Juniper
knife: 7" fork: 8" spoon: 6"
Allover SWEDEN
THIS IS AN ONGOING ITEM!

Around the approximate age of 7, in the first year of school, every Swedish child takes woodworking class and in this class children make a butter knife. We were seeing them here and there in second hand stores and were interested in what it was all about. Although none of the store-bought ones were as nice, since they are not made by small children's hands, (we examined and tested 4 versions) this butter knife, herring fork and traditional sugar spoon were the very nicest we could find, I figure since they are also handmade but by adults. The gentleman who started producing these is a true entrepreneur, after being in the tobacco business and pet product industry for 35 years he looked around and was struck with the desire to produce kitchen utensils in juniper. For him the most difficult thing was to find all the small manufacturers that could make the products, it took more than a year to find the men willing to do it but over time he built up a small work pool with most of the men working from there homes and producing on a small scale. The juniper bush that is used grows very slowly so the wood is between 40-80 years old. In some communities in Sweden where it grows along the Baltic coastline it is now forbidden to cut down the juniper bushes, making the wood increasingly hard to get. The use of juniper for making kitchen tools dates from 1600. The wood is solid and the smell is quite nice, they will last you for at least the next decade if you take care of them. As you can see, a lot of time and care has gone into their production.