Christmas break

At the moment I am enjoying a very welcome christmas break. And even though christmas always comes with a busier schedule than anticipated, I still got some hobby-projects done. The whole plum-project is now finished and in bottles, for instance. The two varieties of liquor/schnapps turned out to be very pleasant drinks. We made a sweeter variant where we boiled the fruit and added a bit more sugar, and that is a nice drink to sip from. The unboiled and less sweet variant turned out to be great for a shot after christmas dinner as a digestive.

The strong stuff. Left the less sweet variant, and on the right the sweeter one. Boiling the fruit resulted in a very different colour.

The plum wine project is now also finished. It was my first brewing project and it was a lot of fun. I learned a lot of new things by trying this out and I will certainly keep on brewing. The wine turned out to be rich in plum taste, and on the sweet side. I have not measured the alcohol concentration in any of my brews this time, but it tastes quite strong. Certainly over 10 percent, and maybe over 12. Now I have six bottles of plum wine and six bottles of elderberry port aging in a cool dark spot. I will age them for a couple of months and pop open a bottle of each in may.

The plum wine. It has a very nice light orange colour, and it is clearer than this picture makes one think. 

I also found a few hours to sit down with a knife and some bits of wood, and whittled away at some butter spreaders that came is very handy during our christmas brunch. It is nice to see others use and appreciate your own work. Wooden spoons are not really used in the family, so finding the spreaders well recieved was nice for me.

Some spreaders. Fun to carve, and very useful. I will be making more and play around with the curves a bit. 

For good measure I`ll include a picture of the brunch-table that was a joint effort of the whole family where everyone made very nice things in abundance.

One of my guilty pleasures in this time of year is to have breakfast with the left overs of the brunch the day after. Gingerbread men, cake, a cinnamon roll and coffee from a sycamore kuksa? A proper start of any day I imagine.

The Second International Secret Spoon Swap!

It has happened! The initiative that was started on the Spooncarving Facebook Group where people from all over the world send spoons to each other happened for the second time, and this time I was a part of it. It is a very fun and exciting experience to send a spoon to a carver somewhere else in the world, and it is also very nice to receive a spoon that someone else has made. I have sent my spoon out to Ben who lives in the USA, and he received it today. Here is a picture that he took of it:

I myself received a very nice spoon and spreader from Don Nalezyty. It is very delicate and also very different from how I used to think about eating spoons. I will try to copy this spoon to gain  carving skill and insight in form and function. He also included a very nice spreader as an extra gift. Both utensils are carved from cherry, and the tooled finish on them is very good. Smooth and shiney. Needless to say I am very happy with them.

Kuksas

Last week I finished another wooden cup. The design might classify as a noggin more than a kuksa. My largest one yet. It is carved from sycamore and left at a tooled finish. Here are some pictures of the thing:

In progress. Up to this point most was done with the hatchet and the spoon knife.

Nearly done. In the picture are all the tools I used in the making. 

Done!

Swiss army knife for scale.

Hollowing this one out was a pain with just a spoon knife. It cost my a lot of time and both of my hands, but the result pleases me. I haven`t applied any finish to it just yet, but I think I know what I`ll do to seal it. I have experimented with using milk to seal a kuksa. I had a kuksa from hawthorn, but since it is a ring-porous wood the coffee seeped out through the grain. It seemed that all the walnut oil in the world could not seal the grain. I was adviced a myriad of solutions on the spooncarving facebook group where there are many experienced wise and friendly folk gathered. One of the solutions was sealing with boiling milk. The casein in the milk will seal the grain. I don't know exactly how it works but i do have a theory. Casein is a largely hydrophobic protein that is rich in proline-residues. When milk is boiled these proteins denature and can form aggregates that serve as a barrier between the wood and the outside world. I think that some proteins of the casein family can even form micels. This property could allow the formation of bilayer barriers that are rather stable. It does not really matter exactly what happens though. Bottom line is that the casein in the milk seals the grain from the outside world. The excess milk is poured away and wiped off thoroughly, removing the milk as a substrate for bacteria and preventing the kuksa to become bacteria-infested. So I went ahead and boiled said kuksa in milk:

It is important to not immediatly wash the kuksa when it is out of the milk. Wipe it down and rub it with a cloth instead. This leaves a lovey shiney finish and the cup is sealed. I have heard that this finish withstands washing in soapy water once it has had time to set. I gave it a few hours and then tested the cup with hot coffee. I`m happy to report it worked a charm. Next time I`ll finish a cup this way I`ll do it differently though. Then I`ll just pour boiling milk in the cup to the rim and leave that for a few hours. That is an easier approach that must work just as well if not better.

