Green Chopsticks

Make Your Own Chopsticks

Making your own chopsticks is easy and rewarding. You'll end up with a beautiful hand-crafted pair of chopsticks that will remind you of the connection to the land that wood gives us when we know where it comes from. You'll be happy to carry these to restaurants, and they'll provide a good conversational opener for discussing why we need to preserve the forests and stop using throw-away items.

Finding the wood is usually fairly easy. You want a nice hard wood with a closed grain. The best woods that I've found are maple or any of the rose family trees: cherry, almond, plum, pear, apple. In the countryside pieces of wood can often be found aquired from fruit orchards, where orchardists trim their trees and usually have a stack of firewood just the right length. In the city look for tree-trimmers and see if they will give you a piece they have cut. You can also use firewood if it is a hard species like madrone, or look for a downed branch in the forest.

The first thing to do with your wood is cut it roughly to length. I always keep my pieces a little longer than I'll want my chopsticks, and then trim them later. Then you can cut or split your wood into blanks, about a quarter inch square. Splitting them is a bit trickier, but it often yields slightly curved pieces which make very lovely chopsticks. I always keep adjacent blanks together to make a "fitting" pair of chopsticks. If I am making several sets of chopsticks for a gift I try to make them from the same piece of wood.

Finishing the blanks can be done by hand or with an electric sander. I usually use a belt sander turned upside down as a sanding table. First smooth the chopsticks out on all four sides, then sand off the corners of the lower half of the chopsticks until they are round, and slightly soften the edges of the upper chopsticks.

The top ends of the chopsticks can be decoratively carved if you have the inclination.

Handcarved chopsticks make a beautiful and welcome gift, and, of course, encourage people not to use more disposable chopsticks.