Super Easy Wooden Spoon - Step By Step Beginner Wood Carving Project

Hey everybody, it's Brian from Carving This Fun, and we're going to do a quick and easy little spoon here. This is more like a little feather spoon that I made. It's a fun, easy project. We're going to be using the Schaaf three-piece tool set, and they send out these cool small blanks with it. You can make like a cool little teaspoon with it, or like a sugar spoon. You can also use this thing for like making regular spoons and whatnot, so there's just a little bit of a size difference is all. So we're going to make a small, easy, quick spoon, great for beginners. All you're going to need is your three-piece set. I love the Schaaf with the Schaafing compound on there. You're going to want a pencil, a wood blank, and then some sandpaper to smooth it off. This is 150 grit. All right, so the first things first that we need to do is make sure that we have our blank and we draw our little outline of the feather. You can do it as you want. Now if you want to make it as simple as possible, you don't necessarily have to do the feather if that seems intimidating to you. You can just do a regular stick handle. Just be mindful about how much room you have with this, so it's going to be a really skinny handle. Then the wider design gives you some more to hold on to. But yeah, so just what I like to do with this is on the spoon area, I like to drop it down just a little bit, about halfway, and then we're just going to make like a giant oval shape, and then a little notch here, just for like the bottom of the spoon. So after we get it drawn on there, we're going to go ahead and remove some of the wood. I'm just going to use this detail knife for most of the work here, and then for the spoon, we're going to use the hook knife. So first things first, we're going to outline the shape. So we're going to remove this top section, round it off, and this little chunk here. When doing it, I like to start from the furthest away, because the way that the wood grain is going here, if you start right here, you run the risk of ripping off a whole bunch of wood, and you might accidentally take more than you need. So just start off near the end, and then work your way back. That way you don't accidentally break up a bunch of wood, because it starts splitting on you. Work small, and you get some pretty good results. And if you need to switch it up, you can also do a paring cut as well. I find it works best when you're working on the front, because sometimes you're working in this direction, and you can't see where that line is. Like for my angle, I can't see where this line is, but if I do it right here, I can see exactly where that line is, and I know that I don't want to overshoot it. So right there, I'm coming close to the line, so I know that I need to stop there and move to another spot. At this stage, we're just removing larger sections of wood. It does not need to be perfectly down to the line. As a matter of fact, I recommend you leave wood above the line, just in case. It gives you some wiggle room there. Alright, so I got the front shaved down. We're going to start working on the backside now. And just taper the backside up a little bit. And then now we're going to do this little crevice right here, and from this one, we're going to be going from both directions in a curving motion. So we're basically carving a U. That's what we're wanting to do. We come in from one side, stop halfway, come in from the other side, and try to match it. Because if we try to go all the way through, we run the risk of removing too much wood because it grabs onto the wood grain and wood fibers, and it's just going to take off an unnecessary amount of wood. And you can't really put it back on too easily. So we got the side profile done. Now we need to start rounding the spoon. I think we're going to start rounding the bottom of the spoon here. I like to do this before I start carving on the inside, because then I know where I'm going to stop, and it prevents me from accidentally taking off too much wood when I'm going inside. So again, start from this end and work your way back. And since it's a round section here, and we have some wood removed here, we're going to cut from this part going this direction, and from this part going this direction. So we're not going to start carving from around here and then going around, because the wood grain is going this way. If we start doing it that direction, we might accidentally take a hook into the wood grain and remove this entire chunk. We don't want to do that. So just start from the top and round it up. You can bring it to about, maybe just like almost an eighth of an inch to the top of it. You don't necessarily need to bring it all the way up there to the front, but you can if you want. And since we're going to be cutting across the wood grain here, it's going to be a bit difficult cutting in across this part right here. So smaller cuts are your friend here. Don't worry about making huge chunks. Small controlled cuts are what you want to do. All right, now that I got the front rounded about, cutting this direction, I'm going to start cutting this direction and making sure that I don't take off too much wood here. Remember, small controlled cuts. I may be cutting towards myself, but I'm not pulling with this arm. I'm literally taking it and squeezing my thumb on this so that it is pulling