Manuka Spoon Part II

The spoon is taking awhile and I am a bit behind posting about it. I actually still have not finished it but it is almost there. The amount of time I spend sitting relaxing by a fire is pretty minimal as I always end up starting late in the day and inevitably charge about just trying to get where I want to go, finding wood, cooking, choking down my food, and then hoofing it back home to beat the dark. 

I have to rethink my whole approach to get a bit more relax time. The whole point of it all is to enjoy myself in the outdoors and not worry about things like phones and deadlines. Instead I spend a lot of it racing against the clock. The simple answer, of course, is to get up earlier....*shudder*.

So the spoon bowl. I don't have any fancy carving knives except my awesome Mora kniv. But I learnt a technique from Survivor Lilly on youtube - essentially you want to scoop up a good hot coal from the fire, a little one does the trick, hold it down with a stick and blow on it hard. It works surprisingly well as long as you don't mind getting dizzy, accidentally sucking massive hits of smoke and burning your cheek with a hot ember flung from a coal. I has a hole in my face :( .

Very interesting how the heat has changed the character of the wood in terms of how it carves. It almost feels chalkier if that makes sense, and really is not as pleasant to work with. 

Most of the bowl was done on my Rimutaka Rail Trail trip, and I gave the shaft a good working over on the trip to Smiths Creek. I'm really loving how it is taking shape. In hindsight it was possibly the wrong kind of wood to use being all gnarled, knotty and cracked. On top of that an insect had burrowed a winding path through the entire length of the wood. But I reckon not many people can say they have a Manuka Spoon!

Doing a bowl on the Rimutaka Rail Trail

A good Smiths Creek shafting.