Elevated Silverware That Keeps Your Table Safe From Food

How many times has this happened to you? You're cooking mac and cheese and use a spoon to mix the cheesy goodness around. You go to put the spoon down, but you're afraid of the goo it's going to leave on your counter. For these kinds of everyday troubles, there is Cantilever flatware, the seemingly obvious solution to a commonplace problem. So obvious, we're hitting our heads for not thinking of it first.

Created by design team iLoveHandles, the sensible utensils are shaped so that the messy part never tarnishes the clean table. Now you no longer have to look for a plate or bowl to temporarily stash your dirty tools. The line includes a knife, fork, spoon, chopsticks, and spatula.

"I am a bit of a germaphobe," designer Rich Moore told Co.Design. "I was warming up some lunch and I went to put my fork down on the counter. I instinctively put it face-down because, that way, the least amount of surface area touched the counter. We realized that we could tweak the angle a tiny bit, and it wouldn’t touch at all. So, we started bending forks and 3-D printing prototypes to test the idea."

Creating the fork and spoon was simple, as they only needed small tweaks in their angles. The knife was slightly more difficult. Because it's a flat shape, it was tricky to make it float above a surface without adding a clunky weight to anchor it down. The solution eventually came in the shape of a tapered triangle. Once the designs were drawn, Moore sent them to his partner Avik to begin 3-D prototyping.

Despite being a genius design, the studio has had some problems getting it off the ground. "We were told by so many factories that they simply could not do it. We almost gave up several times. They kept trying to sell us other flatware that was ‘similar,’ missing the entire point," Moore said. Likely the unusual shapes of the cutlery made it difficult to mass-produce.

Thankfully, the designers found a willing factory, and production began. You can purchase the utensils here and never have to worry about sauce puddles again.

[h/t: Co.Design]