to clean up the tool marks and then give them a simple food-safe oil treatment of some kind. Maybe nothing that impressive, and certainly not a time efficient basis for a new and profitable cottage industry to fend off the current round of rampant inflation.. but deeply satisfying nonetheless!
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