The Maymont Foundation

On Thursday of last week I had the pleasure of going with my daughter on her field trip to Maymont.  It was my first visit, but certainly not my last.  After taking a quick tour through the indoor Nature Center, filled with animals that live in or near the James River, we exited through the rear doors and out into the property. 

The first thing you see is acre after acre of rolling pasture that extends out into the distance in every direction.  There is a path, and a map, that takes you to areas of interest, a barn, filled with sheep, goats, chickens, rabbits, and even a donkey.  The mansion itself, open to the public for tours.  The Japanese garden, the Italian garden, and the carefully restored ornamental lawn.  There are also various animal exhibits, black bears, several birds of prey, red and grey foxes, and several species of owl. 

Any of those things would be worth a return trip.  Without a doubt though, for me, the thing that sealed the deal was the trees.  I found myself staring dumbfounded at the immense trees that cover the property.  I don't think I have ever seen a larger collection of huge trees in my life.  Huge Oaks, with trunks easily 5 to 6 feet in diameter are everywhere.  Huge Tulip Poplars, larger than any that I have ever seen are found throughout the property.  Down near the path to the Japanese Garden are Beech trees that are monstrous, with huge twisted branches curling up into the sky.  I was at a loss for words. 

Here are a few pictures that I took, they do not do justice to the arboreal spectacle that awaits you should you have the opportunity to visit Maymont.  I'll be back, the trees have assured my return.  Remember, you can click on each picture to see it in full size.

 

Not to be outdone by the trees that cover the grounds, there is a huge stand of rhododendrons that were in bloom.  I had to take a picture of those as well.

  As a woodworker, or whatever it is that I am, a woodworker might be a stretch I guess.  I am always looking at trees and thinking of the wonderful things that I could make from them.  I was surprised that my first thought when visiting the trees of Maymont was just the opposite.  These trees need to stay as they are, for all to visit and enjoy.  Maymont just got added to the list of must see places for people visiting Richmond, VA  Come on down, and I'll show you the trees.

Function over form

I struggled over the title of this post for quite some time.  I wasn't sure how to convey the topic of this post in the title, and I'm still not sure I have, but at least it sets the stage.  In my opinion when carving something that is going to be used by someone for a specific purpose there are two main design elements that must be considered.  Form and function.  What does that mean?  Well you could carve the most beautiful and artistic spoon in the world and if it doesn't work as a spoon should, then what good is it?  On the other hand, you can carve a spoon that isn't visually appealing, but works outstandingly well.  There must be a balance between the way it looks and the way it works.  Getting that balance right is the key. 

Okay, so where am I going with this?  What is my point?  I think a lot of people, myself included, often have a misguided view on what is more important when it comes to form and function.  I think that we often give a higher weight to form, the way things look, than to function, the way things work.  I also think that people give up on themselves because the things that they make don't look as perfect or well-formed as those that others make.  I think it is natural to compare your work to others, but while that comparison is often helpful, it can also cause feelings of inadequacy. 

I'm guilty and I have talked about it in the past on more than one occasion.  Today though, I came to a realization.  When you first start carving spoons, or making anything else for that matter, you MUST consider function first.  If you are carving a spoon, make a spoon first and foremost, then worry about how good it looks when you have figured out the technique.  Case in point, I present the following spoon.

I carved it in October of last year, 7 months ago.  I had been carving spoons for maybe four months at the time.  A neighbor had a Bradford pear tree come down in a storm and gave me a few sticks of wood in exchange for helping him clean up the mess. I carved this spoon the same day the tree fell, and I was pretty proud of it, but then I noticed the crack in the bowl. 

Not wanting to throw it away, I threw it into a kitchen drawer.  It wasn't pretty, the wood was hard to carve and my tools were less than adequate.  I was still having trouble with handle design.  That being said, it was still a spoon and from a functional standpoint a pretty good one.  I didn't think much of it at the time, but in the 7 months that have passed since I carved this spoon, I have used it almost every day. 

I have stirred gallons of iced tea and Kool-Aid with this spoon.  I have made pan upon pan of sausage gravy, I have used it to stir soups, to saute vegetables, to make scrambled eggs, to stir pancake batter.  I have cooked with it, served with it, and tasted food from the cracked bowl.  This regular old spoon has become one of the most used cooking implements in my kitchen.

I have carved better looking spoons since this one was made.  Spoons that I have given as gifts and are in use by other people today.  They have looked better than the one pictured above, my sincerest hope, though, is that they have performed just as well.  A spoon, if it is truly a spoon, must work.  The way it looks, the fact that it was sanded or has a tooled finish, the shape of the handle and the bowl do not matter in the long run.  Form is important, but function reigns supreme.  Let us never forget that we are essentially tool makers.  Focus on making tools that work and the beauty will come naturally.

