"By Hand and Eye" by George Walker and Jim Tolpin

I have been reading and rereading parts of "By Hand and Eye" by George Walker and Jim Tolpin for a few weeks now, digesting the implications (available here: http://lostartpress.com/products/by-hand-eye-1). It is a fascinating read, and its effect on me has been a bit like an alarm call.  It is not the tune of the call (the book is longer than it needs to be), but it is the act of calling that is so significant (it wakes you up!)

(lostartpress.com)

Design prior to the Industrial Revolution was a very different process.  Before the age of machines, artisans very seldom measured anything: no technical drawings, only the crudest of rulers.  Instead, artisans dealt in geometry.  It did not matter how tall a column was, but that its height was five times that of the pedestal.  Design was not about precision, but proportion.  And everything was in proportion--from the smallest detail to the largest dimension.  These ratios were based on some fundamental "unit," an element of the piece upon which all other parts were related (in the case of a column, the pedestal).  The authors describe how, with a divider in hand, they explored various designs (furniture, architectural elements, etc...) and found all of these fantastic whole-number proportions: halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, eights.  Once you unlock the piece, that is find the unit, this sort of "frozen music" emerges, a symphony in form: "octave, fifth, fourth, fifth, octave."

The key tool in this type of design was the divider, with which you could step out these ratios.  And if you were going to reproduce a design, you just needed to know the "musical score," as there were no measured drawings: the width of the drawer is five times its height, the casing of the window is 1/6 the width, etc...  The height of this form of design was the "Classical Orders," and studying them was a crucial way that artisans educated themselves.  A bit like practicing the musical scales, drawing and redrawing Ionic columns and the like woke one's eye to these relationships and trained artisans in proper proportions.

Why did all of this end?  As the Industrial Revolution erupted, machines took over production from artisans.  Rather than tools being an extension of the maker, the maker became an extension of the machine.  And machines don't deal in ratios; they need cold numbers.  And so, measurement overtook proportions as the currency of design, and the "frozen music" of pre-industrial design was largely lost from made objects.

(desertwindgraphics.com)

One interesting legacy of this age of designing "by hand and eye" had to do with counting on one's fingers.  Pre-industrial designers did not like counting by tens as we do today.  For adding and subtracting, tens are very logical, but for ratios, tens are very limiting.  You can only break them down into 1/2 and 1/5th.  Instead, designers preferred to count in twelves, which break down into all sorts of great ratios: 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/6.  And so they learned to count to twelve on their fingers!  Using their thumb as a pointer, they would count the digits on the remaining four fingers, creating ratios of twelve.  I had always wondered why the imperial system was based on twelve inches.  Such an odd way to measure things (but a great way to create ratios!)

This has gotten me thinking about spoon design.  What are the proportions that work best for eating spoons?  What is the unit of measurement?  For a while I messed around with length as the unit, with each part of the spoon taking up one third of the total: bowl, stem, handle.  How long should an eating spoon be?  Taking a cue from Walker and Tolpin, I used a body measurement: the span of my hand.  (By the way, the metal soup spoons in my kitchen are about the span of a hand.)  This worked OK, but really the crucial measurement of an eating spoon is not its length.  It is the width of the bowl.  If you are going to put the spoon in your mouth, it can only be so wide (I realize some eating spoons are made for "sipping" and are not supposed to fit in the mouth).  Once you determine the ideal bowl width, all other elements of the spoon grow in proportion to that.  You scale it down for the details, and scale it up for the overall dimensions.

I will add some drawings I have made when I can get near a scanner...  More to come.

Notes on eating spoon design

I have been studying eating spoon design these days, trying to figure out what feels right to me.  Here are some of my notes:

• How much should the bowl rise in relation to the handle?  About 15 degrees, so it comes up to meet the mouth.  
• How long should the bowl be in relation to its width?  About 1.6 to 1.  
• How long should the spoon be in relation to the length of the bowl?  About 3 to 1, though this can vary significantly.  
• How about handle shape?  I like the tail of the handle to thicken and kick up a bit at the end, giving the hand something to grasp onto.  I also like a little concavity in the top of the handle where the thumb can register.  
• As to the bottom of the handle, the transition of the the keel of the stem to the underside of the handle should have a little flat surface to provide the middle finger a place to rest, otherwise the spoon feels a little unstable.  
• The plan view of the handle can vary significantly, though lots of decorative bulges and points don't always work so well in the hand.  I like a little bulge near where the index finger wraps around the side, giving it a nice purchase on the spoon.

So, what does this look like?  Not sure yet, but here are a few recent cherry spoons that I am liking:

The overall length to bowl length ratio on this one is a little under 3 to 1

This one kicks up ever so slightly in the tail.

