props for Ridley Scott's Robin Hood

Last year I made a lovely set of bowls and mazers for Ridley Scott's medieval film "Nottingham" then at the last minute it was canceled due to the pending actors strike. I just heard that it is up and running again and starts filming in 5 weeks. Russel Crowe is Robin Hood and Cate Blanchett has just been confirmed as Maid marian.

Most exciting is they have decided they want a bowlturner in the background of one of the shots so I am supplying my old lathe, a set of tools and piles of shavings from the workshop floor. These are the bowls I made, they were all a bit drab as they wanted them unoiled so the props department could age them.


I have done TV quite a number of times including Meet the ancestors and playing the Turner Nememiah Wallington in Simon Sharmas History of Britain but a £91 Million big screen production is quite different. I can't wait to see Russel Crowe drinking from one of my mazers on the big screen. Ridley Scott aparantly says he is "not making a documentary" but his attention to detail is impresive, his set designer has a copy of my book and this will be the first time medieval folk have been shown drinking from wooden bowls.

a nail spoilt my adze

Most of the trees I use come from a tree surgeon who does a lot of management on Sheffield's street trees. Even large old trees can not be sold to the sawmills because of the risk of nails and things inside. This can mess up an expensive sawmill but I cut them up with a chainsaw and if I hit a nail I sharpen the chain and carry on. Today though I came across a nail that was buried deep in the wood, it must have been hammered into the tree more than 50 years ago. It didn't show up as i cut the blanks and took a very nasty chunk out of my favourite adze.

Out of all the tools I own this is the only one that I consider irreplaceable. I bought it from Ion Constantin a Romanian pole lathe turner and spoon carver in 1998, it an antique blacksmith made tool and it is quite the best adze I have ever used.
This is the nail that did the damage.


Thankfully I now have the tools and skills to repair the damage, so after half an hours grinding, shaping and polishing my adze was working again. I remember over 15 years ago meeting an American blacksmith/woodworker called Don Webber, he showed me the basics of toolmaking in a very demystified way. He said that it was very empowering for a tool user to become a toolmaker, it has been good advice.


After that experience I felt like a break from that tree, I couln't face hitting another nail in the same day so I picked up a bowl blank I cut a few eeks ago from burr maple, this one was destined to be a mazer. I turn these very finely and ready to fit a silver rim. The rims are made first and I turn the bowl to fit. The problem is I have to turn them a little over size and gues just how much it will shrink so that when it is dry the rim fits perfectly. It took me quite a while to work the technique out but I have a pretty good succes rate now.


This one looks a bit drab now but I recently finished another from the same tree and it looks stunning.

a most enjoyable spoon carving course

We had a most enjoyable weekend. Our spooncarving group were just a great fun bunch of people and we all had a fun time.

We all went through the various processes of learning to use an axe and knife safely but efficiently and then how to get the best designs out of various bits of wood.


Nicola cooks home made soup and puts on a simple spread of food which always seems to go down well.


Sadly I didn't take many photos of peoples work and there were some really good spoons. Everyone made nice spoons and I hope learnt enough skills to be able to carry on the hobby at home. I was particularly pleased with this spoon partly because I can not do this type of decorative carving myself. I could only show Shankar the basics of how it was done with some examples made by my Dutch friend Jan Harm and he went away and decorated his spoon with beautiful carving. He is an eye surgeon though so is used to using sharp tools for fine detail.


When I bought the wood for the course I had noticed it was realy very fast grown but it was only when we started working it that I ralised just how fast grown. In fact it is as quickly grown as any tree I have ever seen, the 8" diameter logs had grown in 7 years. The only other time I have seen that growth rate has been on cricket bat willows which are specially grown on good ground with lots of space around them. This log came from the pole growing on an old pollard willow.

another fully booked spooncarving course

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 course participant John who now sources willow sticks for me. We use these for teaching the different knife cuts with. Then I went to Mr Anderson the Tree surgeon and picked up a load of larger diameter willow for splitting up to practice axe work and make spoons from. I always split a bit and work it a little into a tent peg or something to check it will be easy to use. I am really pleased with the raw materials, good materials make the learning experience so much easier.