it towards me, but I am controlling every little cut and I am only making small cuts here. Now that we got most of it rounded, we're just going to smooth it out a little bit so that it looks more like a rounded section underneath. Then we can start doing, working with the hook knife. All right, cool. No, no, I'm not worried about how rough that is. We're going to be fixing that up later with either smaller control cuts or with the sandpaper, but we're at the point where we can start working on the inside. Now for me, what I like to do is leap a small lip around the edge, mostly when we're using stuff with like basswood, because it's a bit softer. If I was using something like I'm using with cherry, I can take it a little bit more to the edge because this is about two to three times as hard as the basswood. Noted that cherry is much harder to carve, but it's more durable, but the basswood is great for learning on and beginners and making cool little designs because it's easier to make these small intricate patterns. So what I like to do sometimes is just make a little indicator line all the way around the rim, showing how far I want to go. This doesn't have to be perfect, and then don't worry about it being there. We can sand it off. You can see I left a little bit of an outline there, and that's about where I'm going to put my edge and then go towards the middle. Now for me, I like to go towards the middle and like go all the way around instead of just like trying to scoop it all the way out like this. And keep in mind when you're actually doing the hook knife or using the hook knife, be mindful of the wood grain going this direction. If we go like this, we'll pry up the wood grain like a pile of straws, and it'll want to rip off all the wood going this way. If we go across the wood grain, we're actually cutting across it and separating it, so it's less likely to split on us. So I like to go in just all the way around on that line and create an indentation, and then I start really working on it. And with these smaller spoons, you have to be careful about your hand placement because like smaller work areas are a bit harder to get a good grip on sometimes. So be careful. Take smaller cuts if necessary. And be careful with this spot. Sometimes the hook knives, you might struggle against the wood fibers. Take it slow. Smaller cuts. Be patient with it. Keep in mind the inside does not have to be perfectly smooth because that's what we have to sandpaper for. And keep in mind I am mentally gauging at how deep I'm going so that I don't blow through the bottom. I think this is about good for me right here. Just use an edge imitator to guess, you'll be good. Alright, I'm going to quickly strop up my detail knife again just to make sure I get it nice and sharp. And all I'm doing is just honing that edge, making sure that it's nice and sharp again. You don't need to apply a lot of pressure. If you want to know how to do this, I made a couple videos on how to apply a stropping compound as well as how to sharpen this three-piece kit as well. I'll have that link in the description for that video so you get an idea of what to do. There you go. So when I wanted to maximize the amount of surface space I have here, now I could make this a vertical up and down feather where it's on an edge like this, but if you look at this one, you see that I actually had the feather just offset to the side. So what I did is I made this edge right here, the feather edge, and then this bottom edge right here, the other edge. So I cut this in at an angle on both sides so that it's kind of sitting at an angle right here. So you have your feather, but it's at an angle. It kind of makes it easier to hold onto, especially if you're right-handed. You can hold onto it, and for me, it just naturally comes into the right position in my hand. So I'm going to take this. Basically, I'm going to kind of round this edge a little bit to the point where that becomes my new edge. So I'm kind of rounding this section off and creating that edge right there. So for this, again, I don't want to start carving from here going all the way up because I'm going to hook onto... Here, I'll give you an example. So if I... I'm going to start from right here. Imagine that I did this all the way back here. If I started from right here, you see all this wood that's just like all of a sudden ripping off? This could actually end up going, instead of at this direction, it could go like cut across this way, and then all of a sudden, this whole section, like including back here, could get ripped off. I don't want that. So I like to start at this end and work my way back so that I don't accidentally do too much with the wood grain. And just take it slow. You don't have to have it all the way flat going down. Just work your way down. All right. Now that I got that edge roughed out, I'm going to match it to the bottom. And it can have a little bit of a bow to it, which is what I'm going to leave because you can see this one is not... I don't know if you can see it in the video here. Yeah. I mean, in the video, you can kind of... Or in the picture here, you can kind of see it's a little bit bowed. It's almost like an oval, like a very thin oval, which is what I want because I want it... When you're looking at it, I want it to look like the edges are thinner, but it has some meat in the middle of it. So slightly rounded surface on this