Over the last 7 years I have had the pleasure and good company of several hundred wonderful folk on my spoon and bowl carving courses. I know many of you read the blog. There is a new website which I very much like set up by Kate Dew-Martin, it gives a range of craft courses available in the UK and…
Today I was in London meeting with Skills Minister John Hayes and the BIS craft skills advisory board. One of the things discussed was the NIACE craft toolkit. We helped publicise the call for input to this document a while ago and it’s good to see the finished website with a wealth of information. Perhaps one of the more interesting…
Here are pics from bowl and spooncarving courses just finished. Rob Nicholson is a good greenwoodworker but this was his first go at carving bowls, he did a nice blog post showing all the stages here. Here are a couple of finished bowls and then it was on to spooncarving first cutting suitable raw material with a big Japanese pull…
Here is our replica bronze age boat in the courtyard of Borlougne castle. Read about the building of it here Our job now was just two of us had to get it inside the medieval building behind. We had been told it wouldn’t fit and we would have to dismantle it and rebuild it inside, it looked to us like…
The Old Police Station Edale is now up and running as a wonderful holiday cottage. I’ll share a few pics below and feel free to share the website with friends via blogs or facebook…..I need some bookings.Regular blog readers may remember me starting the work converting it knocking the first wall down back in December Well now it looks like…
The last 3 weeks have been hectic but fun. First I worked at Hever Castle in Kent, the childhood home of Anne Boleyn, an impressive Tudor castle with fantastic gardens created by Lord Astor in the early 20th Century. Is this the best spot to work a lathe ever?and these are the porringers I made on the first of four…
A few weeks ago I was demonstrating turning at Hever Castle in Kent and fell in love with these huge pots. Doing my research afterwards it turns out they were collected in Italy by Lord Astor in the early 20th Century and are thought to be from Pompeii. Wherever they are from I adore the presence of them, the gorgeous…
Having knocked off at 4am last Thursday night we were back at work at 8am Friday am with 30 hours to go to boat launch and lots of work ahead. All we need to do is fix the 4 top planks in place. Pete Clark the organiser of the whole project spent the day pacing outside like an expectant dad…
As far as I can remember this is the longest day I have ever worked. Many years ago I did run two jobs working a seafood restaurant and burger bar in Cocoa Beach Florida but that was just 16 hour days and this was much more fun. This post follows on from the last but must now be around 10pm…
I am back from my Dover boat building project and have a bunch more pics to share over the next few blog posts. It has been quite a ride and folk that have been following the UK news may already know the outcome. I’ll start where I left off with the four main base timbers in place, that is as…
