With a little skill and practice trees can help you to express more than words can say.
With spring in the air and a smile in my heart I took myself of to the woods a couple of weekends ago with an idea. I wanted to carve something special from wood for someone special. When you have an idea like this everything needs to be right. The right tree can take a while to find! As with so many crafts you have to let the materials speak to you. Never forget you’re taking a living thing to create something so it needs to be done with thought.
What I had in mind was a spoon. An ideal wood or this sort of thing is birch. Fortunately this is found in abundance and usually self seeded often giving densely crowded trees in fierce competition. This makes for nice spoon-friendly bends in the tree. By taking one small (sub-80mm) tree you can rest pretty easy in the knowledge you’re doing more good than harm.
Wanting even this quite clinical part of the process to form memories I took some photos, like the one above, from where the sapling stood. After trimming down into short lengths, leaving the top and tidying up a bit it was back to base for some carving.
And to cut a long story short here’s the result. Something made as things used to be with love, attention, skill and experience, not by machine. That small birch lives on for longer than it may ever have done in the wood.
