While in London last summer, I looked in the utensil drawer of the AirBnB we were staying at and saw four sets of hand-carved chopsticks. My immediate thought was “And why have I never done this??”
So I began. I’ve always wanted to practice carving, so this is my chance on a small scale. Deciding to go a more illustrative route (as opposed to decorative shapes and patterns) I settled on whittling the characters of the almost certainly untrue legend of how sushi was invented.
Supposedly an elderly woman in feudal Japan was constantly having her large pots of rice stolen by local thieves. One day she decided to hide the jars in a famously huge osprey nest. When she came up to retrieve them, she found that the osprey herself had used the jars as storage… for her freshly caught fish.
Thus, I started with the osprey and the fish. After drawing some sketches, I had the general ideas mapped out. I picked walnut as the base because, while it is generally a straight grained hardwood with no pores, it is still luxurious enough to be eating from. My pocket knife and linoleum block cutter were my tools.
Despite the seeming simplicity, it took almost three months of “waiting in the car” type carving. To finish, I used the trusty steel wool ebonizing stain for some darkness in the recesses, then sanded the highlights. I then soaked them in some mineral oil for food safety. The “water” behind the fish needs a little work and the sticks themselves feel a bit too long, but I love the osprey perched in the contracting textured “log” and the overall mineral finish.
