Would you like to see some beautiful wooden bowls? These are not my work but carved by students on a most enjoyable course this week. Having been offering spoon carving courses for some years now it was a natural progression to offer a bowl carving course but I was not quite happy with any of the techniques or particularly…
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…
So Monday in the House of Lords and Wednesday stood in the rain sawing up logs to make bowl blanks, my life is nothing if not varied at the moment. Today I cut up a sycamore log and I can tell from the blanks that it will make really nice star bowls. I have been out of stock of them…
This is going to be a rather picture heavy blog post but I hope it is of interest. We’ll start with a look at traditional management of the chestnut pollards then visit a museum which was the highlight of my time in Galicia. The scene in the picture below has become unusual in Europe in the last 200 years but…
I built this fence 20 years ago whilst working for the National Trust at Ide Hill in Kent, we used storm blown sweet chestnut which came from the wood a few yards away. I visited the property for the first time again last weekend and was pleased to see the fence is holding up well. Sweet chestnut has a high…
In 1987 the most powerful storm in 200 years hit Southern England uprooting millions of trees. The following year I got a job as a National Trust Warden clearing and replanting the storm damaged woodlands at Toy’s Hill the property at the epicentre of the storm where 95% of the trees were flattened. Last weekend I had a committee meeting…
Tomorrow is the first day of our first spooncarving course of the year. We are fully booked again which is nice and I am looking forward to meeting 8 new folks and sharing time carving together. Yesterday I sharpened 8 knives, 8 axes and 8 hook knives. I spent today collecting wood, first a trip to meet with a past…
Yesterday I went out to the woods to choose some trees for my next little project at home. I need somewhere to store logs for the fire under shelter and since I have always fancied doing a bit of timber framing I am building it to a bit higher spec than is really necessary. The timber will be larch from…
The floods in Sheffield last year have lead to the environment agency looking at the management of riverside trees along the river Don. One of the problems was that fallen trees washed downstream and blocked bridges creating dams. Now there is a program of cutting the riverside trees, many of which are alder a timber which has little commercial value…
