How to Carve a Wooden Spoon with a Dremel Rotary Tool

Hi guys, today we'll be making a woodcarver staple, a wooden spoon. Here's an example of one I made a while back. I've made a bunch of these since, they make great functional gifts, and they're super easy to make with a Dremel, so stick around to see how I like to make them. I'll be using a Dremel 4300, any rotary tool should work just fine though, and I have it hooked up to a flex shaft just because I have dainty hands and early onset arthritis. Here's the wood I'm using, I always use a hardwood, usually maple or birch. You don't want anything soft or porous or toxic, since this is a cooking spoon. Not sure I have to say it, but please don't use a chemically treated chunk of pine to make a spoon. Alright, so hopefully you have access to a cooking spoon, I'll be using this one to trace an outline onto the wood with a pencil. You can absolutely just freehand draw one, or fold some paper and cut out an outline to get a symmetrical spoon. I'll be using the Dremel 561 at 25,000 RPM to start. The first thing I like to do is score the outline very carefully, and that'll just help to guide the 561 once you actually start cutting so it doesn't fight you as much. This is a hard and thick piece of wood, so I did several passes until I got the outline out. By the way, you don't need to be super accurate here, we're just getting a really rough 2D spoon for the time being. Now that it's out, I stick to the 561 to shave away the sides and clean it up a little. Always carve right to left with the 561 for better control. I retraced the outline, and then I switched over to the Cutsaw Extreme Flame Bear, and this bear is great to quickly clean up the sides without accidentally cutting out more material than you want, since it has more control than the 561. Take your time here to get it as symmetrical as you can. And now that the sides are even, I went back with the pencil to freehand the shape of the bottom of the spoon. You might notice I'm only going to carve away the bottom, which might seem weird, but it ends up giving you a really classic cooking spoon profile. I've made several of these, and trying to carve from the top gives you a profile sort of like this, which is okay I guess, but it's just a bit shallow, sort of like a salad spoon. Up to you though on what shape you want for your spoon. I also went ahead and drew on where the bowl will be for the spoon. Alright, let's carve again. I'm using the cut saw still, and I'll just be removing the parts that I outlined from the side. If you're new to carving, I guarantee that if you carve a 2D manner, keeping the piece blocky at the beginning, you'll get a much more symmetrical and more predictable carve than if you jumped right into the rounding of the piece. Also, if you're new to carving, or not new, please follow the user manual and safety instructions of your tool, use it correctly, wear a mask and eye protection and such, and just don't be irresponsible because these things can hurt you, and they've definitely hurt me. So, see how I've removed just the side profile that I drew on? Now we're ready to start rounding the sides. With the cut saw, I just went and removed all the edges around the whole spoon, front and back, until it was all nice and rounded. And I tried to keep the bevels on the sides even, so that the spoon stays symmetrical. Side note, yes, I have posted a wooden spoon tutorial on this channel in the past, but I wanted to remake that video with a more conventional and practical spoon shape like this one. Okay, now we can smooth this thing out a bit. I'll be using the Dremel 80 grit sanding drum at 15,000 rpm. I'll spare you from watching all the sanding, but I went over it all with the sanding drum to remove any of the tool marks that I had left, and then I switched over to this 200 grit sanding disc, which is also the Dremel brand. If you switch over to the 200 grit too early though, it's going to be a pain to get out any deep scratches and carve marks, so make sure to be patient. Hey, that spoon doesn't have a bowl! Yeah, all right, fine. So I'm using a spherical tungsten carbide burr here to clear it out. You could totally use a cut saw burr for this, but I find this burr specifically gets the depth easier than the cut saw, which I usually use for more superficial carving. So many Dremel bits are better at specific things that you wouldn't expect until you have a lot of trial and error. I like making a little grid to first get the depth, and then I remove all the wood between. I test the depth just by pinching it so I can guesstimate the thickness. I stayed on the conservative end for this one and kept it thick. And for this spoon I'll be adding slits, so I grab my model spoon and use that to place the lines on both sides. I use the Dremel 562 here at 25,000 rpm to cut the lines, starting again with a little etch just to guide the bit for when I carve deeper. The 562 here is better than the 561 just because it has finer teeth so you can get a more precise line. And here's the plus to making a spoon with slits or holes in it, you can really easily see how thick the bowl of the spoon is once you cut through it, and that'll keep you from making