Shavings are the very thin curls or flakes that come off when you run a sharp blade across a surface. The picture most people have is wood: a plane or a knife slides along a plank and pale curls pile up — wood shavings. Cooks use the same word for chocolate or cheese scraped into thin bits and sprinkled on a cake or pasta. The word is almost always plural. One tiny piece can be a shaving, but we rarely bother; we name the stuff, not each flake. It is not the tool and not the action (that is shaving). Though actually, it is not the same as sawdust: sawdust is more like powder from a saw; shavings are the thin curls a blade peels off. In a workshop they are mess; in a kitchen they are decoration. Same shape of thing.