Happy carving my friends.

Luray Caverns and a 140 year old spoon

My family and I have been talking about visiting the Luray Caverns for a long time.  They are located in the Shenandoah Valley, deep in the Appalachian Mountains.  I grew up in the mountains, and driving through them, seeing them in the distance always makes me feel like I am coming home.  It was a really nice drive, fairly short, and the countryside is just beautiful this time of year.  On our way home we stopped at two viewing areas, here is a picture taken at the first one, with a view of the Blue Ridge Mountains far in the distance.

 

I honestly didn't know what to expect at the cavern.  In many cases things aren't what they are advertised to be, but I can tell you that the Luray Caverns more than exceeded my expectations.  When we got to the cavern it was raining and cold, but we braved the elements and got our tickets and stood in line to go on the self-paced tour.  Your ticket for admission covers entrance to the cavern, an antique carriage and car museum, and the Luray Museum that contains artifacts from the local community collected throughout the years.

To get down into the cave proper, you descent a long fight of stairs and then arrive at a sort of holding area where you can put on your headphones and get the audio tour started.  You begin the tour by following a walkway with a metal hand rail down and into the cavern.  It took me all of about 30 seconds to let out my first gasp of amazement.  The flow stone, the draperies, the stalactites, the named structures, were breathtaking.  One structure in the deepest part of the cave was said to be over 7 million years old. 

 

Flow stone, named because of the way it looks like a frozen waterfall.

Draperies or Curtains

Stalactites

Tallest formation in the cavern, 40+ feet high.

My camera does not even begin to do this natural wonder justice.  The sheer size of the formations, the timelessness that you feel by being inside the cavern, and the beauty, all combine to leave you feeling like you have just done and experienced something amazing.

After our tour was over, we headed into the Carriage and Automobile museum.  To be honest, we should have done that first.  Man made items, even those that were made over a hundred years ago, seemed to pale in comparison to what we had just seen.  The Luray Museum was much the same, but a bit more interesting.  I enjoyed the displays of pottery and other items from the past.  Still, after seeing a 7 million year old rock formation 165 feet under ground, it was hard to be impressed.

I did see one wooden spoon along with a few other wooden cooking implements, a bowl and several rolling pins on display.  I stood and looked at the spoon for quite some time.  It was just a tool, just an implement to stir a soup or mix a cake.  

Nothing fancy at all.  Just a plain old spoon, its only decoration was a small cone shaped finial on the end.  It's a spoon that was made to be used.  Not to be put away in a drawer as a keepsake.  It's the kind of spoon that I like to make.  140 years ago they weren't worried about how many people liked what they made, they crafted and carved tools and items for their every day use.  I need to remember that more often I guess.

Luray Caverns

Weekend Camping Trip, round 2

Last week it was all about spending a weekend in the woods with other dads and our daughters.  This week, it was my son and I.  We had fun, we always do.  He gets to spend time with friends that he only sees at the camp outs and I get a few minutes with him without video games or the TV cutting into our time spent together.  It is something that we both really look forward to doing twice a year.  We were talking about our fall camp out on the drive home on Sunday.  We are ready to go again for sure.  I think this picture sums up the weekend.

See the smile?  See the joy?  I can promise you that smile was mirrored on my face as I took this picture.

We cooked potatoes in the ground again, and for the second weekend in a row we had some tasty results.  Instead of taking a video, I was able to take a few pictures of the preparation.  Not being the person digging the hole has its advantages I guess.

When we got to the camp ground we built our fire and it burned all evening Friday and then throughout the night.  We dug our hole on the uphill side of the fire, deep enough to go through the thin layer of ash and into the hard ground below.

Into this hole we built a small secondary fire, with small branches and twigs that were found in the nearby woods.  We started the secondary fire with a shovel full of hot coals from the main fire.

After forming a secondary coal bed in the bottom of our hole, we lined the hole with several rocks that we had placed in the coals of the main fire.  We shoveled in some more hot coals from the main fire and then added the potatoes.  We covered the whole thing with dirt, deep enough that no smoke was able to escape.

We waited about five hours and then excavated our tasty treasures.  For the second week in a row our efforts were rewarded with perfectly baked potatoes.

 

Taking the potatoes out of the hole was the best and worst part of this whole effort.  The fire was so hot that even with a thick, fire resistant glove on, our hands were on the edge of being burned.  We had to take turns digging them out, because the heat on our faces was almost too hot to handle.

