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Some wooden bowls & spoons

December 8, 2013

So about a year and a half ago, I built a foot-powered lathe for turning bowls. It’s a very rough structure that works really really well. Power comes from your leg, pushing on a stick, which is tied to a string, which wraps around a mandrel, which spins a chunk of wood. Sticks, string, and two fixed points create the axis of rotation. Apply curved blades (ospoons, 20131n stix) to roughly round chunk, dig out a void until it’s smooth and beautifully hollow, remove a bowl. I still love carving wooden spoons, but there is something about the lathe. The design goes back thousands of years, originating with the spindle that gives us fire, and the spindle that gives us thread for weaving. A spindle, of course, is just a fancy name for a stick. A stick is the first tool, and first weapon. Marry weapon to vessel, you get a spoon — the only tool, along with the bowl, that’s not regularly conscripted to kill people. Thanks to youtube mentors Robin Wood and Ben Orford, both from the UK, where green woodworking seems to retain a closer connection to the culture of today. Robin’s wonderful book on the traditional wooden bowl is worth getting, if you’re interested.   spoons, 20132  spoons, 20134 spoons, 20135 spoons, 20136 spoons, 20137spoons, 20133

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from the publisher

Hand Print Press began in the early 90s, when I self-published Build Your Own Earth Oven. I was thinking of myself as a capital A  Artist. However, as I learned from the garden and other teachers, art just means “to fit together” — it’s how the world works — flora, fauna, humans — all must fit themselves together, with each other, with the landscape, with wind and weather. In addition to the bookstore (which now includes a few other authors), the site contains stories and updates on ovens, heat, baking, beauty, agriculture, fire, community, culture, (spoon) carving, etc. It’s all art! Thanks for visiting. You can contact me at handprint at cmug dot com, or thru instagram.
— Kiko Denzer

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