Have a forking good time crafting!

March 8, 2009 8:29 PM

If you have too much mismatched cutlery to fit in your kitchen drawers, take a stab at crafting with it! Make a wind chime, fork key ring, fork cup rings or coat hooks, make cutlery clocks, or light fixtures such as these by designer Ali Siahvoshi. Or you can make jewelry: fork bracelets, a fork necklace pendant, or collaged spoon necklace pendants like those made by SpoonFedArt. Forks and spoons make groovy rings. Here’s how to make spoon rings. For more inspiration, check out this cutlery chair sculpture by Osian Batyka-Williams, this cutlery table by Toni Grilo, some sculpture by Matthew Bartik, Vince Pompei’s whimsical silverware flowers, clocks and sculptures, or the items at Forkometry. Just don’t get so carried away with your new craft that you find yourself having to eat with your fingers.
posted by orange swan (9 comments total)

Chris Cornell used to wear a twisted fork pendant necklace. I remember attending what I think was a birthday party for him at a bowling alley back in about 1996. I hadn't seen Chris since Lollapalooza in 1992. To start up a conversation I ask him why he wasn't wearing his twisted fork, which I always thought was very cool.

With a pained look, he advises me that he lost it.

Still trying to be positive, I suggested that maybe whoever made it in the first place could make him another one. I had no idea what I'd just blundered into, as he told me it was a gift from Shannon Hoon, who died in 1995...

It appears this bit of rock trivia was important enough to make it into Wikipedia.
posted by Tube at 9:21 PM on March 8, 2009 [1 favorite]

Huh, when my little brother went to state nerd camp, he had a counselor who constantly wore a simple fork bangle that a friend had made for him before his tragic and premature death and who helped his charges fashion their own fork bracelets from forks filched from the state university who hosted the event. I had no idea that fork jewelry was frequently linked with tragedy.

I haven't worn my own fork bracelet in a while.
posted by mayhap at 10:21 PM on March 8, 2009

To carry Tube's sidetrack out a bit further, I met Artis the Spoonman, subject of Soundgarden's Spoonman, when I commented on a spoon necklace he was wearing. I'd been playing around with silverware a bit at that point and admired the piece he was wearing.
posted by lekvar at 10:25 PM on March 8, 2009

I have a fork bracelet made by Robert Seven and I adore it. Thanks for these marvelous links.
posted by pointystick at 8:04 AM on March 9, 2009

Oh Swan, your posts make me swoon! This one especially. Well done!
posted by Lynsey at 9:25 AM on March 9, 2009

Great post as usual, orange swan. There have been a number of tiny forks that have mysteriously shown up in my house over the past few months; my boyfriend has been accusing me of having tiny fork parties while he's out of town. Now I can get them out of the utensil drawer and stop the accusations.
posted by queensissy at 12:12 PM on March 9, 2009

I inherited a cutlery wind chime when my mother died. The spoons and forks are smashed flat, which may be important in getting them to ring when they strike each other.
posted by Restless Day at 3:19 PM on March 9, 2009

Well, like the photo in the wind chime link shows. Flat.
posted by Restless Day at 3:24 PM on March 9, 2009

My sister went to Fairbanks, AK, for college and never left. For a few years she would try to entice me to visit her at Christmas ("It's daark, and coooold, and you can flash freeze boiling waaater"). At one point, I think before she changed her meds, she told me about how one morning she was in the cafeteria, and the food was sufficiently substandard that as she was turning in her tray in a seething rage, in order to exact punishment from the evil foodservice staff, she decided to scoop up all the forks from the service line, and perhaps, all the forks she could find in the cafeteria, and take them. Once she got back to her room, not knowing what to do now with all these filched forks, she began to bend and twist them together and fashion them into a sphere. That next Christmas, she tried to lure me to Alaska with promises of seeing the forkball, which I have to admit was pretty tempting. However, I have still never made it out there and have still never seen the forkball. I don't even know if she still has it. I should ask her.
posted by Hal Mumkin at 8:30 PM on March 9, 2009 [1 favorite]