Wild plum eating spoon #9

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: 17cm  (6 1/2 inches)
Bowl width: 5cm
Bowl length: 7cm
Finish: hemp seed oil

This eating spoon is unusual for me having a slightly asymetrical bowl making it a right handed spoon. Cherry like this with some dark growth rings doesn’t come along very often.

Length: 17.5cm  (7 inches)
Bowl width: 4.6cm
Bowl length: 6.2cm
Finish: hemp seed oil

This eating spoon from a tight grained piece of cherry has a small knot in the back of the neck. It’s more of a beauty mark than a flaw and and wont effect it being used although it little extra care when cleaning wouldn’t go amiss.

Length: 18cm  (7 inches)
Bowl width: 4.2cm
Bowl length: 6cm
Finish: hemp seed oil

This elm spoon was made from a crook, a bent section of the branch, so the grain runs through the bown. Notice how there long oval rings in the bowl rather than the circles you see on some straight grained spoons. This makes the spoon stronger and the thin, slightly narrower bowl, makes it great eating spoon for main meals like rice based dishes. The elm dries very hard and should last many years of regular use.