is desired. And since this part is kind of curved, I am going to do that little trick where I'm carving in two directions so that I don't accidentally start cutting across the wood grain and ripping off a bunch of wood I don't want. Now that that side is done, I'm going to do the same thing to the other side where this is one edge and then this is the other edge. So if we're looking at the spoon upside down, I didn't put the feather marks on this side. I just did it on this side, which you can do the same thing if you want. Or you can apply it to both sides if you wanted to. It is at an angle, so you can see that the feather on this side is at a slight angle. So I need to make this one edge, match this edge, and then I'm taking this corner down inwards. Basically, you're doing the same exact thing you just did to the other side. And this part, you can see that I accidentally took too much right there, so it's starting to rip off a whole bunch of the wood. So I'm going to continue this all the way across, but I can literally just like... You can see it's like I'm peeling off all this wood, and this section right here is essentially going to come off. I can fix it by moving the rest of the wood going this way, but instead, I'm going to go from this direction and try to smooth it out a little bit. That way I don't move too much wood accidentally. See, I smoothed it out there. So I'm going to go ahead and just bring this down a little bit more. And then since this part is now kind of like an edge, I'm going to knock off that sharp peak on there, just make it more rounded. All right, from here, I'm going to be sanding it in a little bit, but I'll use my knife to remove a couple like flaky pieces. Or I can even use my knife to like really start smoothing it down by really small, thin cuts like this. That can be a little bit tedious. Instead, I'm going to use the sandpaper, but first, I'm going to take it and start knocking off any of the like the weird jagged edges, like I don't like that funky bump right there that this has, so I'm going to kind of round it off a little bit. It's basically you're removing any weird shapes before you start doing the finishing work and adding details. Also, I don't like that little bump there, so I'm going to just round it off a little bit. Move it around. I think my feather is going to dip in right there, so I'll probably fix that up a little bit. It's a little bit better. Round this off so it's more like a rounded point, and I'm pretty much going to let the sandpaper do the rest of the work here. Again, you can take your knife and do like really small detailed cuts if you want, but the sandpaper is going to be really quick, and I'll show you a couple quick little tricks here. One of the things that I've learned is I don't like to hold the sandpaper and sand it like this. That just puts strain on my fingers. If I have like a soft surface, like this is kind of a soft mat, I'll just put this on there and just start sanding like that, because then when you're pushing into it, it can create a natural curve, so it's not a super flat surface. So this allows you to impart a nice organic look to like a curvature. You can see this, quickly removing some of that, and you can already see it's like it removed a whole bunch of those scalloped cuts in there, and it's starting to get some nice round surface to it. So I'm going to do that to the rest of it here. I'm going to be a little bit more off camera so I can have a little bit more dexterity. I like to do it at the edge of my table so I can get my knuckles from being bashed up here. The bottom of the spoon is good. Work on the top here, and then the sides, and then I'll show you what I do for the middle. All right, now that I got it mostly sanded there, I'm going to smooth out these edges a little bit more so it looks more like a feather. All righty. Now that we got that done there, we got to get the inside. This is going to be a little bit tedious and whatnot. Sometimes there's going to be, I'm going to have like some weird chunks like right there. It doesn't have to be absolutely perfect on the inside, but you're definitely going to want to use your thumb in there. There we go, and it doesn't have to be absolutely perfect. You can take more time and sand it down a little bit more. It doesn't take too much to get in there. The basset's pretty easy and nice and soft to work with. We're going to start working on the feather here. Now, keep in mind, feathers aren't exactly equally proportional where one side has the same exact as the other. The center part of the feather is usually kind of offset a little bit, and then you got to take what the barbs are going out towards the side, and then we can take some notches out here so that it looks more like the barbs are separating on the feather. That way it looks less like a leaf, but yeah. So we're going to draw the line for the vein first. There's no science to it. Just make it kind of like an arch. If you keep your drawing hand planted, like your wrist on the table, another one, other hand steady, you can create like a nice natural arc, and then from there you can just start creating like lines or notches. I don't think you necessarily need to draw each of the feather lines, but you can if you want. From here, what I'm going to do is create like a little, it's going to be like a V cut going in, so the blade comes in one direction and cuts across, and