Breton Wedding Spoons

I'm finally starting to get the hang of the wax inlay process that is a necessary part of carving an authentic looking Breton wedding spoon.  After a couple of false starts...notably the poorly hinged folding spoon with the anaemic candle wax inlay to the left of the frame... I learned a few hard lessons and feel like I'm getting somewhere both with the carving and with the inlaying.

The middle spoon shows vast improvement simply from the use of quality sealing wax in place of the cheap candle wax I used for my initial experiment.  The other lesson I learned was to keep the depth and width of each little triangular chip as close to the same as possible.  It's tedious and time-consuming work cutting out all those little chips; work made even more difficult by the fact they become almost invisible until the wax is added.

The third spoon (black inlay to extreme right) is definitely a merging of Celtic cousins though.  The elegant Breton pattern becomes particularly fetching when filled with black wax that I rescued off the outside of a block of lovely Welsh cheese!  I don't know what kind of wax they use to seal "Little Black Bomber" mature cheddar, but it worked as good as the cheese tasted!  Perfect!!

I don't feel like I'm quite there yet and I'll definitely have to take a few more runs at the articulated version of the Breton spoon before I can be confident enough to take a commission on one, but I'm definitely enjoying learning about this lovely branch of the lovespoon family!!