I have very much enjoyed the ground breaking Radio 4 & British Museum program “a history of the world in 100 objects” The project runs wider than just the 100 objects however with various museums choosing their favourite object to tell a story. The Museum of English Rural Life at Reading have chosen George Lailey’s lathe “This lathe tells…
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…
I am feeling very honoured to have been invited to take part in a very special cultural exchange involving traditional woodworkers from Japan and Europe. A small select group of traditional woodworkers from Germany, Sweden, Belgium and the UK will travel to Japan in August and work with alongside traditional Japanese woodworkers to build two small buildings, one a traditional…
One of the key jobs of the Heritage Crafts Association is what we call advocacy. It is largely about meeting as many influential people as possible and letting them know about what is going on the world of traditional crafts and what they may be able to do to help. Yesterday was a good example of our Advocacy work, HCA…
If you watched the program and want to find out more about this sort of craft and where to learn here are some links and resources. If you missed it and are in the UK you can see it on iplayer here. The BBC are not allowed to link to “commercial sites” so the first link must be to Guy…
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…
Acredited training systems in craft have a very long history having their golden age with the medieval guilds when it was impossible to practice without having been through a rigorous training and being a fully signed up member of the guild. William Morris was a huge fan of the medieval guilds and there were various attempts to resurrect some semblance…
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…
Over the last week I have been looking over prooofs of the book that accompanies the Mastercrafts series. I guess the first thing folk will want to know is “is it worth buying” and I would say if you can pre-order it at £14 it looks like a bargain. It’s a lovely looking coffee table book with nice photographs…
Dorothy Hartley was born in the 1890’s and spent most of her long life traveling the country and writing about old craft skills, country ways, old recipes and such like. There are many books of that type and most are pretty much like modern day local journalism, it is clear the writer stayed long enough to get the basics of…
