Having worked the last two weekends it would be nice to have a day or two off this week but I have quite a lot on so a day off will have to wait till the week after next when kids are on half term. I do have some really nice inspiring work on though so it does not feel…
Last weekend was the annual meeting of the Association of Pole Lathe Turners and Greenwoodworkers. We have been members since there were only a few dozen folk but now there are about 500 members and over 250 turned up for a weekends log bothering. Last year the same weekend we were freezing in Northumberland but this year the event was…
I have been working for a while with Sheffield silversmith Owen Waterhouse to make replicas of medieval mazer bowls and the Scottish whiskey drinking bowls called quaiches. It took us quite a while to work out how to do it but now Owen makes the rims then I turn bowls to fit. The difficult bit is getting a wooden bowl…
Our bank holiday weekend was spent teaching a spoon carving course. Green woodwork has become a popular hobby in the UK but the most common route people take is chairmaking. In Sweden a much larger variety of greenwood crafts are practiced and most of them are based on skilled use of the knife and axe. In our spooncarving foundation course…
It has been a busy time since my last post. I have continued playing with birch, this time making a birch bark box. I have admired these for years and at Christmas was sent two by a German friend, they were made in Lithuania. I managed to take one apart and put it back together learning how the joints worked…
In medieval times the various craftspeople formed guilds to support each other in times of hardship, promote excellence in their craft and to protect the trade against outside competition. In London these guilds evolved into the worshipful companies and together they elected the Lord Mayor and played a major role in the running of the city. By Victorian times the…
A friend recently recommended this book “Celebrating Birch” published by North House Folk School in Minesota. I ordered a copy and it arrived a couple of weeks ago. It is a lovely inspirational book, full of projects using this most versatile tree, from bowls and spoons to birch tar glue and bark boxes. The first project I was inspired to…
Over the last few weeks I have had some very nice correspondence with a gentleman by the name of Tomio Imaru in Japan. Tomio visited the UK and worked on the pole lathe with Mike Abbott in 2004 and has since made chairs in Japan but more recently he became interested in bowls and found my youtube videos and book.…
Its been a bit of a slow week as kids were off school Monday and Tuesday and everyone is full of flu. I have managed to get up to the workshop for a bit of therapeutic turning every now and then though. Yesterday I turned a ladle for the Mary Rose Trust, I first visited the Mary Rose to study…
Just to show the European hewing technique as a contrast to the Japanese, here is some video again from 2005 Kesurokai. The technique of hewing by cutting out notches, chopping off the block between and then finishing the surface with a wide bladed axe is the same as was used in Britain to create all our wonderful timber framed buildings.…
