My First Blog

My parents are pretty amazing people.  My father is a general contractor and my mother works for the government.  Both artists.  From a young age they both made an effort to keep my sister and I connected to various forms of art.  My mother has her various works all over their house.  My dad has helped her with some.  His art comes in the form of the home.  They collaborate together on everything they do which is amazing.

I started playing with hand tools at a young age.  By the time I was twelve I was working for my dad and I learned my way around power tools.  I enjoyed building houses with him, but, I went off to college is Boston after high school and that ended my house building days.  I went through a period of adjustment in college.  I tried new hobbies.  I learned a lot from researching things I may have been interested in at the time.  Then college ended and I was on my own in the real world.

I met my beautiful soon to be wife, Lydia.  She quickly learned that I cycled hobbies very frequently.  I was always trying to find something that I could settle on.  Her appreciation for the natural beauty of things and my abilities with wood made everything fall into place.  I knew that woodworking was something I would never get out of my system.  The only problem is that we moved to a small apartment outside of Boston and I had no room for a shop. I still have access to a shop at my friend Rob's house.  I brought all of my power tools there and build things from time to time.  But, I decided it was time to try a more simple (and less noisy) approach to woodworking.  I found that I could use hand tools in a corner of our apartment and fell in love with spoon carving of all things.  Spoon carving then led to a love of making any wood tools that people could find useful around the house.

Here I am now.. I hope that with this blog I can share some of the things I do and possibly make those things available to other people.  I should note that the name Thinking Spoons came from my friend Eli's father Fred Crouch.  The last thing he said to me before he passed was "Keep thinking" instead of good bye.  It is such a simple phrase that I feel everyone could live by.