Searching through the log pile for crooked pieces

I am a terrible hoarder ( and my wife will agree with me on that one! )

for years now I have always been bringing bits of wood home, mainly pieces of wood with nice bends or crooks, these along with woods from trees that have had a special meaning to them for me that I have encountered in my work, or from trees that aren't too common to our shores.

A lot of the wood gets stock piled and some never gets returned to . 

The past few days I have been searching through these piles of wood looking for find nice bits to carve,

Among them have been some nice birch crooks. Hazel crooks and even some tulip tree crooks.

A lot of the bigger pieces I carved almost straight away when I got them home, so the ones that are left have been too small for large ladles so I have been carving out some small ladles and scoops.

Because of their size rather than try to split them in two, I prefer to carve them out with the axe.

This way I have more control of how they will turn out, some of them are even too small for the axe!.

Carving smaller spoons is fun and they always look great and when from crooks they always feel good in the hand.

I plan to do some chip carving on these when they are done so I shall post some pictures if folks are interested to see how the turn out?.