Mammoth Ivory Ear Spoons and Sewing Needles

Well, I’m back from my latest trip – to Arizona. I’m down one boyfriend, but up one hobby. With the chaos of my breakup I’ve once again been bad about posting, but here are some images of what I’ve been spending my nervous energy on:

A couple of years ago I purchased a small bag of scrap mammoth ivory cut-offs at Pennsic, a large medieval event. I found the bag of ivory just before I left for Arizona, and I needed to switch things up when I got home, so I picked up some pieces and just started whittling. These are medieval style ear spoons and sewing/embroidery needles. The ear spoons are inspired by the ones shown in this image (from a book of Viking era finds that I have that’s in Russian, so I’m not sure of the details – I need to work on my Cyrillic).

I formed the ivory items using a few simple tools: my pocket knife, a set of small files from Harbor Freight, and an exacto knife (mostly for around the hole because it has a smaller blade than my pocket knife). I’ve already sold the smaller ear spoon, and plan on putting the larger one up for sale on my etsy site. They were fairly fun, if somewhat time consuming, so I’ll probably make a few more.