Just wanted to share a great link to a video of a wonderful old Japanese craftsman cleaving bamboo down to 0.1mm. Having spent many hours sat beside my friend Owen Jones the swill basket maker I am pretty faniliar with this sort of cleaving but not to this fine a finish. Follow this link to the 8 minute film of…
Meet Dietrich a German Journeyman. His odd costume tells those in the know that he is a fully trained craftsman traveling and looking for work to broaden his experience. In Germany folk instantly recognise this and so it makes life easy to get lifts when hitchiking or folk will simply offer him food and lodgings in exchange for some work.…
A grand day out today the the YSP. We have been regular visitors to YSP since moving to the area 15 years ago. Just 5 minutes off junction 38 of the M1 you will find seveeral hundred acres of rolling parkland dotted with sculptures by Henry Moore, Anthony Claro, Barbara Hepworth and many more. A few years ago they built…
In 1997 I visited Wharton Eshericks house in the USA and was utterly charmed. The whole house is a piece of functional sculpture. Centerpiece is the spiral staircase which has been much copied elsewhere. It is rare for me to find the work of a 20th century woodworker that I admire as much as that of medieval woodworkers but here…
What a beautiful name for a beautiful vessel. Each area of the British coastline evolved particular types of traditional boats developed to suit the shoreline and the local fishing methods. The Lerret was the boat of the Dorset coast read more about them and how they were used here and here. By this time last year there was only one…
Whilst at the Museum of English Rural Life a few weeks ago Terrence McSweeney told us the wonderful story of his mother’s basketmaking. I asked him to email me details which I am sure others will enjoy as much as I did so here you are in Terence’s words. In 1976 there were only a few professional basketmakers in Ireland:…
Folk who enjoyed the mastercrafts episode on chairmaking should watch this video and see exactly where those skills have been kept alive. It is a good example of the way in which tacit knowledge has been passed down from generation to generation and is now being spread more widely using modern media and the knowledge used by a great many…
Some may have seen that we have started a new blog on the Heritage Crafts Association site and that many of the posts there are copies of ones from here. I have been blogging increasingly about HCA work over the last year and we felt it would look more professional now to have those HCA and general craft posts on…
January 2009 saw a bunch of press articles about “the last master cooper”I put links to some on them in my blog post here. There was clearly something about a craft which everyone had heard about being potentially endangered that struck a raw nerve and warranted a lot of news coverage, all good news for traditional crafts and shows the…
Today I finished a commemorative oak gate installed at Epwell near Banbury. It has been a long project involving several craftspeople, a woodcarver, a blacksmith and my mate Andy who did the joinery on the gate. I was delighted with the finished project as was Alice who commissioned it. This is what it replaced, functional but rather an urban solution…
