Butter Spreaders

When I'm not carving things or out in the woods, I'm usually found in an office in London working on Eco-Schools for the charity Keep Britain Tidy. Each year in September Keep Britain Tidy has a Waste Less Live More week. Last year the theme for the week was food and food waste. This year the week is running from 22 - 28 September and the theme is 'Be Resourceful'. 

To encourage people to be resourceful and to raise awareness that what's good for the environment is good for us, I decided to teach people how to carve wooden butter spreaders, a nice introduction to green woodworking. 

In preparation for the workshops I thought I'd give myself a bit of a refresher, as it's been a while since I've done spreaders. I had a nice round of cherry left over from the bits of wood I hauled away from Spoonfest. 

Using an axe and a wooden club I split the round in half, and half again, until I had eight pieces of wood to work with.

I sketched out a rough design on them. I made each one was slightly different to experiment with the design a little. I went back and forth between using the axe to rough them out and solely using a knife. Some of the pieces of wood benefited from being split again, especially if I was just using the knife. 

I ended up with 11 spreaders. It didn't take too long to make these. It was good to do them as it highlighted which knife grips would be the most beneficial to use, the areas where learners might have trouble and how thick to split the blanks.

I'll be running a couple of workshops in London (one near Old Street Station and one in Tower Hamlet's Victoria Park). If you're part of an organisation in London or south Essex and are interested in receiving one of these workshops as part of the Waste Less Live More week, please get in touch (tom.bartlett@keepbritaintidy.org)