An Ohio Metalsmith in Dresden

Just a spoon.  A simple, by the book spoon with no fancy metaphors on my internal angst, and no deeper insight into the human condition other than fulfilling the basic need to transport food from the plate and into the mouth without getting your fingers goopy.  Maybe be a little stylish as you're doing it, but other than that, it's just a spoon.

I have scoured all the English language resources I could find to come up with a basic how-to on classical spoon making techniques and there isn't much out there.  No big book on everything you need to know to make a spoon, so I had to cobble together snippets from several texts and try to fill in the blank.  This time I wanted to push up the degree of difficulty by working with copper.  While still being softer and cheaper than silver it does behave more like a real metal and needs heating up as it becomes work hardened instead of becoming softer if you over hammer it like pewter does.

The process started out very similar to the pewter scoop project.  Choosing the right hammer face to move the metal in the direction it needs to go.  As you can see from the narrow profile of the hammer marks, the compressions are thinning and spreading the metal at a right angle from the face of the hammer.  What started out as a rectangular bar widened and elongated into a proper spoon form.

As it progresses the metal gets compressed and brittle so heating it with a torch to a warm cherry color then quenching it in water helps loosen things up for the next round of forging.

Below you can see the form is getting more defined as the neck gets narrowed and elongated and the bowl fans out.  The side view shows the thinness of the bowl in comparison to the neck which traditionally is thicker to support the weight of the load and the stress of scooping.  Though unless you are planning on hefting up small children or shoveling out a tunnel through rock with your spoon you don't need to over do this.  Maybe this is some residual design concern from when historically these utensils were being made with pewter and such issues would be understandable.

This process continues until the form gets closer to the final dimensions of the finished design.  Then different hammers are required to flatten out the handle and start to dome the bowl.  To get the handle flat, a flat hammer is used on a fat surface.  To get the bowl, a rounded hammer face is first used to sink the bowl into a large leather bag filled with sand.  Then to deepen the bowl, a flat hammer is used over a dome that matches the desired final shape of the bowl.  This is repeated several times with breaks to anneal the metal of the bowl with the flame.

Finally, a small and light hammer is used to planish out the residual hammer marks, the pieces is filed, sanded and polished.  So what you end up with is a spoon with all the proper proportions.  The neck is thick, the handle wider and thinner to fit comfortably in the hand, and the bowl depressed deep enough to hold plenty of food, yet narrow enough to fit easily into the mouth without making a scene.  The arching of the neck adds grace to the design and keeps the bowl level so that any residual liquid stays inside where it belongs and not on your nice tablecloth.  I decided to keep the shovel like shape of the tip of the spoon (a byproduct of the original form of the rod) and not cut it away as is usually done as I liked the sturdiness and utilitarian functionality of the form.  One can get deep into the corners of a box of something tasty and not miss a thing.

So, it's a spoon.  Nice and simple.