This is a special opportunity to own one of our limited edition “spoon of the season 2020” designs. This bowl was our Spring piece. Our spring design this year wasn’t a spoon- it’s a little copper bowl. You can use this petite multipurpose bowl for candies, nuts, cream, or spices. Mix your own herb blend in it, fill it with nuts or olives as as elegant addition to your hors d’oeuvres, or let it hold your rings while you cook. We hope you enjoy using your bowl as much as we enjoyed creating it.

Measurements:

3.75” diameter and .75” deep

Process:

Once we decided on the bowl and it’s size, I cut circles out of soft, pure copper sheet by hand with tin snips. I hammered the circles down into a thick, carved wooden dish to give it the initial depth, first with a self-made wooden mallet, and then with a heavy steel round-faced hammer. Beginning with the wooden mallet stretches the copper more gently and evenly from the flat form, otherwise it’s easy to accidentally develop a fold at the outer edges of the sheet, which would mean scrapping that piece entirely and saving the copper for a different project.

The planishing step is next, where I strike the outer surface of the bowl with a light hammer over the entire surface. This is done on top of a hard steel dome custom made for the process, so that the copper is being sandwiched in between two surfaces of hard steel, causing the copper to spread and harden. A bowl this size takes between 500 and 600 hammer strikes to planish. Striking the copper is a paradoxical endeavor, because it must be done with enough force to move metal and make a prominent mark, but it also requires delicacy in the placement of blows, so that each blow overlaps the previous blows only somewhat. A wayward strike at this step can cause a deep mark or gouge in the copper and render the bowl irredeemable. It’s important that the shape is generally correct from the first step before planishing begins, because the copper is so much harder to stretch and alter after it’s complete.

After planishing, I hammered the bowls again into a hand-carved wooden form to reinforce the final shape, then flipped them over and drew a rough circle using dry erase marker. With a small ball pein hammer, I then hammered directly into the bottom of the bowl, stretching the copper the opposite direction and carefully defining the edges of the base. Once more, I went to my planishing ball, but this time to refine the new convex in the inside of the bowls.

With the hammering steps finally complete, I did the finishing work of grinding the edges to ensure evenness, deburring the edges, polishing them by hand, and cleaning and buffing the entire bowl with copper polish and a microfiber cloth.

One-of-a-kind items are in stock and ready to ship.