Photos by Billie Winter

The air in Pratt Fine Art Center’s wood studio smelled clean, earthy, damp. It reminded me of Home Depot. But if someone asked me, I’d tell them it reminded me of the Hoh Rainforest.

A red tub bursting with chunks of raw wood—called blanks—rested on a table that was also made of wood. Wooden stools idled next to other wooden tables. Saws adorned the walls, the longest of which—like one you’d use if you were really, authentically about to yell “Timber!”—crowned the doorway of the room’s entrance. Clamps covered the back wall. Vices sprouted from workshop benches like arms readied for wrestling. A giant plastic bag filled with even more blanks sat on the floor in tripping distance of their final evolution: On a table top, a beautiful wooden bowl blossomed with ornately-carved spoons. If you were skilled, you could turn one of those blanks into a beautiful spoon tonight.

In my latest exploration into Seattle subcultures, I took a hook knife in hand, fished a blank out of the bin, and learned the magic of spoon carving at Seattle Spoon Club. While I did not successfully make a beautiful utensil for sipping only the finest of soups, I met a community committed to spreading the joy of craft.

They come to connect. Some seek a connection to their creativity, others want to handle something tangible after spending their days muddied in the intangible, and a few carvers are there because each sweep brings them closer to something—or someone—they’ve lost. They find it all through the simple elegance and ubiquity of the spoon.

The First Cut

For the last six years, on the third Friday of every month, between 30 and 60 spoon carvers flock to the Pratt center in the Central District. Amidst the din of pounding mallets and scraping knives, they chat, they share expertise, they carve.

It’s a relatively hands-off club. The organizers—carpenter and furniture-maker Tom Henscheid, civil engineer and renowned woodturner Elizabeth Weber, and software engineer and hobbyist carver Michael Alexander—provide the wood which they’ve already cut into blanks and Pratt provides the space, but spoon club isn’t a class. 

“Some organizations have a demonstrator, and everybody sits around like bumps on a log and listens to one person talk,” Henscheid said. “We're here to carve spoons and share.”

Complete beginners shouldn’t come to Spoon Club looking to start from scratch, unless they go with someone who knows what they’re doing.

“Most people get introduced by having either just watched enough YouTube or Instagram that they have a general sense,” Kim McIntyre, Pratt’s wood studio manager, said. “But I'd say a higher percentage of people come with somebody who is a spoon carver. They usually get invited by a peer, a family member, a co-worker, and so they're getting a side-by-side informal lesson.”

Though, the organizers won’t hold back if you ask them a question. Henscheid—two pairs of glasses perched on his nose, spoon in hand, a spare sharp tool in his pocket—spends a typical Spoon Club flitting around from table to table, talking to everyone, and giving tips.

“He knows everyone’s name,” Connie Carson, a Seattleite who’s been carving for about nine months said. “He sets the tone for this environment, like this is a very giving environment, and people are happy to be here.”

That’s because there wouldn’t be a Spoon Club without Henscheid. He is Spoon Club.

For the Love of Spoons

“A spoon is universal,” Henscheid said. “It's probably the most egalitarian thing to create. It can be special, but it's not very self-important. No matter how fancy the spoon, it's still just a spoon.”

Each year, Henscheid carves anywhere between 300 and 400 spoons. Because of the simple nature of the craft (you likely only need two hand tools), you can carve anywhere. And Tom does.

“Tom carves in traffic,” Alexander, the club’s co-president, said.

“He says he pulls over,” McIntyre said, “but the amount of chips that come out of his van, I think he's carving at stoplights.”

“He carves in his bed,” Weber said.

“He has a sheet that has been sewn on the bottom so that when you sit up, the chips all collect down the bottom of the bed,” McIntyre said.

Henscheid started carving spoons in the mid-1970s when he read a book on it.

“I thought, ‘Jeez, I could do that,’” Henscheid said.

That was his first time woodworking. He started carving a spoon a day, a practice he’s kept up for 50 years, hence the 300 to 400 annual spoons.

A few years later, while working at a shipyard in Seattle, he carved his daily spoon on breaks.

“A fellow named Frank Guthrie, who was a shipwright, would walk up and he would just stand there and watch me carving during lunch and shake his head,” Henscheid said.

Days later, Guthrie came up to Henscheid.

“He said, ‘God, I can't stand this anymore. You're just doing it all wrong.’ He goes, ‘You be at my house at eight o'clock in the morning on Saturday, and I'm going to show you how to make proper spoon knives,’” Henscheid regaled.

Guthrie, it turned out, was a famous Coast Salish carver. Guthrie taught Henscheid to modify his carving tools and make them work for himself. Henscheid said he learned more from Guthrie that day than he had from anyone before or has from anyone since.

“He said, ‘I'm showing you this stuff, but you have to pass it on, and if you don't teach other people how to do it, I'm gonna haunt you from the grave,’” Henscheid said. “I've been staying one step ahead of Frank Guthrie ever since.”

Henscheid teaches spoon carving, bent-knife making, and more. His stewardship cultivated a spoon-carving culture not only at Pratt and in Seattle, but across Western Washington. Henscheid started the spoon carving and spoon carving tool-making classes at Pratt. He also teaches spoon carving at the Port Townsend School of Woodworking. His love for carving spoons is infectious. Though it may all be to ward off a potential haunting, something tells me it’s the love of carving that motivates Henscheid more.

The Spoon Carvers

Not all woodworkers carve spoons, according to club co-president Weber. But spoon carvers are a microcosm of the carving world.

“Some people try it and they're just like, ‘I guess it was fun to make a one-time piece,’” Weber said. “And then some people get bitten by the spoon-carving bug, and then they just can't stop.”