There is something very rewarding about eating something that you have worked hard to prepare.  Our tribe mates were appreciative and we were left with a feeling of satisfaction that came from more than just a full stomach.  I am confident that we will cook this way again, after two successful weeks and a great deal of confidence in our ability, we won't be able to help ourselves.

Right before I left for the camp out a package came in the mail with a Minnesota post mark, bearing the name Pinewood Forge.  More about that later though, this has gone on long enough.

Weekend Camping trip, round one.

I take my daughter camping twice a year with a large group of other fathers as part of a program at our YMCA called the Indian Princesses.  For those two weekends a local camp ground is filled with the smells of camp fires and the laughter of hundreds of young girls.  My daughter is almost 6 and we have been going since she was 4, I think this past weekend was our 5th camp out.  She loves it, and looks forward to going.  She gets to spend time with her friends and do some fishing and loves searching for frogs and trying to catch minnows on the edge of the lake.  She gets to shoot a gun, run an obstacle course through the woods, make crafts, and sleep outside.  I enjoy it as well, mostly because it seems like I rarely get time with my daughter where I am not competing with some other distraction.

Because the weekend has an Indian theme we each belong to a specific tribe.  My daughter and I are part of the Crow tribe.  Each tribe has a specific campsite and a camp fire that is used for warmth, roasting marshmallows, and for just sitting around talking.  This year, we decided to use it to cook some of our Saturday night dinner as well.

After reading a post at The Sharpened Axe about cooking beans in a fire pit, I thought it would be fun to give it a try at our camp out.  We decided on baked potatoes though.  I didn't take pictures of our preparations, but I can tell you that it was as described in the post linked above.  The main difference was that we dug our hole on the peripheral of our existing camp fire, and then filled it with hot coals from the fire and counted on residual heat from the actively burning fire to handle most of the cooking.  In a sense we created an oven with the main fire acting as the heat source.

The potatoes were coated in left over bacon grease from that morning's breakfast, and wrapped in aluminum foil.  We dug a hole about 18 inches deep and lined it with rocks and filled it with hot coals from the fire.  We then added our potatoes and then covered everything with an 8 inch layer of dirt.  

We waited about 6 hours before digging them up, here are the results.

They were cooked to perfection!  It was a very rewarding experience.  I am already looking forward to the fall camp out with my daughter.  Next weekend, I will be camping with my son in the Father/Son version of the same weekend.  

I also spent some time last week, carving a coffee scoop, I haven't been out in the shop much at all lately, I'm spending some time out there this week for sure.  We are buying a new set of cookware, and I need some spoons to keep the non-stick finish safe.  No more metal spoons for us!

Here is my finished coffee scoop.  I'm sending it to a friend this week.  It isn't too fancy, but I know that it will be used to make many many pots of wonderful coffee.

Buying Locally (Random thought #1)

Yeah, I numbered it, prepare for more of these.  I have this problem.  Random things pop into my brain, I can't help it, it just happens, and then, I have to go learn more about these random things.  They become an obsession and things like tracking wood chips into the house from carving spoons begin to happen.  Be happy that I am sparing you the whole series on bent wood rings that I had going for a while.  Shew.  Talk about dodging a bullet, count yourself fortunate for sure.  Anyway, these random thoughts just pop in.  Trust me, I don't sit around the house all day trying to think of various interesting topics.  I think, though, that folks might find them interesting even if they come here looking for spoon carving related topics.

Today's random topic is something that I just sort of started thinking about, not just today, or yesterday even, but something that has been fighting for brain cycles for a week or so now.

How can I buy locally?

Now, don't snicker meanly and point to the previous post about my new spoon knives from Mr. Orford.  I realize that I bought them from a man that lives across the ocean from me.  Not really local I reckon.  Fair enough, but he is still a local businessman, running a local business, and I was honored to support him in that.  But that isn't the point here.

There are studies upon studies that show that supporting local businesses is good for the community.  A larger percentage of the money you spend stays in the community as opposed to when you buy from the big box stores.  One study in 2002 reported that 44% of the money spent with a local business stays in the community, versus 14% when spent at a big box store.  That's pretty significant.  I love my community.  If I need to spend money anyway, why wouldn't I spend it in a way that benefits the area that I live in?  Well, that sounds great doesn't it?  I mean we would all want to do that I think.  But we don't, or we don't do it enough.