For the rest I am very happy that my copy of the book "Swedish Carving Techniques" arrived last week. It is indeed a wonderful book and I understand what all the fuss is about. A lot of knowledge and inspiration is gathered in these pages.

Bottling of the Elderberry port

The elderberry port is finally in bottles. The fermentation stopped a few weeks ago, and this weekend it was time to get it into bottles. I had the help of my brother, which was really nice. There are just many things to hold and and extra pair of hands is really convenient. Here are the pictures of what we did. Started by placing the demijohn on the countertop, taking care to not disturb the sediment.

 Meanwhile we boiled some corks to get them into the bottles, and cleaned out six bottles. I have tried to gather old used bottles, but couldn`t gather a sufficient amount of bottles with the right opening and size, so eventually I gave in and ordered twelve appropriate bottles for €0.80 a piece. Along with that I ordered a simple bottling-device. I had planned on using a mallet, but figured that I could just as well invest the €5,- in this device I`ll be using more often in the future.

 Above you see the bottling device that compresses a cork untill it fits the bottleneck and shoves it in. It makes life a whole lot easier. When the bottles were clean and the corks ready, we started racking the port into the bottles. In hindsight I think racking the port into another container before putting it in bottles would have reduced the sediment in the last bottle we filled, so that is something to remember for the next time we do this. The next picture is a bit messy, but getting this process on is tricky enough while holding tubes and making sure the bottle doesn`t overflow.

 For the last bit of port in the demijohn you have to tilt to get it out without sediment. When all six bottles were full we pushed in the corks. This is a matter of placing the corks into the device, placing the device on the bottle, and pushing in the plunger. Here is a shot of my brother pushing one in.

 While we were at it, we racked off the plum wine into the now available (and cleaned) demijohn. This is to clear it further. The result of the evenings work are six bottles of port, an a racked gallon of plum wine of which we got to have a little taste.

 Since we didn`t degas the port, and want to know if there is risks of the corks coming out, I sealed the corks with wax. When the wax breaches we know the cork moves, and then we have to take action.

Six bottles of port. I like the colour. I didn`t really get to taste it yet though. The small sip I got was promising, but I couldn`t really taste all that was going on. In a couple of months we can open a bottle and see what we think of it. If people like it I want to scale up and make 12 bottles next year. Then there is some to give away as well.

More large cooking spoons.

Had some fun tonight, and made 4 cookingspoons. I hope to make two more tomorrow morning. After that I`ll have to take a look at the wine-project again. Botteling of the port and racking of the plum wine is scheduled for saturday night or sunday somewhere.

These spoons are all sycamore and all between 35 and 40 cm long.

I am experimenting with normal round bowl shapes and assymetrical bowlshapes that are supposed to help scrape tight corners in pots and pans.

Cooking spoons

A short and quick post to show some of the cooking spoons I made over the last week. The small two are from two halves of one apple branch and are about 26 cm long. The large one (sycamore) is quite a beast at 40 cm. I am investigating what a good standard size do-it-all spoon is, since the last few weeks several people have approached me wanting to purchase cooking spoons. (I know, I was surprised too.) I do enjoy these large spoons so I`ll be making a few more of that calibre.

For the rest I`d like to mention that I`ll recieve a pretty cool book at some point in the next few weeks. 'Swedish Carving Techniques', by Wille Sundquist, is apparently the green wood carving bible. It went out of print a long time ago and in the second-hand circuit it popped up every now and then for several hundred dollars. Now Taunton Press in the USA has reprinted it, and for 25 dollars you can call yourself de owner of this book. At first I was bummed out, because after a phonecall to the press it seemed like I couldn`t order the book since they didn`t take my dutch debet card or paypal. Then my faith in humanity got a huge boost when someone in a spoon-carving facebook group I`m a member of offered to order one for me. I very gladly took that offer, paypalled him the money, and now anxiously await the mailman to see why this book is such a big deal in the carving world.

Shrink pot. A picture tutorial.