Here my index finger has a bulge to wrap around.  Feels good!

Here my middle finger has a flat to rest on.

This spoon is longer than the above spoon, ratio now over 3 to 1.  It is nice for deeper bowls.  Reaches right in there!

This one has a great swell at the tail.  Feels very secure!

My index finger rests comfortably on that bulge.

I rounded the keel on this one a bit, so my index does not quite know where to sit...
It is OK, but not as nice as the first spoon.

Study, fail, replicate

Barn Carder once inscribed "I believe in replication" in one of his spoons.   Like writing drafts of prose, replicating a spoon must help you pare away the superfluous, reveal weaknesses, and distill the full idea.
But honestly I wouldn't know--because I can't seem to find the time for replication.
I finish a spoon every week or two, from time carved out of my busy life.  Regretfully, I can't seem to take a weekend and just make a mess of spoons.  I know it would really help my carving, but work and family beckon.  Also, I definitely feel that my taste in spoons is still evolving.  I am still coming to terms with what makes a great spoon, and I rather not copy junk.
And so, in my case I have found that there is a step or two before replication:

• Study: I have tried to carve a lot of different types of spoons--different bowl designs, different handle lengths, different angles.  It has been really nice to sit down with a wide variety of spoons and see what I like about each.  It has helped me inch towards a vision of a "good" spoon.  That, and studying spoons from master carvers.  I have a few spoons from the likes of Jarrod Stone Dahl, Don Nalezyty, and Oliver Pratt.  They have given me new ideas for how far I can push the material, what bowl shapes work, and how the handle interacts with the hand.  I don't love everything about all of them, but they give me great ideas.  I guess through study I am developing my taste.  Once I feel firm on that, maybe I will feel better about replication.

• Failure: The other day my daughter asked for a bowl of ice cream, and while prying out a rock-hard chunk, my spoon split.  My daughter was horrified.  She literally moaned, "oh daddy, Oh Daddy, OH DADDY!"  My wife was cross and snapped, "Why didn't you use a metal scoop?!"  Me, I just shrugged and reached for another wooden spoon.  Yes the spoon represented a few hours work, but its failure brought me great insight.  I now see how the bowl was too thin for its short, straight grain.  With radially split blanks I need different thicknesses in different places than with bent crook spoons.  Seems obvious, and I understood it intellectually, but nothing like a splintery mess to drive the point home.

I recently received a spoon from Steve Tomlin.  It too was made from radially split wood.  It works perfectly and feels very comfortable in the hand and mouth.  The finish is top notch, with subtle details that belie its apparent simplicity.  And yet, my first reaction was that it felt a bit too chunky.  Too much material in the bowl and the handle, I thought...  Until now.  

Study, fail, replicate.

Some wisdom for beginners, quoted by Steve Tomlin

"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit." ~ Ira Glass

For more, see http://kottke.org/11/04/your-taste-is-why-your-own-work-disappoints-you

Toasting spoons

I hope Don Nalezyty does not mind, but here is his post on "toasting" spoons to achieve a darker appearance and maybe a harder surface:

"The toasting process is quite simple. The basic idea is to kiln dry the spoon after it's completed, but not oiled and bring the temparature up just high enough to start to darken the wood a little bit. 

I generally start at a lower temp, which varies by wood, but around 300ºF is generally safe.

I give the spoon 30 minutes at that temperature keeping an eye on it to ensure it doesn't start darkening early.

Then I increase the temperature by 15º and watch closely. If after 30 minutes it hasn't started to darken, I repeat the process.

Once the temperature is getting around 350ºF, I'll increase in increments of 10º or even only 5º.

I like the wood to darken so slowly that I almost don't know it is happening. It takes a long time as I want the heat to saturate the spoon through out and have the whole thing change consistently.

When the color is right, I turn off the oven, but leave the spoons inside. When the temp has dropped below 300ºF, I'll pull the spoons out, oil them and through them back in for 10 to 15 minutes. At that point, I wipe away any excess oil and put them back in the oven to cool down overnight.

In the morning, the oil is dry to the touch and the spoons are generally a darker richer color. They're also ever so slightly harder, but it's enough that I do use liriodendron tulipifera for eating spoons. 

Of course once you know what temp a given wood darkens at, you can shorten the process and you can even stop just before it darkens and still get a slighlty harder spoon without the color change, which is what I've been doing with my latest spoons with the kolrosing.

Thanks for the inspiration, Don.

The American Chestnut

I don't often see my father-in-law excited.

