A Crazy story…. #woodwork #woodworking #woodcraft #asmr #tiktokgrowthchallenge

A guy emailed me last month. He wrote, "Just need a wooden spoon for my wife's birthday." Cedar, if you have it, should be pretty quick, right? It's January. 11 degrees. I'm pulling raw cedar out of a rain barrel. I left frozen since November. Six weeks of cold soaking so the grain splits clean and won't check when it dries. Quick. For one spoon, 42 hours of work spread across two weeks. Western red cedar from a windfall my neighbor dropped two winters ago. Old growth. Eight rings per inch. The tight, slow-grown kind you cannot buy at a hardware store. Only fell yourself or no a guy. Quartersawing against the heartwood so the bowl won't split. Hand split with a grants force Brooks small forest axe by people who spent years just learning not to break the fibers. Roughed out with a hatchet on a stump, profiled with a Mora 106 sloid, bowl hollowed with a 164 hook knife, two handed in the cold, sanded to 600 grit by hand. Squatch mark burned in with a pyrography iron. Three coats of food safe mineral oil and beeswax rubbed in warm. He picked it up Friday. Told me his wife grew up in a cabin her grandfather built with one hatchet and a cross cut saw. She'd been losing him to dementia for three years. He wanted her to have something a man made with his hands. She's going to stir soup with this spoon for the next 40 winters. That's what they don't sell at William Sonoma.