Those who are into it are really into it. There’s a 24-hour international Zoom channel called “Rise Up and Carve” where people log on and carve together. Spoon Club hosts an annual weekend-long camping trip called Spoon Bash to bring together the Seattle and Portland spoon clubs. (Portland has two spoon clubs, according to co-president and Spoon Bash organizer Alexander. The clubs didn’t know the other club existed until recently, he said, since one was completely offline.)

There’s something about spoon-carving that’s light, almost whimsical.

“We don’t say the ‘f’ word,” Tyler van Iderstein, a fourth year spoon carver and software engineer, carving across from Weber, chimed in.

“What’s the ‘f word?’” I asked.

“Forks,” he replied.

Van Iderstein started carving in the pandemic. He taught himself on YouTube. Then, in 2021, he found Spoon Club and has been coming ever since. Carving became a necessary artistic, hands-on outlet for him. He does other crafts, too, like making sheaths for knives.

“Spoon carving is also a slippery slope into cups and bowls,” he deadpanned.

Weber’s table of carvers was the loudest during spoon club. Their faces split into huge grins even while their heads were down, focused on the grain. They’d met here. They usually get together outside of the club to carve monthly, too. Each of their houses is full of spoons.

“I have four jars of spoons in the kitchen,” Matt Hankins said, carving at the far end of the table. “There are jars in the bedroom.”

Beyond having a different spoon for every meal—or even every bite—spoon carving provides something different for each person. For Hankin, it’s a bit of peace.

Hankins, a West Seattle landscaper, started carving six years ago when he went on a wilderness retreat to get sober. Once he got back, he stuck with it—the sobriety and the carving.

He carves at night when his young daughters go to sleep.

“It’s something positive to do with your hands,” He said. “Something to stay busy, and something to focus on or be present with.”

The craft can also help forge one’s identity, especially in a new phase of life.

Miranda Taylor, a data scientist, started spoon carving nine years ago when she had a newborn baby.

“I needed a craft that had nothing to do with kids,” she said. The danger of a blade-based hobby allowed her a slice of independence during new motherhood.

Alexander, the other club co-president, picked up spoon carving after his daughter went to college.

It started as a replacement for a different tradition. When his daughter was four, Alexander started taking her to farmers’ markets. “We would do the local farmers market, and then we would go down to Pike Place market,” he said. “We’d have lunch together, and we did this consistently all the way through high school. It was really fun.”

Then, around eight years ago, she grew up and went off to school.

“Apparently, I got pretty mopey on that first Saturday because my little friend wasn't there,” Alexander said.

Knowing how he always admired the handcrafted wooden spoons at the farmers markets, Alexander’s wife booked him a spoon carving class at Pratt, and he caught the carving bug. Now his spoons—uniquely rounded and impossibly smooth—sell for $125, or he gifts them to newlyweds.

Similarly, Connie Carson booked a spoon carving class with Henscheid for herself last year because she saw it was happening on her dad’s birthday. He’d died the year before.

“He was a closet wood carver,” she said. “I had this premonition that I should take that class on his birthday, and I did.”

The practice of it, carving the same stroke over and over to bring out something functional in a piece of wood, is meditative for Carson, she said. It also brings her closer to her dad.

“I think of him sometimes when I'm carving,” she said.

She admired the fish he carved hanging in his bathroom with a newfound appreciation when she was home for Christmas last year.

“There's a generational thing there that feels really good,” she said. “It's wonderful.”

She swiped away a tear and kept carving.

Spoon Anarchy

As I started carving my cherry wood blank, with McIntyre at my side guiding me, Henscheid sidled up next to us.

“It feels natural, doesn’t it?”

The hook knife felt awkward in my hand. Moments before, when I’d just started, McIntyre suggested that I not carve toward the tender flesh of my body. When I watched her carve, the wood looked as soft as butter. For me, it felt more like stone. But I liked it. There was something so satisfying about stripping off layers to expose the veins of the wood grain underneath. The smell, the sound, the rhythm absorbed me. I couldn’t shake the perfectionist in me, however.

“For your first spoon, I would encourage you to not be precious,” McIntyre said. She told me not to put  unreasonable pressure on myself, to simply try and to be okay failing. An ugly spoon is still a spoon.

McIntyre used to break into the woodshop of her Vermont college at night just to carve with the different tools. She experimented. She likes Spoon Club because she can be imperfect again. Now, as a professional woodworker, every piece is something she needs to be proud of. Here, she plays.

As I carved, I couldn’t figure out the right way to do anything, even though there really wasn’t a right way—it was up to me. The freedom of the craft made me panic. The freedom is what makes every spoon different.

“Everybody produces such unique spoons,” Henscheid said.

Part of that is because of the different techniques.

In some realms of the spoon-carving world, old ways reign supreme.

“There's a group that we jokingly call the ‘Sloyd Police,’” Henscheid said, referring to the traditional Scandinavian way of spoon carving. Those practitioners only rub out their spoons with axes, they only carve in their hands—never on a bench. “They have a particular dogma that things should be done a certain way.”

Spoon Club is not like that.

“We are anarchists,” Henscheid said. “This is very much an anarchist practice because you can buck any trends, even traditionalist, even methods that are generally accepted in the craft world. You can just go the opposite direction.”

So, I took up my borrowed knife and pressed the blade into the wood in whatever way pleased me. One end of the bowl became way too thin after an overzealous stint with the hook knife (“Maybe use the other side when you cook,” McIntyre advised), but it’s my spoon. My next one will be better.