Cherry wood eating spoon #17

Length: 18cm (7 inches)
Bowl width: 5cm
Bowl length: 6.5cm
Finish: hemp seed oil

This big bold spalted blackthorn spoon eating has a symmertic bowl making suitable for left or right handers. It’s an exceptionally beautiful piece of blackthorn heartwoodwith dark patterns of fungal growth. However the wood is sound and the spalting has gone just far enouh for colour but not enough to soften the wood at all. The handle profile is narrower where you hold and wider at the end, that way it sits vewry sweetly in the hand.

Blackthorn is prunus family like plum and damson and shares the same exceptional colours. It usually grows as a prickly shrub on scrub land and in hedges and it’s rare to get large enough pieces to carve like this entirely from the heartwood. This was from Llangrannog in west Wales where I found it in a woodland having been cut down as much as a year earlier.

Length: 15cm
Bowl width: 4.5cm
Bowl length: 5.6cm
Finish: hemp seed oil

This pretty little blackthorn spoon has a different shaped handle than I usually make, probably dictated by the knarly piece of balckthorn it was carved from. It’s got a small amount of softer wood in the bowl – that pale line through the dark heartwood – that’s why is a little bit cheaper than other spoons here. In my judgement this wont be a problem and there’s years of good sue to be had from it. Blackthorn is tough stuff.