Meet Lynn Davy from Looney Spoons
Meet Lynn Davy, the creator behind Looney Spoons and maker of cheeky hand-stamped spoons designed to make you smile. She has a spoon for everyone – from those who revel in the idea of very rude words stamped on prim and proper Victorian silverware to tea lovers called Dave. Here she talks to fellow maker and upcycler Sarah Lyte from Seven Hands about how it all started, the beauty and necessity of upcycling and how she takes her tea…
I am known locally as ‘the rude spoon lady’, so I have that on a big sign behind my craft fair stall.
Hello Lynn! Could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Hello, I’m Lynn from Looney Spoons and I put words on spoons by hand stamping them. I live in a little town called Wimborne Minster in Dorset with my husband, who has recently retired. He makes electronic music and does sound recording for fun (this will become relevant later). Once upon a time I was a freelance proofreader of science books as well as making and selling crafts online, until a brush with breast cancer (check those boobs, ladies, and fellas too, actually!) made me reassess my priorities and decide to focus on my creative activities so that work would feel more like play. Which it still does. Hence why I haven’t retired yet.
Tell us how it all started…
Before the spoons there were beads. Very many beads. Starting when I was about ten. I made jewellery for schoolmates and relatives and later on for fellow students and then work colleagues. When I turned freelance I did the odd craft fair and then the internet came along. Back in the days of dial-up modems I finally took the plunge and opened an online shop for my beadwork – on an American-owned platform that we try not to talk about too much – as well as giving workshops, writing tutorials for magazines and eventually a book.
Beading became less popular; our son grew up and went to university; our solution to the ‘empty nest’ conundrum was to start to do collaborative art projects together. In 2016 we created an installation called ‘Dada Garden’ in our local museum, which referenced both the Dada art movement and the First World War, food security in particular… Now do you see where this is going? We had zero budget so, like the Dada artists, we made our installation from upcycled junk. And since the museum garden was a wartime allotment we wanted weatherproof food-related things to hang from the trees. Things that would make a noise and could be recorded. So my first hand-stamped spoons were actually hung on wind chimes and the hand stamping came about purely because I wanted a permanent way to add words to the spoons. Having tried it, I was hooked!
How did your work evolve to where you are now?
In the first instance, lots of practice. Someone fell in love with one of my Dada wind chimes and wanted to buy it, which was lovely except that I knew it wasn’t very robustly constructed, so I had to do a rapid adaptation of my jewellery-making engineering skills and remake it so that it wouldn’t fall to bits.
I also had lots of enquiries about buying spoons that were just spoons and not hung on wind chimes, so I had to learn how to make a good hand-stamped impression, what to colour it in with that wasn’t going to poison people or turn their tea green, and which sorts of spoons were stampable and which weren’t. It was a pretty steep learning curve.
Later on I expanded my collection of stamping dies (of which more later) and started to do more commissions, which are still a big part of my spoon-bashing activities. I experimented with different styles and tried hard to come up with original wording, as my publishing training has made me very sensitive to copyright issues. Although Shakespeare is fair game. I like to keep trying new ideas, although there are some old favourites I come back to again and again!
Where do you source your cutlery?
Wherever I can find it! These days mostly via online auctions, but I have made the occasional discovery at a boot sale or charity shop. I’ve become a lot more picky about what I buy and how much I pay for it as I’ve now got a pretty good idea about what will work and what won’t.
I also became interested in finding out more about vintage cutlery, so I now have a collection of books on the subject as well as spending hours researching online. Occasionally I discover a treasure among the junk as a result. Once there was an Imperial Russian silver spoon; once an American spoon that was older than the USA; and best of all a perfect Georgian condiment spoon by the remarkable lady silversmith Hester Bateman. I admit to keeping that one!
As an upcycler myself, I’d love to know how important upcycling is to you.
Upcycling is fundamental! I am not one to buy something new if I can upcycle or repurpose something I already have to do the job. Anything I can keep out of landfill is a bonus. Apart from the environmental benefits, I love being able to keep interesting old stuff serving a useful purpose.
I don’t subscribe to the ‘paint it grey and put wallpaper on it’ school of furniture upcycling (I’m old-fashioned, I like my brown furniture to be brown!) but I have upcycled a couple of small tables and some shelves with collaged vintage book pages, maps, postcards and so on – all salvaged from things that were personally meaningful but would otherwise have been destined for the recycling bin. At least parts of them are still giving me pleasure in places where I see them every day.
