The Great Scottish Spoon Hoolie: the best spoon carving festival in Scotland?
The Great Scottish Spoon Hoolie is the chance to spend a weekend in the Scottish woodlands with like-minded greenwood carvers, to learn new skills, and to make new friends. Opening with a Friday night social, the weekend is full of discussions and workshops, all included in the ticket price. We try to bring the best trainers from the UK and Europe and host a varied set of opportunities to learn.
Dreamed up in 2016, the Great Scottish Spoon Hoolie first took place in rural Scotland in May 2017 and has been running ever since, including two years online. Now in its seventh year, the Hoolie provides the space to share quality time with trainers and carvers – at all stages of their crafting journey – from around the world. Our focus is on connecting people – with each other, with traditional crafts, with experts, with the woodlands – and sharing the joy of spoon carving as far and wide as we can.
We’ve gone from a small gathering to a larger one, but 2023 sees us back being up-close-and-personal, with just 30 tickets available for the weekend. We have 7 trainers delivering workshops over the weekend of 19-21 May, along with our very own Spoon Dragon/ Hoolie man and a dedicated Spoon Doctor. Werner Fuchs, the amazing carver and trainer from Germany, will be coming over early to deliver a two-day ‘prefest’ workshop, Big Spoons, Big Fun!
This being our 10th anniversary year as a social enterprise, we’re also hosting two other festivals: the Great Scottish Craft Hoolie, focusing on other greenwood and natural crafts; and the Great Scottish FireFest, sharing fire-based crafts from ceramics to metalwork.
About the organiser: Green Aspirations Scotland CIC is a woodland-based social enterprise with a mission to reconnect people with nature and inspire a love for the outdoors through woodlands. We were established in 2013 and, over the past decade, we’ve worked with different groups of people – community groups, corporate teams, young adults, school pupils, kids, and crafters – to develop traditional skills, create an appreciation of the woodlands, and encourage sustainable and healthy environments.
