Woodworker Tom Bartlett cleans up the cup handle by hand.
“It all starts with a big lump of wood.”
So says Tom Bartlett, the spoon-carving sage of the Sherman neighborhood (not to be confused with Tommy Bartlett, the waterski stuntman of Wisconsin Dells).
I’m tagging along on a visit to Bartlett’s north-side studio with a group of local woodworkers.
A hand-carvedsugar maple kitchen spoon.
About 10 of us are squeezed into the workspace — a single-car garage behind the house he shares with his wife, Courtney, a professional illustrator and Madison College professor, and their spaniel, Charlie. He’s set out chocolate chip cookies, coffee, and an assortment of Viking-inspired wooden mugs, which he’s about to show us how to fabricate using a 13th century tool called a “pole lathe.”
Our timing is auspicious. Bartlett has just wrapped up his second season as a craft vendor downtown during the Saturday Dane County Farmers’ Market on the Capitol Square, where he sells his wooden mugs and carved cutlery under the name Sylva Spoon. You’d recognize him as the bearded, bespectacled Englishman casually wielding a hatchet that could slice through the toughest vegetable in your tote before you said “kohlrabi.”
“I think Madison people just seem to get it,” he says. Most people at the farmers’ market aren’t interested in whether his mugs are superior to ceramic (from a practical standpoint, it’s a draw, at best). Instead, they’re fascinated by the process. How does he do that?
Bartlett is an inventive teacher, and he regularly leads workshops and demonstrations in Madison and around the state.
For our group, he’s prepared a few cups in various stages of differentiation, from “lump” to vessel, and he switches from one to another with the flair and pacing of a TV chef. He appears to conceal no proprietary “trade secrets,” divulging tips with gracious confidence.
Each of Bartlett’s mugs starts out as a reclaimed log — usually birch — from somewhere in Madison. Sometimes clients bring a limb from a beloved tree, but more often Bartlett does his own collecting. His ears perk up at the sound of neighborhood chainsaws.
Then he waits, from weeks to months, for the wood to reach the right moisture content. Traditional wood turners like Bartlett use “green” wood, which is roughly halfway between the moisture content of a kiln-dried board from a lumber yard and a living, water-slurping tree. Why green wood? For one thing, it requires much less energy to carve — crucial for a foot-powered Medieval-era lathe.
Once the wood reaches the right moisture content, Bartlett cuts it into those rough cup-shaped lumps with a combination of new and old tech, usually a traditional splitting maul and a chainsaw. Bartlett likes to keep his tool ownership at a minimum. Everything in his studio has been selected with spoon-carving or mug-turning in mind, and the more he can do with his trusty Gränsfors hatchet, the better.
Bartlett uses this razor-sharp Swedish hand axe to rough out the shape of the mug and handle. He cuts with quick, efficient strokes, hunched over his cutting stump in a position that provides leverage and safety. As the chips fly, he explains that axes are among the oldest known human-made objects. A stone axe head from western Australia dates back nearly 50,000 years. The oldest mug? A mere 6,000 years old.
After a few minutes of chopping, the proto-mug is ready for the lathe, built out of hand-hewn blocks of wood. Its main concession to modernity is its use of elastic bungees in the place of the whippy sapling that would normally help power the contraption.
From log to mug, largely the way it would have been done in the High Middle Ages.
In most woodworking, the woodworker moves the tools and the wood remains stationary, but lathe turning works the other way around. While using both hands to brace a chisel-like tool called a gouge, Bartlett vigorously pumps his left leg up and down on a pedal that reminds me of an antique sewing machine. The mug spins and he carves away delicate tendrils of wood that cling to his hands and the gouge like grated zucchini. The mugs only occasionally fly off the lathe — after an early mistake, he’s moved it away from the garage door windows.
“My neighbor is a physical therapist, and I’ve been meaning to ask if this is bad for my legs,” he muses. “No problems thus far. I do a lot of stretching.”
Bartlett spends about an hour on the lathe for each cup he makes. When he’s satisfied with the surface and interior of the mug, he pops it off the lathe, drills a finger hole in the handle with a hand-powered drill, and finishes up with hand-carved details, his own interpretation of a traditional Viking mead vessel design.
He allows each mug to sit for a few days to let the moisture content fall. Then he lightly heats them and coats them in pure linseed oil.
The finished mugs give coffee and tea a subtle but distinctive note — fresh and nutty, reminiscent of spring. The mugs sometimes require re-oiling, but they’re hardy enough to stand up to daily use. His cups are beautiful, but they’re even more beautiful with a little coffee in them (aren’t we all?).
Bartlett is preparing to spend the winter in his garage studio, honing his craft and building up a supply of mugs and spoons. Additionally, this year, he’ll be working on a series of tutorial videos that he’ll put online to accompany his popular blog and 24,000-follower-strong Instagram account (@sylva_spoon).
Bartlett’s craft also has a tendency to bring him back to his English roots. The UK is a hotbed of traditional woodworking, and he tries to make it to Cornwall every summer to attend Spoonfest: the International Celebration of the Carved Wooden Spoon. It’s a time to compare methods, make friends from around the world, and learn new tricks.
“It’s well hippie-ish,” he says. “You can properly nerd out about this stuff.”
Tom Bartlett will be selling his goods at the Good Day Market: Holiday Edition at Garver Feed Mill on Dec. 14 and 15. For information about workshops, see sylvaspoon.com.
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[Editor's note: This article has been corrected to reflect that Bartlett vends during the Saturday Dane County Farmers' Market as part of the city of Madison street vending program which is not a part of the DCFM.]
