Yet Another Lovespoon…well, no…I guess it isn’t.

The Luther Rose

I guess this is actually a whole new “thing”, not really a Lovespoon and yet not really a “non-Lovespoon” either.  It resides in the netherworld in between. 

Some friends of ours were over a month or so ago looking at Lovespoons.  Their son and brand new daughter-in-law were the recipients of ‘the “R” and “X” Lovespoon’ that I posted recently.  “K” said that she admired the dark wood spoon that I did about a year ago. “S” said that he liked the heart with the inset cross of another spoon that he saw.  Being a Pastor, he said that it was like the “Luther Rose”, an icon of the Lutheran Church.

I put their comments -- along with the idea of inlaying one color of wood into/onto another in a Lovespoon that I had just seen someplace online -- into the mental blender and a day or so later this idea emerged.  

I carved the rose from Basswood.  As simple as the rose looks, it still took two tries.  It has a lot of very subtle curves and undercutting.  It also ended up being a bit larger than I had originally intended.  So I had to increase the overall size of the Celtic knot and the width of the handle to keep the slightly larger rose from overpowering the piece.  Originally, it was also going to have a “framing” disk behind it but that would have made it look even larger and there was an upper limit to just how big I was willing to go :-)

Both the handle of this piece and the aforementioned spoon were carved from cherry and stained dark.  I power-carved the previous spoon but this time I used a coping saw to cut out the openings and then I hand-carved it.  After it was all said and done, it turned out to require about the same amount of effort.  Sure, power carving is much quicker and easier, but this one required much less sanding because the blade-fashioned surface was not left “chewed up” by the rapidly rotating burr.

A secondary benefit of the hand-carved finish was that there were far fewer of those raw "mechanically" ripped open fibers to suck up excess stain.  That greatly minimized the dreadful blotching that I experienced the first time.

Not much else to say except that I hope you like it.

One from the Bench:

If you don't like how things are, change them!  You're not a tree. - Jim Rohn

‘Til next time…Keep makin’ chips!