Touch it! The wood tells the story; smooth-mellowed pieces of trees shaped for use in your kitchen. Yes, a tree limb is where this piece started. It began to take shape on the work bench with the help of chisels and a mallet, a pocket knife, scoop gouge and a coping saw. Then, the sanding began. Hours and hours, days and days later, after sanding smooth and then wetting the wood to bring up the grain, then sanding again and again, the character of this piece began to form. It’s an individual and like no other. It’s hand-rubbed with peanut oil and ready to come to life in your kitchen.
Wood has been around forever. When we live with wood around us, the unique character of wood can add depth to our existence. That existence is dependent upon eating. We eat to survive, but is survival enough? A bowl of soup eaten with a plastic spoon from a paper dish is a meal. Put that soup in a bowl fashioned lovingly from a burl of a hardwood tree, and eat it with a treen spoon and it becomes a feast. Use your treenware. Only your loving use can bring this heartwood alive again to share joy and beauty.
Treen is the Old English plural of trees. Treening is creating beautiful utensils out of wood to use around the home. They can range from oaken buckets to toothpick holders, or the treenware for use in the kitchen that Nancy Lou Webster specializes in. The art form dates back tothe 18th century.
For Webster, treening began in rural Mississippi. Her father taught her to whittle at the age of nine. Her work has come a long way since she made slingshots for the boys in the neighborhood. During and following her formal art studies at the University of Mississippi and Mississippi University for Women, Webster explored a wide range of media before settling down with wood.
