Many people have expressed an interest in taking a spoon carving lesson with me. I stopped at the start of the pandemic, and have been focusing my time and attention on more long-term projects (see below), and for now I have no plans to resume teaching in person. That said, I have tried to make a number of learning resources of varying levels of accessibility.
The most important is my Instagram account (icon towards the bottom of the home page), and also the Spoonesaurus Instagram account, (@spoonesaurus). While on Instagram, search the hashtags #spooncarvingtips and #greenwoodspooncarving , where I have been gathering all of the most helpful of my posts. My reels feed within Instagram also has a lot of useful process videos arranged by topic.
If you'd like something more tangible, you can subscribe to Spoonesaurus Magazine (bold words are a link), a quarterly print magazine that I publish that is all about spoon carving. We are currently closing in on 700 subscribers from more than two dozen countries around the world. Every 10 issues of the magazine get compiled into a book that you can also buy if you'd like to catch up on back issues. Both volume 1 (issues 00-10) is out, and volume 2 (issues 11-20) are now available.
I have three books you can buy. The first, Carving Out a Living on the Land, came out in 2019 and is a memoir of taking over a 60-year-old coppiced Christmas tree farm. It also chronicles the early years of my spoon carving practice. The second, the Spoon Carving Project Book came out in 2023 and is a project-based approach to carving wooden spoons. Both books are linked in the homepage.
Finally, we are very excited to announce the publication of Greenwood Spoon Carving. This is a massive book that lays out everything I know about carving spoons. It took me three years to write, contains hundreds of photographs, and is as close to a masterclass as I can manage. I originally chose to self-publish with a print-on-demand setup, which enabled me to make the book exactly what I wanted it to be, but also made the book very expensive. I am thrilled to announce that Greenwood Spoon Carving is now published by Mortise and Tenon magazine, which has allowed us to bring the cost down to $48. I want to take a moment to express a HUGE thank you to those of you who supported the book back when it was hundreds of dollars: without your show of support, this would not have happened. I would like to share my gratitude personally, so if you bought the book when it was originally self-published, please be in touch with me. I have something for you.
Finally, click the link below to download a free ebook I did in 2020 with Lee John Phillips. I think you'll like it!
| The Pocket Book of Axe Blocks |