While roaming the internet I found that there seems to be more information out there on how to make shrink rays than there is on shrink pots. There are some write ups done about them by people that are far more knowledgeable than me. Examples: Here is a blog post by Mark Emery, here is one by Robin Wood, and of course Sean Hellman makes fanstastic shrink pots as can be seen here. What I found lacking on the net, however, was a clear tutorial for novices such as myself. People nearly as green as the wood they work. And therefore I decided to produce such a tutorial in the hope that other green woodworkers have a place to start from. 

A shrink pot is a container that is made from a hollowed log of green wood. The bottom is made to fit the inside of the hollowed log and inserted into a groove that is cut near the bottom end. The green wood will shrink and lock around the bottom, resulting in a nice watertight container. They are fun to make and do not require much tools. I use a drill, a spoon knife and a knife for them. For materials you`ll need a bit of green round wood to make the actual pot, and another bit to make a board with for the bottom. This board is ideally made out of dried wood, but using green wood can also be done. Wood shrinks a lot more radially than length- or widthwise, and therefore the pot will lock the bottom in place fine. For the pot in this tutorial I used an apple branch for the pot itself and a some dry oak for the bottom.

First cut the wood to length and drill a hole through the middle. I use a powerdrill and a 25mm flatbit, but it could of course also be done with an auger or handpowered drill. When you use an auger it might be easier to drill the hole first and then cut the wood to length afterwards. The hole will give the spoonknife an edge to bite on and will speed the whole thing up a lot. 

 Here are the tools I used. A mora 164 and my carving knife (a rehandled mora 511). I am quite certain that the spoon knife is just a luxury to have here and that the whole pot can be made with the straight knife. The spoon knife is just more convenient and a bit quicker when it comes to hollowing out the pot.

 

Work the pot from both ends taking care to achieve an even wall thickness. I do not think there is a rule for wall thickness. Thicker walls will press on the bottom plate tighter when they shrink, but that also brings the risk of the bottom shifting or cracking in the drying process higher. This can again be alleviated by cutting a deeper groove and using a thicker bottom plate. You can play around with it a lot. I haven`t made enough of these to give sound advice from experience yet. I have, however, seen a lot of these on the net, and for this size (10 cm high, 7cm wide, bark not counted) a 1cm wall seems fair. I did not count the bark with the wall thickness or diameter. The bark does not add to the structure of the pot and is only there to look rustic. 

When the walls are thin enough for your liking, it is time to cut the groove. Determine what side of the pot will be the bottom, and draw a line spaced about 1 cm up from the bottom on the inner wall. 

 Then, using your straight knife, make a cut about 1.5mm to 2mm deep over the line. It is important to make this cut in a 90 degree angle relative to the longitudinal axis of the pot. That is because this cut will form the ridge against which the bottom plate will later rest.

 Then follows a part that I could not photograph on my own while making the cut, so I`ll describe it as well as I can. Coming in from the bottom side, make a cut that is similar to the previous one, but angled 45 degrees downward. This will remove a bit of wood resulting in a groove that has a sharp edge at the top and a more tapered edge towards the bottom. This will help the bottom plate slide in and lock on place. Here is a bad picture of the groove.

It is then time to carve the bottom plate. Begin with flattening the material you want to make the bottom from, and get it near to the appropriate thickness. In this case that is a few mm. Place the pot on the material and trace the inner diameter onto the wood with a pencil. I also like to mark the orientation of the bottom plate with a line on both the pot and the plate. I noticed it is not always obvious how the orientation of the plate was after you spent some time whittling it down, and such a mark that tells you exactly how you planned to put it in really helps. From here on it is just a game of trimming the plate down untill it just fits into the tube of wood. I find that tapering the edges of the bottom plate helps to achieve a good fit.

 When you can just about push the plate into the tube, tap it in further with your knife handle. If all is well it will click into the groove.

That is essentially it. You have now succesfully made a shrink pot. All that rests is waiting for it to actually shrink and gain a tight fit on the bottom. I trimmed the top edges of the pot a bit, and called it done. Here it is in a picture with my Opinel #8 for scale.

And a picture of what the bottom ended up looking like in better light. 

The pot can now be used. What for? Well, typically they are equipped with a fitting lid and used as containers for dry goods like spices etc. I like the idea of using one to grow herbs in in the kitchen. Momentarily it stands on a shelf holding some wooden spoons. Once dried it will get promoted to function as a cinnamon-container, I think.

I hope this tutorial is clear and inspires some people to have a go. Making a  shrink pot is very achievable, and doesn`t take so long. In fact, it took me longer to complete this blog post than it did to make the pot.