Where do your ideas come from?
All over the place – I have a magpie mind. I am rarely stuck for words and, if I am, I can always ask my husband for a suggestion. His last one was “horse farts”. It made me laugh, so I stamped it anyway and, lo and behold, someone purchased it for a friend who owned a windy horse.
I also find that once I’ve started making something, other ideas will come along while I’m doing it. I always have a notebook within arm’s reach just in case.
I can’t do much about all the large-scale terrible things that are happening in the world but I can at least try to make my own local patch a slightly better and happier place, whether that’s my home town or my online presence.
How important is the humour in your work?
Very. Especially the rude words. They keep me sane and counteract my natural tendency to be pessimistic and gloomy. I’ve come to realise that positivity is vital to good mental health, so I try to stay cheery and only be rude in a funny way and not an actually rude one. I can’t do much about all the large-scale terrible things that are happening in the world but I can at least try to make my own local patch a slightly better and happier place, whether that’s my home town or my online presence.
I’m not sure when I first stamped a rude word on a spoon – it was probably around the time of the Brexit vote – but I do remember when I first took rude spoons to a craft fair and how much people giggled. Also how penetrating was the voice of the very small boy who was just learning to read and was delighted by how clear and unambiguous my block capital lettering was… there was no way his dad was going to get away with pretending he’d misread it. So after that the ‘rudeys’ went on the top shelf in a box with a warning sign on the lid! And now I am known locally as ‘the rude spoon lady’, so I have that on a big sign behind my craft fair stall.
I love doing bespoke orders that make me laugh – I do sometimes wish that more people would think outside the box. If you’re buying a spoon for a tea-lover called Dave, there are so many things I could stamp on it that are NOT ‘Dave’s Tea Spoon’ and the proofreader in me is thinking that you don’t really need the word ‘Spoon’ on there at all… Anyway, the customer is always right, ‘Dave’ generally loves his tea spoon, and I do get plenty of more interesting commissions to keep me on my toes.
Can you tell us about your tools?
Have you got a spare week or so? I love how basic my tools are. The hammer is the most important. I started with an old DIY hammer that belonged to my granny but it was hard steel and hard on the hands, so I swapped it for a more forgiving and ergonomic brass hammer some years ago. I learned very early on that a block is essential. Because physics. If you stamp with the spoon on a soft surface you barely make an impression at all – you need a hard surface to reflect the energy of the hammer blow so the stamp goes into the metal of the spoon. My first block was a scarred old chunk of steel that cost me 50p at a boot sale, with a stainless knife blade taped to it to give me a smooth surface that wouldn’t leave marks on the back of the spoon. I’ve now upgraded to a ‘proper’ polished steel bench block and it sits on some card and a wooden board so it won’t damage my work table.
Something I discovered for myself was that a watercolour pencil was way better than the conventional tape for lining up the letters. Especially as the first alphabet I chose had lower-case letters with descenders (the bits that go below the line on, for example, ‘y’ or ‘g’) and again with my proofreading hat on I couldn’t bear not to align them properly. It also allows me to play around and not necessarily put all the writing in a straight line. I draw onto the spoon with it before I start, and it just wipes away when I come to clean off the paint at the end. There you go – a trick of the trade for nothing!
(And no, I don’t suck the end of the pencil, I keep a jamjar of water on the desk to dip into. I’m making items that other people are going to put in their mouths, after all.)
Then it’s just (she says airily) a matter of putting the spoon on the block, choosing the first letter die, making sure it’s the right letter and the right way round, standing it upright on the spoon and hitting it smartly and straight with the hammer. Check the impression, make sure it’s good, if not, attempt to fit the die back into the exact same place and hit it again. Repeat until the wording is complete.
Of course, there are many and varied ways to get this wrong. Especially since the letter dies are reversed. If I had a pound for every time I’ve stamped ‘sqoon’ I wouldn’t need to keep my shop open…
Once the letters are stamped I use a black acrylic paint marker (non-toxic and water-based) to colour them in, then wipe away excess paint with a not-too-absorbent cloth. At the moment it’s an old bit of J-cloth that by now is probably more paint than cloth. Hold the spoon up next to a sheet of white paper to check there are no lingering smears or tarnish marks and then the spoon is done!
Are your stamps recycled too?
