Crafts to Inspire your Brain
About a year ago I went to Rekindle and made a spoon in their spoon carving workshop. Rekindle are trying to encourage resourcefulness in the community. Their motto is, if you have some spare material lying around home – don’t throw it in the rubbish – use it to make an artwork or a useful object. If you have a cabbage tree that is constantly dropping leaves which are hard to dispose of – make some rope! Firewood can become a carved household item.
Spoon Carving Workshops
One of their classes is green wood carving. I managed to get on a free workshop on a weekday at the Arts Centre of Christchurch. You have to be fast to get into the free workshops – they go fast! There were about five of us in the class and we each got a wooden horse to sit on. Here is a picture of one of them. Don’t I look happy? I was so stoked to be making something useful for my house!
A Block of Wood
I was given a flat green piece of wood which looked nothing like a spoon at this point and had hairy pieces sticking out of it. At first I thought, “How am I going to get a spoon out of this? How on earth?” We drew the shape of the spoon on the piece of rectangular wood and then proceeded to carve it out using the specialised tools at Rekindle. I won’t go into too much detail as you need to really go there to learn.
They teach you health and safety and have special leather aprons to avoid you cutting yourself and show you how to use the very sharp tools.
Eventually, I started to get a spoon shape from the wood and then started to shave off pieces to make it more rounded the final step was to carve out the hole in the spoon. This was the most satisfying part.
I was a very very happy girl. Can’t you tell from the photos? I just love anything creative!
Oiling Your Spoon
My spoon was still not ready. I was told that it wouldn’t be dry for several months and had to be oiled regularly. Good things take time. I set it in a jar of walnut oil which was given to me by Rekindle and rotated it every now and again to make sure the whole thing was coated. Once it’s been oiled for a long time and has dried, you can start using it, but you still have to keep oiling it at least once a year.
How Different Creative Pursuits Help Your Photography
Why am I posting about this workshop on my photography website? Of course, making a spoon has nothing to do with photography. Or does it? Well actually it is another form of creativity which was good for my brain and helped me to be creative and experience some mindfulness. It also showed me how a simple piece of, what was essentially firewood, can be turned into something that is beautiful.
In the same way, I can use this for making props for photography and looking at materials in a different light when I’m shooting. A simple leaf can become a prop. A piece of wood can be turned into something amazing. An apple can become a prop in a photoshoot. A piece of fabric can become a dress.
Go Do it!
If you have the chance and live in Christchurch I would recommend you go and do this workshop to challenge yourself and learn something new. I absolutely loved it.
If you are into arty stuff – check out my photography!