Blog: Sloyd, or the art of spoon carving

By Bobby Fiedler, Library Director

I started woodworking as a hobby in 2009. In my job as a librarian, I spend a lot of time at the computer screen using technology for a variety of tasks. I’ve always been interested in technology and the ways that it can be used to accomplish any number of things, let alone the ability to connect to people and access and share information from all corners of the globe. But I also immensely enjoy working with my hands to create utilitarian, real-world objects. Enter woodworking.

When most people think of a woodshop, they imagine a room of machinery: table saws, drill presses, band saws, planers – replete with sawdust and buzzing noises. These tools all have a place and a use, including in my shop. But the more time I’ve spent working with wood, the more I’ve been drawn to the quiet, methodical use of hand powered tools, with names like drawknife, adze, bowl gouge, froe, shave-horse, and handplane. These are all “edge” tools, meaning they are made to conform to the human hand and have a sharpened steel edge which shapes and molds whatever you might be building. Think dovetailed drawers or windsor chairs, hand-hewn bowls, and spoons.

If you were to take that process of using hand tools one step further and use them to work with wood when it’s green, you have what some people call Sloyd. In the most basic sense, Sloyd means handcraft. Digging a little deeper it refers to educational sloyd, a system of handicraft-based education started in Finland around 1865. Sloyd is still compulsory in the educational system in most Nordic countries. It was introduced to the United States by Meri Toppelius in the early 1900s, and the history and tenets alone are well worth a deep dive.

I learned about Sloyd while at a chair-making class in Maine a number of years ago. After a 10- or 12-hour day in the shop building a Welsh Stick Chair with only hand tools and no electricity, we’d sit around the fire after supper and try to carve wooden spoons by hand with a special kind of knife called a sloyd knife. For a woodworker accustomed to traditional power tools and possessing only a cursory familiarity with hand tools, trying to carve a spoon from green wood is an incredibly humbling experience. Contained in the seemingly simple art of spoon carving is a complex world of learning to understand the true nature of a piece of wood. Is it straight grained or curved? How do you hold the extraordinarily sharp knife without inflicting damage to yourself? How on earth do you carve the bowl of the spoon? How do you follow the wood grain? How thin is too thin? Anyone trying spoon carving for the first time quickly realizes it will take a lifetime to master – and that type of life would be one well-lived.

Learning to carve spoons has taught me more about the qualities of different types of wood than I could have ever learned running a board through a table saw. And it’s extremely gratifying. You are making something useful, especially if you use it for

eating ice cream or better yet, give it as a gift. It’s difficult to intimate how satisfying it is to do such a simple act, to create such a basic object, one that we take for granted every single day. But it opens your eyes to how someone, somewhere had to figure out a way to make or build whatever it is you might be looking at or using. And what better way to spend a cold, dark, Iowa winter night than by the fireplace – maybe with friends – carving a spoon with your own hands? If the spoon you’re carving breaks or ends up

   ‘Learning to carve spoons has taught me … how  satisfying it is to do such a simple act, to create such a basic object that we take for granted every single day.’