I can’t remember when I first heard of pulled fibre birch brooms, it may have been in Sweden at Taljfest or may have been through my friend Jarrod Dahl in USA who now makes them ocassionally. Whatever they are a wonderful green woodworking craft. I wonder who first pulled a few birch fibres in this way and worked out that…
In just over a months time I’ll be heading for the USA to teach at the amazing North House Folk School. I am teaching two three day courses which are already fully booked but also there is a full weekend of activities as part of the “Fresh Cut” conference. It promises to be an inspirational time with events running Friday…
Jeremy Atkinson is the last clogmaker in England making all his clog soles in the traditional way with three traditional clog knives, the blocker, hollower and gripper. The razor sharp knives have a handle nearly three feet long which generates huge leverage and control allowing him to carve the fresh wood into clog soles. Here is his website I have…
Way back in June I documented the various stages of our birch bark canoe build, this is the final chapter. Ther last blog post had us fitting the gunwales and thwarts once that was done we had to fit the ribs. These are made from cleft and shaved cedar. Here is Jarrod working with the crooked knife to shave down the…
Five years ago I blogged about ladder making. I had been contacted by Stanley Clarke who left school and became an apprentice ladder maker aged 14 in 1954. At the time I said “I am going to look into various sources to see if there is any way we can find some funding to spend time with Stanley, pay for…
Back to our birch bark canoe build the last post we had just started sewing on the gore panels, that is the part that extends the width of the main bark sections upwards.The next stage is to set out the gunwales, we had split these out from an 16 foot long cedar and now set to shaving them down using…
So now the build starts in earnest. We laid out the rolls of bark that we collected last week, sorting the pieces and deciding how to get the best from them. Jarrod has a building board which raises the bed 18″ off the floor and gives a level bed to measure and work from. There is a great amount of thought…
Our Birch bark canoe build is progressing faster than I have time to blog. We collected cedar for the ribs, gunwales and sheathing in what is called a cedar swamp, I was fearing even worse mosquitos and imagining sinking into feet deep of marsh but it was not so bad. The cedar we were after was northern white cedar Thuja…
We are progressing nicely with our birch bark canoe build, we have collected spruce root for the stitching and processed a lot of it. Now it was time to collect the big pieces of bark for the canoe. Here’s April and Jarrod Stone Dahl heading off into the woods. April makes the ash splint pack baskets and this one is…
I am Wisconsin to learn and share. We have a had a brief break from canoe building work to get ready for the bowl turning course I am teaching at North House Folk School. We visited Jarrod’s friend Mike to borrow his well equipped blacksmith workshop and to forge a bunch of tools for the students to use. I’ll be…
