Drying slowly, oiling once, and what the cracked spoons taught me

Cut 01 of 04

Why a spoon cracks while it dries

Wood shrinks as it loses water, and it loses water much faster through end grain than through the sides, in the same way that a bundle of straws empties from its open ends. The tip of the bowl and the end of the handle are end grain, so they dry and shrink first while the wood behind them is still wet, and the stress opens a small check. Once a check has started it runs further with every day of drying. The thinner parts of a spoon also dry faster than the thick ones, so a spoon with a thin bowl and a chunky neck is pulling itself apart from the moment it leaves the bench.

My first summer of carving I left finished green spoons on the balcony railing in the sun to dry, because it seemed the natural thing to do. About half of them cracked at the tip within two days. What I do now is slow everything down. A freshly carved spoon goes into a brown paper bag with a handful of its own shavings, and the bag sits in the kitchen cupboard away from the radiator for three or four days. Then it comes out of the bag and sits on an open shelf for another week or two. In winter, with the heating on and the air very dry, I leave it in the bag longer.

I have also learned to carve so that the spoon wants to dry evenly. That means keeping the thickness consistent from the bowl through the neck to the handle, and making sure no pith is left anywhere. Cherry gets extra care: I leave the rim of a cherry spoon a little thicker, and it dries in the bag for a full week.

Cut 02 of 04

Runout, and the handles that snapped in the first week

Runout is what happens when the fibres of the wood do not run the full length of a part of the spoon but leave it partway along, emerging at the surface at a slant. A handle with runout looks perfectly sound, but the fibres are only a few centimetres long before they exit the side, so it has almost no strength along its length. I had three handles snap in the first week of use before I understood why, all of them from blanks I had laid out by eye on the split face without checking the grain direction.

The fix starts at the block. Because a split follows the grain, a split face shows the fibres running the length of the billet, and if I lay the handle along that direction it will be strong. Where the log has a twist or a bend, I follow it and let the spoon take the curve of the wood rather than drawing a straight spoon across curved fibres. Some of my favourite spoons came from branches with a natural crook near a fork, where the grain already bends round the crank of the spoon. The tell-tale sign of runout during carving is the knife suddenly tearing instead of slicing on a flat part of the handle; when that happens, I thicken the handle or accept that it will be a short spoon.

Cut 03 of 04

Finishing cuts on a spoon that is bone dry

When a spoon comes off the shelf after two weeks I weigh it on the kitchen scale, write the weight on the back in pencil, and weigh it again a few days later. When the number stops falling, the spoon is dry. Dry wood carves quite differently from green: it is harder, it cuts cleaner and it takes a crisp facet that stays crisp. I use this for the final pass, taking a very thin cut over every surface with a freshly stropped sloyd knife to remove the slight fuzziness raised during drying and to sharpen the lines between facets.

I do not use sandpaper. That is partly taste, because I like to see the knife cuts, and partly practical, because a knife-cut surface stays smoother after washing than a sanded one, where the fibres lift again the first time the spoon goes into hot water. If a spoon has torn areas that I cannot cut clean, it becomes a spoon for stirring jam in my own kitchen rather than one I give away.

Cut 04 of 04

Oil, rags and one warning I take seriously

I finish every spoon with raw linseed oil, the plain kind sold for food use, without any drying agents added. The spoon gets a generous coat worked in with a scrap of cotton, sits for twenty minutes, and then every trace of oil left on the surface is wiped off. The oil cures inside the wood over several weeks and turns into a hard, slightly water-resistant film. Spoons dry on the windowsill for at least two weeks after oiling before anyone eats with them, and I re-oil my own kitchen spoons once or twice a year when they start to look pale.

The warning is about the rags. A cotton rag soaked in linseed oil gives off heat as the oil cures, and if it is crumpled in a pile or left in a bin the heat can build up until the rag catches fire on its own. This is well known among woodworkers and it is not an exaggeration. After oiling, I spread the rag out flat on the balcony tiles, weighted with a stone, until it is stiff and dry, and only then does it go in the rubbish. On windy days, I drop it in a jar of water instead and put the lid on.