Why?  Convenience is one of the reasons.  Why would I go to a local butcher to buy meat, when I can go to a big box store and buy meat, and everything else on my list in one trip?  I don't know, why would you?  None of us have any time anymore, right?  We are running here and there and time just slips away.  I have to go and buy groceries to feed my family, and since I am there I can just grab some ground beef and be out the door.  Yep, you sure can.  Unless.  Unless you really decide that buying locally is something that you feel passionate about.  I really believe that I am at that point.  I have passion about buying locally, and I for one, am going to look for ways to do that more and more.

Case in point, Longhorn and Lager Meat and Beverage Company.  They are a local butcher shop and when I went to visit them the other day, they had cuts of meat that I had never even heard of.  All cut to order, large orders, small orders, specialty meats and seafood, and a wide range of local wines and beer.

Look, this isn't a commercial for that company, but I was surprised at what I found there.  I bought some breakfast sausage, 2 pounds, for $3.99 a pound.  It was fresh ground, made that morning.  I made a mean batch of sausage gravy and biscuits with it.  When I went to the Big Box store a few days later, I looked at the sausage, and it was $2.99 for a pound.  You know the kind, the tubes of sausage that are filled with preservatives and salts and sugar and things other than sausage.  I won't be buying that sausage anymore, ever.  If I want sausage I will go to my local butcher and get it from him.  Sure, it might cost me a little more, and be a little out of the way, but one thing is for certain, I am buying sausage, and not something that tastes how sausage is supposed to taste.

I am looking for more places that I can buy local items from, the Farmer's Market opens here on May 1st, and you can bet that I will be there.  Buying locally grown fruits and vegetables to feed my family.

Sorry for derailing the blog and posting about something other than my normal topics, I am sure it will happen again, you never know what is going to pop into my head.

Happy Carving everyone.

Spoon Knives! Spoon Knives!

After waiting what has seemed like an eternity, I opened the mail box on Friday and it was finally here.  Sitting under the never ending stacks of bills and home mortgage refinance offers was a gray package.  It was about the size of an express envelope, and was sealed on one end with a few strips of brown packing tape.  There, gleaming in the afternoon sun, was a flash of gold that drew my eye.  An abused postage label.

A quick look in the opposite corner confirmed what I already knew.

Nethergreen Farm!  The name Orford!  The hand written word England!  Oh Happy Day!  It was the knives!  The spoon knives had come!  I could hardly believe they were here!  With a herculean effort I composed myself in case the neighbors were watching, and calmly walked into the house.  There, in the safety of the kitchen, I quickly opened my treasure, being careful not to damage anything that may be inside.  Enclosed were several business cards from Ben, a hand written note from Lois thanking me for my order, and a receipt for my payment.  Oh yeah, and a matched pair of spoon knives!

A matched pair?  Yep.  It is not every day that you order spoon knives from across the sea, so when you do, you get a set.  Right and Left.  They were securely packaged, with the pre-sharpened blades securely wrapped in a length of leather for protection.  I slowly unwound the leather from the first and held it up to the light to inspect it.  As expected, the quality was impeccable.  I rolled the knife over in my hands and saw the maker's mark.

 

I quickly unwrapped the second, and saw that they were truly a matched pair.  The bevel is even and true on both knives, the curve is smooth and even, and both knives are identical in shape.  Both knives have been buffed to a mirror polish, and arrive pre-honed and sharp enough to work with straight from the package.

I went straight to the shop and used them immediately.  They cut extremely well.  They have a thinner blade than I am used too, but they are a joy to use, they cut easily and I am really pleased with my purchase.

I have been using a Mora crook knife to carve the bowls on all my spoons.  I thought it has performed nicely and the only problem that I have had with it, has been the width of the knife blade.  It doesn't handle steep curves very well, because the blade is too thick.  I also have some issues with smaller spoons because of the size of the Mora blade.  Looking at Ben's knives, I know that I will not have the same issue.  His blades are much thinner and will handle some of the cuts much better than what I have been using.

 

One thing that I would like to mention was that my experience with Ben and Lois was a true joy.  The transaction was handled quickly and efficiently.  Email responses were very quick, even after accounting for time differences.  I got the impression that Ben and Lois were looking to make sure that I was a happy customer, something that I find lacking more often than not in today's marketplace.  My purchase was securely packaged, and made it from the UK to the US in 14 days.  Would I buy from the again?  Most assuredly, even more so if I was local.  The smiling and friendly faces that appear on the top of their website has proven to be a genuine reflection of how the Orford's do business.  Click the link below to check out their site.

Ben Orford, Handmade Tools, Knives and Leather work

 

Wow, this has been a really long post.  I have so much more that I want to talk about, but it is late and morning comes early.  Happy Carving!