I have posted before about the best axe and straight knife for carving and the third tool that is needed is the spoon knife or hook knife. Opinions vary enormously as to which is the best spoon carving knife, if you search the web you will find lots of folk vehemently arguing that this or that knife is the best,…
Like all craftspeople I love making my work, I love my raw materials, I love my old tools and tools I have made myself, I love the process of making, I love hearing from customers that use my bowls and spoons. Like most craftspeople I don’t enjoy trying to sell my work, or running the business, or filling out my…
This is one of the reasons why I work. Robin, I got a couple of quaichs from you a while a ago. One of them was used in our wedding last August and we had it engraved. Last night we used both in our annual (this was our fourth) Burns’ supper. I’ve included a few photos that I…
This is a real triumph of film making and story telling. I love the old furniture, I love the stories and the people. I dislike the hard gloss paint at the end but then maybe that is just moving with the times? I would love to see these pieces with a nice soft milk paint or linseed oil based paint with natural…
I have posted links to these individually before but thought it would be good to post them all in one place and some may be new to some folk. The best spooncarver I have ever seen was Ion Constantin a Romanian Gypsy who I visited with Stuart King in 1998. This is the short film, I have a bunch of…
There must be no bowl turner in the world that can get by without one of these. It’s the first tool you use to mark out the wood yet most folk have nasty flimsy ones that don’t do the job very well. I love these old forged ones. I like the way they feel in the hand. I like that…
Well this one is right at the other end of the spectrum from my foot powered turning but I like it anyway. There is something special about really large pieces of wood, I am a fan of Brancusi and Hepworth, these may not be in the same league art wise but they have a presence and are fun and I…
Most of my blog posts are about traditional woodworking and traditional crafts but I am also passionately interested in traditional agriculture globally and locally. Perhaps surprisingly only 30% of the worlds food is produced by the industrialised farming methods we are so familiar with in the developed West, this system is designed to work with large acreages of land under monoculture,…
Well the truth is money is no object it is a means to an end at best and the pursuit of it can easily divert us from doing the things that we really want to do. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siu6JYqOZ0g]
Last June I spent a week in Boulogne installing our Bronze Age boat replica in the museum in the castle there. We came in to work one morning to find an English film crew setting up, Jamie Oliver was apparently coming to take on the French with some English cheeses. I am a big cheese fan particularly very special artisan…