Of German stock from upstate NY, Dave is stoic and hard, with a handshake that hurts.  He is a retired forester, having spent most of his life crashing around the Adirondack Park marking trees and surveying land for the state.  He has watched paper companies take more than they should for decades, using guidelines for tree harvesting that only apply in the lowlands, where trees grow a lot faster than up in the High Peaks.  He has witnessed species decline, the better tree specimens harvested and the worse left to reproduce.  While the Adirondack Park is as large as Massachusetts and in some ways a model of private/public cooperation, the tree stock is not in good health.  This situation has only augmented his curmudgeonly character.

Which was why over dinner last night I was so happy to see him, well, elated about the American Chestnut tree.

The American Chestnut used to cover the Appalachian Mountain range from New York to Georgia in such a density that people complained they could not walk up hill over the expanse of nuts.  When de Soto explored this area in the late 16th century, he proclaimed that wherever there are mountains, there are chestnuts.  These trees used to grow up to 120' tall, with base widths on average 4-7" in diameter.  Stump circles left by these giants indicate much larger diameters, up to 13' across.  The Chestnut also coppices well, a perfect ring of trees multiplying from a single felled stump.  The wood is rot resistant (due to high levels of tannin), light weight, hard, and as I have heard, beautiful for furniture.  It provided food for bear, deer, squirrels, etc..., and all the attending wildlife that in turn depended on them.  In fact, part of the reason for the extinction of the passenger pigeon was its loss of habitat: the American Chestnut.  The Scotch-Irish settlers of this region relied on the Chestnut for nuts to trade, food for pigs and wood for homes.
The American Chestnut was a keystone species of the region.

(theatlantic.com)

Tragically, in the early 20th c. Asian Chestnuts were brought to the US, and with them a blight.  The blight ravaged the American Chestnut, girdling young trees in the first five years of life.  Within fifty years, approximately 4 billion trees were killed, 99.99% of the American Chestnut population.  Wildlife populations collapsed, and an already poor people fell into desperate poverty.  The Appalachian peoples lost two of their major income streams (nuts and the pigs that fed on them), all in the midst of the Great Depression and World War II.  Today, only a few hundred trees remain over the original 200,000,000 range.  Literally every tree in the US is accounted for, registered by the federal government and monitored closely by volunteers.  Some have gone so far as to proclaim the collapse of the American Chestnut as the greatest ecological disaster to strike the world's forests in history.

For years, scientists have tried to create a transgenic variety of the American Chestnut that could resist the blight.  The American Chestnut Society has had some success interbreeding seedlings, trying to breed out the blight-susceptible gene, breed in a blight-resistant gene, and include all the great characteristics of the American variety.  They appear about five years out from their goal.  Also exciting to note, researchers at the State University of New York (SUNY) discovered that a gene from wheat would do the trick.  This new variety of American Chestnut can resist the blight.  SUNY scientists are now going through a regulatory review process with the USDA, EPA, and FDA, but in the meantime they are trying to grow ten thousand seedlings so they will be ready to start planting if/when approval comes.

In my lifetime I might see the return of this keystone species.

And this has Dave uncharacteristically happy...




http://www.esf.edu/chestnut/#.VHUhk2TF_fZ

It also seems that the American Chestnut Foundation is having some success breeding a blight-resistant strain.
http://www.acf.org/r_r.php

Community

Half a world away, my friend Eugen from Transylvania ate breakfast with one of my spoons.

Through the Green Wood Spoon Swap Facebook group, Eugen and I were able to swap spoons and admire one another's technique.

He has dubbed it the "little ballerina," which I find wonderful.  While carving the spoon I was thinking hard about what my daughters would like, from the handle length to the bowl width to the kolrosing.  I find it marvelous that half a world away a man I have never met in person was able to pick up on that aesthetic.  Really goes to show that deep down, we all share a basic human connection.

Last week another on-line acquaintance experienced a tragedy.  Alex, a photographer, musician and woodworker, was away when his house burned to the ground.  He lost everything: his home, his shop and tools, his guitar collection, and (gasp) his photographic equipment and all his photos!  Such a loss for this guy.  Thankfully no one was hurt.

Well, the Facebook group stepped up and launched an auction this weekend, with all proceeds to go to Alex's Paypal account.  Objects and bids came in from around the world.  Would you believe they raised around $7000 in two days?  All for a guy few of us have ever met in person.

Some have said that the internet is the world's greatest experiment in anarchy.  Maybe.  In the individual sense, the internet is certainly anarchic at times--like the Wild West, everyone out for themselves.  But the internet is also anarchic in the social sense, where communities materialize around a common passion, are maintained with relatively little "government" (not to minimize all the hard work the admins did for the auction), and almost naturally serve the needs of the group.  Maybe these Facebook groups are an example of social anarchy?

Whatever you call it, it feels like community to me.