knives · from the bench
Knife grips I use every evening, and keeping the edge alive
Once the axe has done its work, the spoon moves up three floors to the balcony and becomes an evening job with two knives. Learning a handful of grips properly did more for my spoons than any new tool, and keeping those knives sharp turned out to be half of what I mean by good technique.
Cut 01 of 04
Two knives, and why the straight one does most of it
The straight knife is a sloyd knife with a blade about eight centimetres long, a single flat bevel on each side meeting at the edge with no secondary bevel, and an oval wooden handle that fills my hand. The flat bevel is the important part. Laid on the wood, it acts as a guide, and I can feel through the handle whether the edge is about to dig in or skate off. The hook knife is a curved blade on a straight handle, sharpened on the outside of the curve, and it exists for one job, hollowing the bowl.
I spent my first months trying to do too much with the hook knife because hollowing is the satisfying part, and my spoons had deep bowls and clumsy everything else. The balance shifted when I started to count. On a typical eating spoon, the straight knife now makes perhaps nine cuts out of ten: refining the outline, thinning the handle, shaping the back of the bowl, cleaning up the neck, and making the final facets. The hook knife comes out for twenty minutes near the end and then goes back in its sheath.
Cut 02 of 04
The chest lever and the thumb-pull
The chest lever is the grip I use for all the heavier knife work. I hold the knife with the edge facing away from me, blade upright, and hold the spoon in the other hand, also close to my chest. Both hands then press against my breastbone, and the cut is made by pulling my shoulder blades together, opening the chest, so that the knife and the spoon move apart like the two halves of a pair of scissors. The power comes from the back, not the arms, and because both hands are locked against the body, the knife cannot travel far if it slips. It is the grip that removes the most wood with the least effort, and I use it for the long sweeps along the handle.
The thumb-pull is its opposite: a small, precise paring cut towards the thumb, like peeling an apple. I hold the knife with the edge facing me and brace my thumb on the spoon just beyond where the cut will finish, then close my hand so the edge travels through the wood and stops short of the thumb. It is the grip for the end of the handle, the tip of the bowl and the neck. The safety is in the geometry: the cut must end before the thumb, so the thumb sits in a position the blade cannot reach. For the first month I wore a leather thumb guard cut from an old glove, and I still wear it when I am tired.
pencilled on the bench
- Chest lever: knife and spoon both against the chest, power from the back
- Thumb-pull: short paring cut towards a braced thumb that the blade cannot reach
- Forehand grip: the plain cut away from the body, braced on a knee for long runs
- Thumb-push: the other thumb pushes the back of the blade for small controlled cuts
- Never cut towards the inside of the thigh, whatever the grip
Cut 03 of 04
Hollowing the bowl with a hook knife, across the grain
Hollowing is where the grain matters most, because the inside of a bowl is a curve that crosses the fibres at every angle. Early on I tried to hollow by pulling the hook knife along the length of the spoon, from the tip towards the handle, and it tore the wood at the far wall of the bowl every time, leaving a fuzzy patch that no amount of scraping would clean. The rule that fixed it is simple: cut downhill on the grain, from the rim towards the bottom of the bowl, and across the spoon rather than along it wherever possible.
In practice I hold the spoon in my left hand with the bowl facing me and draw the hook knife across the bowl with my right hand, using my left thumb to push the back of the blade in a short controlled arc. Each cut starts at the rim and finishes at the bottom. When I reach the bottom I turn the spoon around and work from the other side, so the two sets of cuts meet in the middle. On a green birch spoon a sharp hook knife leaves a surface that hardly needs touching afterwards; the faint ribs of the cuts are part of what a hand-carved bowl looks like, and I have stopped trying to scrape them away.
Cut 04 of 04
Stropping every twenty minutes, sharpening rarely
Green wood looks soft and is surprisingly hard on an edge, because it is full of fine grit carried up with the water, and bark is worse. A knife that feels fine at the start of the evening is noticeably duller after half an hour, and a dull knife makes me press harder, which is when it slips. My answer is a strop: a strip of old leather belt glued to a flat piece of birch, rubbed with a little polishing compound. I strop the sloyd knife every twenty minutes or so, a dozen strokes on each side, dragging the blade spine-first with the bevel flat on the leather.
The hook knife gets a strop made from a dowel wrapped in leather, since the flat board cannot reach inside the curve. Because I strop so often, I rarely need stones. Perhaps three times a year the sloyd knife needs a proper session on a medium and then a fine stone, with the flat bevel held against the stone and the whole face worked evenly. The test I use afterwards is a cut across the end grain of a dry birch offcut: a sharp knife leaves a shiny surface there, a dull one crushes it.
pencilled on the bench
- Strop little and often, before the knife feels dull
- Keep the bevel flat on the strop; never lift the spine
- Pull the blade spine-first so the leather cannot catch the edge
- Peel the bark off with the axe, not the carving knife
- Test on end grain: shiny means sharp, crushed means stones
Written on the balcony in Šiauliai with the spoons in question drying on the shelf behind me, and revised on 15 Nov 2025 after more of them had been carved and used.Back to all carving notes