How To Make A Wooden Spoon, with Barn the Spoon

Barn the Spoon is a young man who loves to make spoons. He really loves spoon-making, and does it lots.

He learnt much of his wood-ken as a green-woodworking apprentice in Abbotts Wood, where Mike Abbott instructs the great and the keen in all aspects of green-wood-workery.

So Barney is pretty clued up, as this first video will show you.

In fact, he is ridiculously recondite in the art of spoon-making. When unencumbered by the camera, he knocked a beauty up in about 14 minutes, from round log to perfectly smooth eating shovel.

He makes them in a particular Swedish way, whereby he leaves the axe marks on the spoon - "it doesn't need to hide the way it was made" - and he also refuses to sand down his finished spoons - he didn't like the unknown chemicals of sandpaper - aluminium oxide and epoxy, we suppose - being rubbed into his clean and beautiful handiwork.

Right now, Barney Spoon is travelling over Britain. on foot (and bicycle?), and making spoons for all the good people he meets, in exchange for food and shelter.

Being a woodsman, he can provide himself with food and shelter pretty well anyway, but it's nice to be involved with people, and to share the good hospitality that is offered. We know how he feels.

And having an intense love of creating things from green wood, especially spoons, he naturally wants to see his passion spread contagiously amongst the good people of Britain. He is a man with a spoonful mission.

So look out for Barney, on a footpath near you, with a spoon in his hand and a well-informed glint in his eye.

Check his website at: http://barnthespoon.com/