mirroring cuts

This is something I was just writing about this morning for my upcoming book about spoon carving. When you are carving two sides of a spoon, one side where you can see the line, and the other side where you would either need to flip the spoon and carve it without seeing the line, or use a different cut to allow you to still see the line, I think it is always better to flip the spoon.

When you make a cut, your body feels a certain way. When you flip the spoon and make the same cut, even though you can't see the line you are cutting, your body still feels the same way and makes the same cut. Which means you end up with mirrored cuts, even though you did one blind.

When you change your cut so that you can see the line you want, you are changing the way it feels to cut to that line. A potato peeler cut on one side of the bowl feels totally different than the hand squeeze cut to trim the other side. And it will show in the form of mismatching curves. The same goes for the sides of the handle. If you keep the spoon face up and do the off side by transferring the knife over between your holding arm and the side of the spoon, not only will you have less power and control, it will feel different.

And that will mean that it will almost certainly come out different.

I keep testing this, certain in some vague way that at a certain point I will have reached a level of skill where this shifts and it doesn't matter how I do the cuts, but it still does. I get better matching curves if I keep my cuts the same from side to side, even if I can't see one of the sides.

Try it and see for yourself.