I also bought two large oak trees which we will cut up into two inch thick planks for making benches from. This one is particularly fine as it has a lot of epicormic growth, little twigs and that means that inside it will have lots of little pippy patterns in the grain.


Tonight was a committee meeting of "Working Woodlands" a local group that promotes the use of local timber, we had an excellent meeting working on our new business plan which I think will bring a new focus to the group and help us concentrate on our core message of using local timber. It's very much like the message about locally, sustainably sourced food which has become so mainstream now, hopefully timber will get there too and folk will begin to think about tropical hardwood picnic tables for £50 in much the same way as they look at battery farmed eggs.

lost crafts

Lost Crafts by Una McGovern has been a surprisingly good read.

The book covers around 100 crafts with about 3 pages each. I expected it to be superficial and poorly written, the sort of thing you get in the local paper.

In fact each craft gets a very accurate and concise summary with interesting anecdotes. The range chosen is interesting and the author clearly has a deep personal understanding and interest in many of the crafts described, or maybe she is just a very good researcher and writer.

As someone who has worked full time in the traditional crafts for 15 years and read everything that has been written from Cobbet and Morris to Yanagi, Leach and Pye I still learnt quite a few things from this book. I particularly enjoyed the section on traditional boat building, despite working in woodland crafts and before that traditional forestry I could not fault the sections on coppicing, hedge laying green wood crafts, clogmaking etc. I read the first and only plausible explanation I have seen of how to tickle a trout and good descriptions of eel catching too.

The book is not as deep as Dorothy Hartley's 1939 classic "Made in England"
but is probably much better suited to the modern reader.

I would heartily recommend it and shall be buying several copies as gifts, good price for a nice hardback too.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lost-Crafts-Rediscovering-Traditional-Skills/dp/0550104267

wonderful snowy scenery

I live where I do because I have a deep connection with the natural landscape and being in beautiful places is very important to me. I never take the scenery for granted and in fact when you live in a hilly place everyday the light changes the view and highlights things you have never noticed before.

Yesterdy was even more special, this was the view out of the front door early morning.


Icicles on the woodshed.

The road up towards the workshop.


I cut some plate blanks, climbers coming down off the hill with crampons and ice axes gave me some funny looks.

Then turned a really nice set of plates.


Before heading home. To me this is priceless.

more spoon racks

So I have been talking with Mathew about spoon racks and thought I would put a few pictures of different types up here. These date from the days when everyone had their own personal wooden spoon which they washed and popped back in the rack. First a joined one, these are quite common in the antiques trade and most come from Wales late 19th C.


Next a couple from St Fagans folk life museum I love the gorgeous simplicity of this design.


And this one is an even nicer example being made entirely from small branchwood, the joint at the right hand end is part of the tree where the branch attaches to the main stem. The branch forms the handle and the main stem the rack.


And finally one from Skansen Open Air Museum in Stockholm, a most wonderful place.

bushcraft and bowmaking course with Fredde Norgren

Last year I came across a chap in Sweden Fredde Norgren who has wonderful bushcraft skills. He has lots of videos on his youtube site and if you are into the outdoors and simple (but very proficient) hand skills I would recomend looking through them.

Fredde and I have aranged a 3 day course in the UK so we can get together and share skills, have some fun time camping in the woods and Fredde will teach a small group of folk how to make and shoot their own bow and arrows. I have made a number of longbows over the years but Fredde has a very simple design which works extremely well. I am really looking forward to it. If you would like to join us details are on our courses page here. www.spooncarving.net

This is Fredde making a bow



and an arrow



and shooting here



And one of my favourite videos is this one where he shows how to cook with hot rocks. I have often heard how Native Americans cooked this way in tightly woven baskets filled with water which they would boil by adding hot rocks, it always sounded a very slow and inefective process but Fredde shows it here and once his fire and rocks are hot he boils a cup of water faster than gas stove.



