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hey welcome back to my shop where you get to learn woodworking through my mistakes now if you watch my previous videos you know that so far I’ve mostly worked on somewhat larger projects so today I’m going to switch it up a bit and make something that I know I can finish in a day I have some leftover wood scraps for my shopmate’s most recent projects that are actually really really good quality so we don’t want to throw them out so I’ll be using those today to make a little Christmas gift come join me so the thing that I’m making was inspired by my mom’s visit now I’ll start by saying that this woman is extremely smart like Masters in computer science PhD in Applied Mathematics kind of smart but she opens coffee bags like a hungry little raccoon just look at this there’s a way to open it properly right below and this thing is just ripped at the top I don’t understand and this isn’t the first time she does this a lot so what I’m going to do is I’m going to make a little gift that is also a solution I got the idea from The Woodworking Journal magazine I just happened to be flipping through it and I came across this it’s a coffee spoon that’s also a coffee bag clip and I think it’s not only Nifty but it can be also made with very limited tools so unlike my previous builds this one is actually something that you can probably make at home even if you don’t have access to some of the bigger machines all you need is a strip of wood and in my case I’m using this African mahogany scrap a Dremel sandpaper a food safe wood finish and while I will be using a bandsaw and a drill press you can also do it using a coping saw and a handheld drill I will not be going off the instructions in the article though and I will just use the idea to make it the way that I would make it just a disclaimer for anyone that did read the article and sees me going off and doing my own thing I wanted to let you know okay so there is a way to make curved wooden objects like spoons and the process consists of cutting off portions of the shape at a time so first we start off by drawing the general outline of the shape when we see how long we want the piece to be we can cut it to size I use a miter saw but again you can use a coping saw for this because the cut doesn’t need to be super clean we just want to remove excess pieces as much as we can so the thing is easier to work with and shape then we want to cut off one side we can’t do both yet or you’re going to make things a lot harder for yourself in a minute I start off by cutting these little notches around the curves that way they break off and the blade can have an easier time getting through the cuts don’t have to match the curves that we sketched exactly we just want to remove as much excess as we can so that again we can shape it down later the closer to the lines that we get the less sanding we have to do later and this is what we have we now draw on the back of the spoon on that side that was trimmed down and will cut along those lines using the flat surface of the side that hasn’t been cut yet ah and naturally I had to have a technical difficulty as I was trying to cut because life just wouldn’t be interesting otherwise so I had to pause everything and find a spare bandsaw blade which my shop mate luckily had on hand had he not I would have had to wait until tomorrow to get a new one so this project would have no longer been a one day project okay now that we have these two sides cut we can then redraw the shape for the other side of the spoon on the back of the side that was just cut and this is also where we make the opening for the clip first I clamped down a flat piece of wood to use as a guide so that I can make the clip part super straight the clip part needs to be done first because I still need that straight edge from the other side so that I can run that against the guide once that part was done then I can cut off the other side [Laughter] and this is what I was left with looks pretty awful right but trust the process now it’s time to shape it I took out the trusty Dremel tested out some of the bits until I found the one I liked and then I just started shaping it and this process took a while how easy this process is depends on the bits that you have I unfortunately don’t have the optimal ones that are needed for this kind of carving so this wasn’t as easy as it could have been I’m thinking of buying them if I like this design and decide to make more but for now this is fine this is supposed to be a limited tools project anyways so let’s work with what we got great this already looks more like a spoon I like the general shape so now we can start carving it out I use the drill press with a forstner bit to just remove as much of the excess wood as I could that way I wouldn’t have to do as much work with my limited Dremel bits I started out with this smaller bit but then sized up when I realized that I could do even more damage with the next one up and now back to the Dremel I just have to patiently sand and sand and sand and then when I got the sides all carved out I went in with a more aggressive bit to smooth out the bottom and curve it out a little more and then I used regular old sandpaper to go over everything and make it nice and smooth this is what it looks like and look at that wood there’s no finish on this or anything yet this shine is just that African Mahogany it’s what it looks like and it’s so smooth to the touch usually to get this level of smoothness I would have to sand it put a finish on it sand it again and then do another layer of finish and even then you don’t get this kind of shine I then put on a layer of tongue oil on it to seal everything foreign and now the final reveal this is the inspiration for the spoon and this is what I made just look how shiny it is and again that’s not the tongue oil that’s doing that it’s mostly just the wood it has this almost luminescence to it you can see it best on the inside of the spoon where there’s a lot of curvature it looks so good and feels so smooth and it’s lightweight and I swear this is my new favorite wood now that little Dent inside is still bugging me a bit but it’s not too bad so if you’re making this and your OCD then I would say maybe to try and get rid of it but what do you think did I do okay would you give this as a gift or would you try making it let me know what you think and I will see you next time bye …