Posted by alin23 12/10/2025
Several people are involved in making every product at IKEA. At least one of them must be an expert in compliance. They can expect scrutiny and product recalls, fines and bad sales if they’re found out.
The one person making the hand-made spoon does not necessarily know all the environmental regulations that should be followed.
A friend who is a potter saw me drinking out of it and said that the glaze looked suspicious. He said it looked loaded with heavy metals, and that I should probably not use it or at least get it tested.
At the time I knew a guy who worked in a lab that tested certain substances for hazardous materials. He was intrigued and brought it in to work one day, and later texted me asking if I wanted it back, because it was very likely leaching cobalt, lead, and cadmium, and it was probably also very mildly radioactive.
I feel much better drinking out of mugs from IKEA and other big name stores.
I get solid wood (olive wood or other woods ) tools and I don’t finish them. But if I did I might just use beeswax
These are strips glued together aka laminated. The binder is not PVA (which is water soluble and not suitable for the task), it’s most commonly a formaldehyde resin such as phenol- , urea- or melamine urea formaldehyde
I don’t build cutting boards myself, but have never heard of using anything but food-safe PVA glue. Those resins are used for laminating plywood etc, probably not even legal to use in kitchen utensils, at least in the EU.
Under temperature, sure, they differ a bunch. But in terms of food prep, no, they are all non-toxic and edible once cured.
Of course, the article is about high end stuff, but I just want to put everything in the dishwasher. Which I presume you can't do with even the best coated high end utensils?
We also switched to wooden Cutting boards, I find them to be pretty annoying as they really go bad fast in the dishwasher and can be quite expensive. We just wash them with boiling water, a bit of soap every now and then.
Never use boiling water. Use warm water and a little bit of soap.
Couple of years back I went to all wooden spoons in the kitchen. My all time favourite is the most traditional of all: boxwood. This is what wooden utensils are made in my home country for centuries. It's light but dense, hard, and durable. It doesn't absorb color or smells easily as other hardwood. Beautiful too!
What does that mean? It's tough enough that you can make it thinner? It dries out more fully? Or does "dense" refer to something other than density, like tightness of the grain?
Boxwood was for centuries the choice of wind instrument makers because of its stability and hardness, which made it possible to create thinner more practical instruments (clarinets, flute etc). till humans discovered granadillo wood, which is as dense as boxwood but much more humidity and temperature stable.
Your shop looks great too. Others might enjoy folowing the link buried towards the bottom of the article.
Make sure you do water popping after finishing the carving and sanding process. It's what makes the difference between wood that catches your lips and wood that feels like ceramic. The process is simple: sand with 600 or 400 grit, whichever you have, then get all the wood wet with water (faucet is fine), let dry completely (hairdryer helps), sand again with 600/400 grit and repeat about 3 times until wetting the wood no longer makes it feel rough.
Burnishing for spatulas for example can be done on a drill press. Just use a smooth rounded end steel bar and a low speed on the drill. You’ll have the concave part done in minutes. For the handle and convex part it’s usually easiest to burnish with a smooth steel rod and move the piece along the side. I can get my hard maple spatula burnished in under 15 minutes.
If you really want to keep the fibers from rising a lot post burnishing- water pop the wood, sand with 220, slightly dampen the wood again and then burnish.
I haven’t tried this but apparently you can automate the burnishing by using antlers/smooth stones in a rock tumbler.
For the exterior and for cutting boards, I use a hard wax oil I make from linseed oil and beeswax. It's easy to prepare and I usually provide a small cup of it to whomever I'm gifting the cutting board.
I reuse small, glass jelly jars with screw-on metal lids, about 1/2 a cup in size. You do need to leave a layer of water on top, though, because otherwise the top layer will polymerize and leave a rubbery layer you have to remove the next time you use it.
Generally I use a beeswax and mineral oil finish, sometimes this other product I can't remember the name of made from flax oil.
I've been wondering why jojoba oil doesn't get mentioned more in these discussions, either in combination with something else or on its own? It's a wax but liquid at room temperature, and seems to be stable for a long long time, long enough at least that it would probably need some refinishing before it might go bad.
But if you put wood treated with non-polymerized oil in a hot soup or if you pour hot tea into a cup finished with jojoba oil, the oil will get out of the fibers and into your hot liquid, the fiber will raise and the wood will start to feel rough after a few uses and start to get stained from your food and beverage.
I understand why you'd use a polymerizing oil for certain things; I guess I wonder about it as a substitute for mineral oil.
Top Oil indeed seems very similar to what I did (hardwax, drying oils, driers) but half of it is still white spirit solvent, which I'm guessing will give it the same smell as Polyx.
The closest thing I found to what I want is Walrus Oil Furniture Butter (https://walrusoil.com/products/furniture-butter) but I didn't know about it at the time.