I started out with a brand new set of stamps and decided to invest in a hard steel set that would cope with hard metals and lots of wear. That was a good decision although they seemed eye-wateringly expensive at the time. I went for a complete upper- and lower-case alphabet and a set of numbers too, plus three little hearts. All of those still get a lot of use.
Some time later I was asked to do a wholesale order of 1940s spoons and being a proper nerd I decided to try to find 1940s stamping dies for them. That introduced me to a whole world of wonderful vintage letter stamps and now I have quite a collection. Each set is different and has a unique character. My favourites are very tiny block capitals (1/64th of an inch, that’s less than a millimetre), which fit into very small spaces and don’t need to be hammered as hard as the 3mm letters I usually use. I also have a wonderfully battered set of Victorian dies in a hand-carved round holder and a WWII military issue set in its original wooden box, complete with a block for stamping the standard Army issue cutlery. This last one is brilliant because the new recruits had clearly had a hilarious time testing out the stamping dies on the wood of the box – and, of course, they’d stamped rude words! I hope they didn’t get into trouble for it.
What about how and where you work? Do you need silence and a clean, tidy space or do you prefer to be surrounded by inspiration and sounds?
Silence? Yes, if possible (I am easily distracted and my workroom is right next to husband’s home studio, although to be fair he does mostly use headphones) but clean and tidy I just cannot do. I need everything in arm’s reach and I adore creative clutter. There is a system to what goes where, but it is organic rather than neat and it wouldn’t make sense to anyone else. I work on a table in the spare bedroom, which has a skylight and a south-facing window so the light is lovely, and am also very lucky to have a ‘shedio’ in the garden where I can go and do messy stuff like collage and printmaking just for fun.
Do you ever experience writer’s/maker’s block? What do you do when that happens?
Oh yes, often. But I’ve been doing this long enough to know that it’s only temporary. I take a break if I have the time. Maybe look at other Folksy shops and collect favourites for sharing boards. Perhaps get outside in the garden or go for a walk and look at natural history, of which there is a lot round here, we’re very lucky. If the weather’s filthy I’ll indulge myself in half an hour or so of watching underwater live camera feeds, there is something very soothing about fish just swimming about doing whatever it is they do. Maybe I’ll bake a cake (I love cooking, especially if it involves sugar and butter) or go and wind up the wind-up gramophone and play about with some records – sorry, I mean ‘develop my analogue turntablism practice’.
Besides the spoons and the beads I have lots of other crafts to fall back on – there’s always an unfinished crochet, tapestry or sewing project to tinker with or I can head out to the shedio and make some rubbish monoprints. I have one of those little diecutting machines to use as a small-scale printing press and it’s an absolute joy.
It doesn’t usually take very long before the ideas start coming back and I’m hammering again!
Craft gives meaning to life! I’m not happy if I can’t make stuff.
What does craft and being creative mean to you?
It gives meaning to life! I’m not happy if I can’t make stuff. It means discovery, fun, meeting and connecting with people, learning and laughter, play, self-expression and, of course, community. Being creative is much more fun if you can share it with other people who are creative too.
And finally the question we all want to know… how do you take your tea?
I admit it’s mostly a case of a teabag in a mug. The teabag is Fairtrade tea and the mug is a genius rude one from Stokes Croft, so rude it has to be hidden when certain relatives come to visit. I take milk, no sugar, and am not fussy about the strength of the tea, so long as it’s detectably darker than the white china of the mug.
For special occasions I dig out granny’s pretty floral teaset complete with milk jug and a spare pot for hot water. I do the whole warming-the-pot ritual before making tea with loose leaf Earl Grey and digging out one of my vintage tea strainers – I have a lovely one with a strainer that tilts over and then has a little built-in saucer to catch the drips. If I’m very, very lucky there might even be scones, jam and clotted cream to go with the tea!
Meet the Interviewer
The maker asking the questions this month is Sarah Lyte from Seven Hands. Sarah is an upcycling mixed-media fibre artist living and working in Yorkshire, who combines needle felting, wet felting, waste material, upcycled scraps and recycled fibres to create unique landscapes full of colour, texture and light.
Read more about Sarah in her Meet the Maker interview
2 comments
Love the spoon chime! I was showing someone Folksy the other day and your spoons came up and they were so taken with them – loved the personalised, witty inscriptions. They’re a great gift.
Your spoons are lovely and, even more important, they make me smile.
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