the bowl too thin later on as you keep working. I then used the tungsten carbide cutting burr again and carved the bowl out until it was about a quarter inch thick. I cleaned up the slits a bit with the Dremel 561 and then sanded them a bit with a sanding disc since it fits into them better than a sanding drum would. If you want to really be a perfectionist you can also use a small grinding stone like the Dremel 84922 at a low rpm to grind away any little imperfections within those slits. I kept using the 200 grit sanding disc for the inside of the bowl since the sanding drum doesn't make good contact. And then I used these polishing wheels in the inside of the bowl to get a really nice finish on it. By the way, every accessory and tool I use in this video is linked in the description below. I put Amazon links for most things as well as a Cutsaw website link for the flame burr that should get you 5% off if you use the promo code. It's not a lot off, but it's something. It'd be boring to carve a plain spoon, right? Because you may as well just buy one. So I'll be engraving this one with my apartment number for next semester. We want to make sure people know that we spent a whole day making a wooden spoon by hand instead of just spending five dollars on one at a supermarket. I'm using this little Dremel engraver, I believe it's the 106. If anyone can tell me why these rust faster than my other burrs, I'd love to know. I printed out and taped down my design to the spoon and I'm using the engraver just to etch the outside of the numbers without getting any depth. That way once we get the tape off, we can get a really nice little outline that we can carve out. I stuck with my engraver and engraved it about an eighth of an inch deep. I'm using 25,000 rpm. By the way, thank you so much to all of you who've been leaving kind words in the comments, and a special thank you to those who bought me a coffee or a beer through my Ko-Fi link or through the YouTube Super Thanks feature. I really do appreciate all your support. I actually recently saved up enough to get this e-bike, which I've been loving to get around the city. Okay, back to the engraving. I drew a couple lines around the handle and a little hexagon around the number just for style points, and I'm using the Dremel 111 here to carve it out. I love this bit since it makes it really easy to get consistent, thin, deep lines for your engravings. This one is a little old and rusted though, so I burned the wood a bit, but it still made some good lines. All right, let's add a little stipple design in the empty space. I'm using this tungsten carbide spherical burr again, and I'm just going at 25,000 rpm, pushing in a little until there's a little groove, and then moving it and doing it again, and so on until the space is full of them. You can see the stippling has all these little fuzzy parts, and a really easy way to get rid of those without sanding away the design is just to hit it at multiple angles with a buffing wheel. After that, I use the Dremel 84922 at 10,000 rpm to grind out any little imperfections along the spoon, including the insides of the slits and the base of the number, and then we're all set to finish the sanding. I soak the spoon in some water for a few seconds and let it air dry a couple hours in the sun, and then sanded it with buffing wheels up to 400 grit. I repeated this three or four times because it is a cooking spoon, so if you don't raise the grain and re-sand it a couple times, the first time you use this thing, the finish of the wood will look awful. It'll get almost fuzzy, and it won't feel smooth anymore, so really don't skip this step if you want the spoon to age well. I finally sanded the whole thing with 1000 grit sandpaper just so it has a little bit more of its natural luster, and all right, we can finish the spoon now. Please do not put anything that isn't food safe onto this if you're using it for food. I'm using mineral oil since it's non-toxic and food safe, at least this one is. It's used for spoons and cutting boards and bowls, so I'm comfortable using it on things that'll touch food. I put a liberal amount on with a paper towel and wiped the excess off, and then let it soak in overnight. And here we are with the final spoon. It really is simple, but beautiful. It's very smooth, the oil gave it a nice deep color, and the maple should be really durable so me and my roommates can use it for years. Here's the spoon many months later. I actually filmed this video in June or July, I can't remember, but it's still in great shape, and it's held up against my roommates and the dishwasher and such. I'm not sure if you're supposed to put wooden spoons in the dishwasher, but for us it's inevitable. You might notice the color will look more dull as it ages, so if that bothers you, you can just put another layer of food grade mineral oil on there to bring it back to life. All right, I hope you learned something new. Please subscribe if you think I earned it, and if you make one for yourself, or make anything else that I made on this channel for yourself, please let me know how it went in the comments below. And finally, thank you for watching. As always, I'll see you next time.