Our course will be in a friends wood in Essex and the dates are May 15th-17th

beautiful wooden spoons

I was just contacted by a chap in the US who does some spooncarving and chairmaking. He was taken with some pictures of a spoon rack on our website and wanted better pictures to show how it was made. So I thought I would put them here and a link to his site too. His name is Matthew Comer and I like his philosophy as much as his work. http://www.2handswoodcraft.com/index.html.

It often appears that most people are obsessed with making money and buying things today but there are actually still a surprising number of people who are doing what they do for the love of the work, they just take a little searching out.

Anyway these are the pictures of the spoon rack. Sadly I don't know who made it but it is in the kitchens at Saterglantan Swedens national handcraft school. I have taught woodturning courses there but also learned a lot during our stays, it is an inspiring place. http://www.saterglantan.se/index_en.php


The spoons in the racks are made by various different craftspeople that have taught courses there over the years. There are equally inspiring collections of pottery, basketry, birch bark work and wooden bowls, now including some of mine. If you like pictures of this sort of work let me know and I could add some more. To me it is a joy to see beautiful objects used in everyday life.

French Traditional Crafts

France has a wonderful system for supporting traditional crafts.

"These craftsmen, second to none, whose talents are often anonymous
and unsung, deserve to be better known, declared the Minister of
Culture and Communication,... For although the heritage is recognised
primarily in the form of historic monuments, she explained, ...our
country also has a great many highly skilled craftsmen and women,
whose expertise is in itself a genuine yet intangible heritage. In
order to raise the status of these «exceptional skills» and to try to
ensure they are passed on, a Traditional Crafts Council was created in
1994. Its purpose is to preserve and develop craft skills both in the
field of conservation and contemporary creative work, selecting high-
flying artisans with a view to awarding them the title of Master
Craftsman. Each of them will then be given a grant in order to
provide a three year training in their workshop for one student with
the ability to acquire these traditional skills and to perpetuate
them, "

http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/article_imprim.php3?id_article=6698

http://www.metiers-art.culture.fr/

This is one model we could use for our traditional crafts association. Declaring people "master craftsmen" or "living national treasures" could bring a lot of attention to the traditional crafts, give the individuals a boost in their business locally and nationally and if it was tied to funding for a "skills training" scheme like the French system could really help keep the best of our living heritage alive for future generations.

more on traditional crafts organisation

Yesterday I went to London. That meant a 7am start, drive through the snow to Chesterfield and train to London.


I was there for an inspiring meeting. A small group of very committed folk were discussing the way forward for traditional crafts. We have been researching all the previous initiatives and all the different organisations that have done work in related areas. Where the Crafts Council concentrates on contemporary and innovative we concentrate on traditional, where English Heritage protect dead buildings we will protect the living heritage skills.

In 2005 the Heritage Lottey Fund set aside £7 million for training in the traditional crafts. This has all gone to building and conservation crafts (eg lime mortar and hedgelaying) simply because organisations like English Heritage and the National Trust have the infrastructure to make the grant applications. Our new organisation will campaign for all the traditional craft skills.

We have draft aims and objectives and agreements about the way forward. Hopefully within a few weeks we will have an official organisation that people can sign up to and show their support. My job over the weekend is to circulate our draft aims and objectives and then to look for funding for a website that can become the public face of the new organisation.

Our draft key aims are.

Recognition This will start with a survey of which traditional crafts survive and discovering which are the emost endangered.

Transmission We need to find new and innovative ways to ensure that skills are passed from one generation to the next.

Safeguarding We will campaign to ensure government understand the issues facing the traditional crafts and work through the individual craft organisations to nurture these fragile cultural traditions.

Celebration We want to shout about this important part of our living heritage.

After our meeting I hopped back on the tube down to Southwark Cathedral one of my favourite places in the city and a little oasis of calm.


