SPOON MILL

    Unique Wooden Spoons

Artist stirs up success with handmade spoons

ecullen@theadvocate.com

DENHAM SPRINGS -- Chris Fry's shop is not one of those cozy places where the carver feeds scraps of wood to a potbellied stove.

The wood Fry uses to make kitchen spoons is so expensive that the 45-year-old spoonmaker sometimes sells his scraps to other artists.

Fry's spoons glow with their own colors. He uses no finishes on the wood. He doesn't have to with spoons made from burled maple, cherry, old cypress, black walnut, butternut, zebra wood, purple heart, bloodwood, Osage orange, canary wood, ziricote, cocobolo and ebony.

A trained artist, Fry had been too busy making a living to pursue art seriously. Until four years ago, he had a furniture business and worked construction.

Cheri Fry, the spoonmaker's wife, is a speech pathologist in the Livingston Parish school system and an artist herself. She'd watched as Fry collected wood with which to make a guitar.

"My knees hurt from working construction," Fry said. "I was upstairs feeling sorry for myself when Cheri said, 'Why don't you make spoons with some of that wood?'"

Cheri's kitchen is home to several of her husband's spoons. One sunny morning, the spoons Fry sells at festivals around the state were on the kitchen table displayed in old suitcases.

Fry took his wife's suggestion and "two weeks and a box of Band-Aids later" he'd made his first wooden spoon.

"There's not a spoonmaker's manual," Fry said. "It's trial and error."

Fry's first effort showed promise. Four years later, his spoons are lighter, the edges of the spoons' bowls thinner and the handles simple and straight or whimsically twisted.

Fry's spoons aren't cheap. Small ones start around $20. Ladles and larger spoons can cost a couple of hundred dollars, depending on the wood.

"For what people spend on kitchens these days, they want spoons that look nice hanging up," the carver said.

Fry's spoons are made to be used. While he carves styles that sell best, he's open to suggestions from customers.

"I could sell a hundred oven pulls at a show," Fry said.

"The ones you buy in stores look like paint stirrers."

One of Fry's spoons looks and feels like iron, but it's a hard dense wood that gives off a natural, dark glow.

"One woman told me, 'I want something that won't break on my child's behind.'"

Some of his spoons are made from reclaimed white oak, rendered black from being on the bottom of the Mississippi River for years.

"The river coughs up stuff all the time," Fry said. "I've seen cherry tree logs 40 feet long."

His more exotic stock Fry buys from Africa, and Central and South America.

Some of the woods cost hundreds of dollars a board foot.

"Ziricote is a wood from Central America that has just been embargoed," Fry said. "You won't see any newly cut ziricote for 10 years, and the price will go sky high.'

Each piece of wood holds a surprise for the carver.

"The grain of primo zebra wood is straight lines of tan and brown," Fry said.

Fry runs a saw blade through the wood one way and gets lines that look like loopy bull's eyes. He runs the blade through a different way and gets rings.

"I remove a ton of wood with a band saw," he said. "I use a gouge for spoons with deep bowls. Mostly, it's a lot of sanding."

A spoon made from the crotch of a piece of black walnut is cream-colored sap wood that blends into dark, heart wood.

Other stock comes from houses built in the 1800s.

"People like spoons with a story," the carver said.

Fry divides his time between making spoons in a rambling wood house he's building in the woods outside Denham Springs to selling his wares at shows and festivals.

"I take my girls with me -- Maggie, 11, Camille, 10, and Cecile, 8."

Fry's Web site is a work in progress, but you can visit it at http://www.spoonmill.com.

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Couples, families browse handiwork
Vendors showcase work at Azalea art festival
By STEVE MYERS
Staff Reporter
Mobile Press Register
Art can sneak up on you, as it did to Chris Fry.
Once, he had gathered a variety of exotic woods, fully intending to build himself a guitar. He never did that.
Instead, since his wife had been complaining that she needed a wooden spoon, he ended up carving a large one with a long handle. His wife couldn't use the first one - it was left-handed - but he perfected his technique over time.

Soon he started carving spoons out of all kinds of wood, from the cypress that's native to his home state of Louisiana to South American wood that releases a fine silica dust that would damage his lungs if he didn't wear a mask.

"There are over 1,500 species of trees, and I aim to carve a spoon out of every one of them," Fry said.
"It went from hobby to career," said his wife, Cheri Fry, as she showed off her husband's handiwork Saturday to patrons at the Azalea Arts & Crafts Festival. The festival will continue today at the Mobile Museum of Art.

Business was brisk at the Frys' booth.

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 The Steamboat Pilot

Art in the Park a success

By Christine Metz, Staff Reporter

Monday, July 11, 2005

Christopher Fry is not sure what prompted him to sit down one day and start carving spoons.