Finding Fun in Failed Creations

I got inspired by a pair of spoons I saw recently.

Dolphin spoons carved by Welsh spoon carver Mark Howlett. Really nice examples of the form.

Dolphin spoons are a traditional form of Welsh spoon, originating, I think, from Caernarvonshire in north Wales. They get their name from the side profile, with the bump of the neck resembling a dolphin's dorsal fin, and the end of handle is upswept like a dolphin's tail.

You gotta squint a bit to see a dolphin, but its a spoon design I really like and haven't carved in a while. Mark's work inspired me to revisit this form.

I split open some maple (not losing track of one half this time) and had a go.

One end had some weird grain from a knot, so I laid out my design with the bowl at the other end. Normally, that would have been a good idea.

As I carved away the underside of the bowl, a small knot appeared. That isn't always game over, sometimes these little knots appear and then can be carved away.

This was not one of those occasions.

But no problem. I had the second half of the log.

THERE WAS ANOTHER KNOT IN THAT BOWL TOO.

As you can tell from the shouting, I wasn't okay with that. But I had a couple of realizations:

1) Eventually, the universe will evolve into a state of maximum entropy, where all energy is evenly distributed and no further thermodynamic work can be performed. All stars will burn out, and all energy sources will vanish, leading to a dark, cold, and effectively dead cosmos, thus rendering all of human effort, including my spoon carving, irrelevant.

2) I'm just doing this for fun, and the part that makes a dolphin spoon a dolphin spoon is the handle.

Comforted by nihilism, I continued carving, and actually had a good time with it.

When I first saw Mark's dolphin spoons I couldn't visualize how I was going to get that handle shape. I knew I had to make it to understand it. And I was able to do that with the spoon that would never be a spoon.

Pretty much all of the fun I get from carving is in the process, not in having a spoon at the end of it. Having a spoon at the end is a nice bonus, but experimenting with something that I knew had already failed was a freeing experience.

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