From Log to Spoon: How Amy Carves Our Honey Spoons

These started as tree logs.

Sycamore and acacia, from fallen trees or sustainable woodland management in Sussex. Now they're honey spoons with our distinctive yellow bands, sitting in baskets ready to send out to customers.

No point using an ordinary spoon for extraordinary honey. So let me tell you about Amy and how she makes them.

How It Starts

Amy finds all her wood locally. Either from trees blown down by wind, or ones felled as part of sustainable woodland management - thinning to let light reach younger trees, removing damaged specimens, maintaining healthy woodland.

She takes the logs home and starts with an axe.

The first cuts are rough - splitting the log, removing bark, creating the basic block that will become a spoon. This is green woodworking, which means working with wood that still has moisture in it. It's softer, easier to carve, and doesn't split as easily as dried wood.

Then she draws the outline of the spoon on the roughly hewn wood. Not a template - just her eye and experience, judging where the spoon is hiding in that piece of timber.

More axe work. Big cuts removing waste wood, getting closer to the shape. Gradually refining until you can see the spoon emerging.

Then come the carving knives.

The Carving

Amy started hand-carving wood when she was a child. She fell in love with whittling sticks - just sitting outside with a knife and a piece of wood, seeing what emerged.

It was an interest that grew into a hobby and is now her work.

She doesn't use machines. No belt sanders, no rotary tools, no power equipment. Just hand tools - axes for rough work, carving knives for everything else.

And she doesn't use sandpaper either.

Instead, she uses super-sharp knives. Sharp enough to slice through the wood grain cleanly, leaving a smooth surface that shows the final cuts she made.

You can see the facets. The slight ridges where each cut ended and the next began. The marks of her hands and her blades, showing exactly how the spoon was made rather than hiding it.

That's the beautiful bit. It doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is - wood carved by hand, shaped by skill, finished with care.

The Woods

The pale spoons are sycamore. It's a common British tree - you've probably got some nearby without knowing it. The wood is pale cream, fine-grained, and perfect for carving. It doesn't split easily and it has a lovely smooth finish.

The stripy darker spoons are Acacia Mearnsii, also called Black Wattle. It's not a UK native - it comes originally from Australia and Africa - but it's been here long enough that tree surgeons occasionally have to remove specimens that have grown too large or damaged.

Amy got hers from a tree surgeon who took one down near her home in Sussex.

Acacia is extraordinary wood. High oil content, which makes it naturally water-resistant. Rich grain patterns - those beautiful dark stripes you can see. Known for strength and durability. Resists dents and scratches. Fast-growing, which makes it sustainable.

Perfect for honey spoons. They'll last for years, handle daily use, and those grain patterns are stunning.

The Yellow Bands

The yellow bands make the spoons immediately recognizable as Hive & Keeper. Yellow for honey, yellow for bees. Simple, effective, and it looks great against both the pale sycamore and the dark acacia.

First, Amy carves a careful guideline into the handle. A shallow groove circling the wood at exactly the right place. This stops the paint bleeding or running - it can only go as far as the groove before it's contained.

Then she paints. Yellow dipped ends for the acacia spoons. Yellow neck bands for the sycamore ones. The paint she uses is called milk paint which is made based on an ancient homemade paint formula which contains just milk proteins, lime and natural earth or mineral pigments.  

Amy applied 4 layers  to get to our yellow - two of an off white then two of marigold. Even this bit is done with care and time.

Why Hand-Carved Matters

You could make these spoons with machines. CNC router, belt sander, production line. Faster, cheaper, completely consistent.

But they wouldn't be the same.

Machine-made spoons look perfect. Identical. Smooth all over with no visible toolmarks. Nothing that shows how they were made or who made them.

Amy's spoons show their making. You can see where the knife cut. You can see the facets left by her final passes. You can see that a human with skill shaped this piece of wood into something useful and beautiful.

That matters for what we're trying to do at Hive & Keeper.

We're not selling mass-produced uniformity. We're selling things made with care by people whose names you know, using materials with stories, in ways that respect both the maker and the material.

Hand-carved spoons match extraordinary honey. Both are shaped by skill, both show their origins, both are worth paying attention to.