Carve a Spoon Yoke

"It's the first few thousand miles.  After that, a man gets limber with his feet." - Buster Kilrain, a fictional footsoldier in The Killer Angels and the movie Gettysburg.


After you've carved a few yokes, the ability to read the wood and the direction to cut with an edge tool like a spokeshave, drawknive, ax, adze, or chisel starts to come along.  Also, the value in carving "green wood," fresh cut material with more moisture in it, becomes apparent.

In other words, by the time you've finished the last yoke you'll ever need to make, you're ready to make yokes.  Handy, isn't it?

To fix this dilemma, start by carving small yokes, which come disguised as spoons.  Spoons have curves- just like yokes.  Spoons are carved with edge tools- just like yokes.  Spoons can be primitive yet functional, or fancy as the day is long- well, you get the idea.  

But unlike yokes: you can make a spoon in about an hour, if you screw it up, you can burn the evidence and not feel too badly, and you can present the finished product to people who don't have oxen without awkward responses.  ("Gee, thanks for the fancy ox yoke. . .I'll treasure it always and it will look great in my apartment with my cats. . .")

I stopped to visit my mom and dad yesterday, absconding with a small piece of maple from their firewood box.  With a couple of hours yesterday and today, I roughed out two spoons, one hideous, one merely ugly.  Both are left-handed.  But each gave a good lesson in reading grain direction.  


Ironically, in carving a spoon, I had to work around the big elm yoke, still unfinished.