then the blade comes in again the other direction, and it removes like a little V-shaped chunk of wood. So that's, I found the easiest way to create that little detail. And take this slow. You're going to be cutting across the wood grains, which will want to direct your blade for you. Just a slow, controlled cut. And you don't have to be directly on the line. The line is just a guide. Where you feel natural, let the blade take you. So I went in from one direction, and I was going from the other direction, and then it should start just separating like that. If you hit the V correctly, and you create your little vein. All this is really doing is just adding detail. You don't have to be super precise. And then from here is going to be the more tedious part. I personally like to come in at small angles, so I'll do all the cuts going this direction, and then I'll cut in going the opposite direction. Very similar to how I did this vein. We're going to speed up this spot here. I'm going to show you what I do for the first couple. Essentially, all I'm doing is just making a cut and going down like this all day across. You can make as many or as few as you want. And then, we're going to come in from the opposite direction. Because I came in from this direction for the V, now I'm going to come in from this direction for the opposing V, and it opens up that design a little bit more. You don't have to be exactly precise, or have it equal all the way across. You can start off wider at the bottom, and then it goes thinner at the top. Completely your call. Just let your blade take you. Perfection is not necessary here. I mean, feathers aren't perfect to begin with, and I think that's what makes them, each one of them, unique and beautiful. All right, and then you got one side done. You can see it took a little bit more of a chunk off right there. That's perfectly fine. Doesn't matter. You can probably smooth it out. See if I can here. Very shallow cuts. Yeah, there you go. I fixed that. Not a problem. Then now we're going to do the same thing going the opposite side, and then we're going to create those little notches in there. Again, small, controlled cuts. You don't have to make it line up exactly to this side. I did it on my other one. Just let the blade do the work for you, and wherever it may land, that's where the cut's going to be. Then again, coming at the opposite angle, and you're going to remove some of that wood there. All right. Remove all the little pieces there, and you got a nice little feather-looking design. Now, to create the notches in there, take it slow because we're going to be going up into it. You can follow one of the barbs here that you got. I mean, really all you're doing is creating like a little wedge into it, so it looks like there's separation. I recommend no more than three, and make them different sizes, if anything, and try to make it so that one side is following the curve of the barbs on there, and just create like a little... Basically, you're doing stop cuts. You do a little V-cut. It's what it is. It's a very small, controlled stop cut. You might get some separation in the wood right there. It's fine. If you do get a little separation in the wood like how it is separating right there, you can just go and mop it off. You'll be fine. So yeah, you got a little bit of a separation right there. Do the same thing to the other one over here, and that pretty much will finish up your little project there. Just clean it up a little bit. Get some of the extra fluff off. If you want to get rid of some of the pencil marks, the easiest thing to do is just hit it lightly. I say lightly with some sandpaper. Otherwise, you're going to remove a lot of your details you made on there. And there you go. You can add the same patterns to the other side if you want, but for the purpose of the video, we're just going to do the one side. So now you have little feather spoons, which are really fun and cute. Great for like little sugar spoons and whatnot. I think it'd be a great addition to any little tea set or something like that for if you're trying to create something like that. Finish it off if you want to use it with some mineral oil. That's what you usually use, especially for like cutting boards or other spoons. That's what I finish all my soup spoons and wooden spoons with is mineral oil. Reapply as necessary. There are other sealants you can put on there as well. Be mindful you read the information about it. Make sure it's food safe. Not many of them are, so just keep that in mind. All right, and that should do it. And that's basically using your little shaft three piece tool set to make a cool little spoon, something that you can use all the time. It's a great little utilitary item there and something to show off to your friends and family. But yeah, that's how you're going to want to use this. You can use your Floyd knife as well, too. But since it's such a smaller tool set, I found that the detail knife does job. If you do larger spoons like this one. Yeah, your Floyd knife is going to be better for removing a lot more of the wood stock. I almost put my spoon back in the tool kit there. But yeah, I also have some other videos for how to use your shaft tools as well as a sharpening video for how to sharpen these three piece sets. I'll have them in the description below. And yeah, thanks for watching, everyone. Hope you have yourself a great day.