I was in for a treat because the organist was rehearsing so I had half an hour sat alone in this glorious building listening to wonderful music. The organ has 3,743 pipes and was built by Lewis & Co. of Ferndale Road, Brixton, south London, and completed in 1897.



I was not just at Southwark for pleasure I had arranged to meet Tim Clements there. He is a cameraman and film maker with an interest in folk music and traditional crafts and wanted to meet to talk through ways in which all these interests could come together. It sounded an interesting project, he is as passionate about the craft of film making as I am about wood crafts. In a very similar way he is determined to make the films he wants to make regardless of whether they have commercial market or not. I will be interested to see how it turns out.


I still had a couple of hours before my train home so headed off to the British Museum. The place never ceases to amaze me, there is such cultural wealth under one roof from around the globe and from many millenia. I always find something new that I have never really paid attention to before too.
This time I found some turned and laquered Chinese bowls dating to c200bc appologies for the very poor camera phone image. These would have been turned on a similar lathe to the one I make my bowls on today or perhaps a slightly simpler version with an assistant pulling on a strap to spin the work.

playing in the snow

One of the beauties of being self employed is being free to catch rare opportunities when they present themselves. Today school was closed so all the village kids were at home. They spent the morning sledging then they all came to ours for lunch and a film. Afterwards a bunch of us dads got together and went up the hill to build snow caves in the drifts Ollie came too.

Mike and Ollie starting tunneling in. My workshop is just above Ollie's hat in the distance at the end of the valley.

Ollie is almost hidden inside his cave here.

This is Mark having far too much fun for a grown up.

And tucked away inside, it is amazing just how warm and quiet it is inside a snow cave.

We made one cave with a long tunnel running along the face of the drift then made another hole at the end where you could squeeze out.


By the time we had finished we were all tired and happy and headed home for tea. Last time we made snow caves at this spot they lasted over a week.

"living heritage" more support for traditional crafts

Things are changing around the world in the way that "heritage" is viewed.

I would like to share a few words from Linda Fabiani, Scottish Minister for Culture from her introduction to the new report "Intangible Cultural Heritage in Scotland, The way Forward"


"Our cultural heritage informs the identity of our nation. It's more than what we can see and touch in museums and galleries-it's also those intangible aspects which make us who and what we are today. The 2003 UNESCO Convention for safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) suggests all nations consider the distinctive character of their heritage as manifested within their respective borders.

To preserve the richness and diversity of Scotland's culture, an inventory is the first step. This report suggests the beginning of such a process in Scotland; it offers a clear way forward for the promotion and protection of our nation's cultural practices and living traditions. It also puts us in the vanguard of such work within Europe.

From Shetland's Up-Helly-Aa festivals in the north to the Common Ridings of the Borders in the south, from weaving of Harris Tweed in the Western Isles to the silver bands of the Lothians' pit villages in the east, Scotland posseses a wealth of living traditions. These traditions are being constantly augmented and adapted by exposure to the cultural practices of new groups who settle here.

Scotland's cultural heritage is an important part of what makes it such a fantastic place to live, work, and do business. Maintaining the intangible cultural heritage will help to keep Scotland in this enviable position."

The report which discusses how they will survey and protect their heritage can be downloaded here;

http://www.museumsgalleriesscotland.org.uk/publications/publication/65/intangible-cultural-heritage-in-scotland-the-way-forward-summary-report

At present in England we still regard heritage as being buildings and things in museums. When trying to establish what is happening within government in England I was told "from what I can gather, the lack of immediate pressure from the public and the Heritage sector for Government to undertake work in this area means that amidst the competing priorities, the initial work in this area seems to have run out of steam and has been put on hold for the moment"

I am happy for the government to ratify the UNESCO Convention or to follow Scotlands example but I would like to see some action. Several of the crafts that I care passionatley about will be gone in 5 years if nothing is done now. Many of us have now written to our MPs asking what the governments position on Intangible Cultural Heritage and particularly traditional crafts is.

I look forward to hearing Andrew Burnham secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport following Linbda Fabiani's lead.