Other woodworking

Last summer I wrote a post about building a Japanese tool chest, to take some tools with me while traveling. Over the last year I’ve done a lot of green woodworking. I’ve learned a lot about wood and the tools that are needed to turn that wood into things. I’ve carved a bunch of spoons, […]

Some pictures of this summer’s spoon harvest.

Elm is underrated and underused. I really like the stuff. It’s cheap, does not split, and is quite durable in use. I picked up a board of quarter sawn Dutch elm a while back, which turned out to be perfect for cutting boards. Because it is quarter sawn, the wood is very straight and stable. With a […]

Why would you buy finishes for wood? Really, they are expensive, and often contain all kinds of (petro-)chemicals of which you’re not aware when reading the label. The law requires labels of food and drinks to tell us what goes in there, because we consume those things. There is no such requirement for finishes, even […]

  Some time ago, I visited an old sawmill, “de Zwaluw”. It lies in Burdaard, a small village in the north of Friesland. If you’ve ever heard of it, chances are it’s because the famous Frysian ice skating tour, the “Elfstedentocht”, passes through the village twice. The sawmill is wind-powered and run by a team […]

This blog post is long overdue. I carved the spoons below over the last couple of months. As you can see, I’ve been experimenting with different types of wood and different shapes. Most of them are finished with a homemade wax, a mixture of walnut oil, beeswax and a bit of orange oil. They were […]

This is my second knife. I didn’t really take pictures of the making process. A lot of it’s the same as with my first knife. Some of it’s new, but I just forgot to take pictures… The knife is based on a Polar Whittler 80 blank, which I ordered from Nordell Knives. I paid about […]