A traditional craft saved for the future.

Regular readers of this blog will have seen Mike Turnock's workshop before and read about how he is the last sieve and riddle maker in the UK, steam bending wooden rims and weaving wire mesh sieves for gardeners, shellfish fishermen, cooks and potters.

The Heritage Craft Association have done much to help publicise Mike's work both nationally which has helped bring in more work and locally in the hope of finding someone suitable to take the business on. We are delighted to be able to report now that Mike has found a successor and so HCA can be proud to have played a part in saving our first Heritage Craft from extinction.

Damien Bramhall used to visit the workshop when he was a child and watch Mike and his father at work. he has been working as a lorry driver but was looking for a change of career when he read one of the press stories about Mike in the Buxton Advertiser. He got in touch, they came to a mutually convenient arrangement and Mike has already started training Damien up. Mike hopes to retire and pass the business on at the end of August. HCA are trying to help them find some funding to help cover the costs of the training since neither will be earning much whilst Mike is teaching and Damien learning.

I met with them yesterday and Mike was showing Damien how he makes the smaller kitchen sieves using prewoven stainless steel mesh. First he takes one of the small steam bent rims and fixes the ends together.

Then he cuts a circle of the stainless mesh.

and bends it round a former.

A strengthening wire is clipped to length

and the mesh wrapped around.

Now the mesh sits between the two steem bent rims and the whole lot is forced tightly together pulling the mesh taught.

A couple of tacks keep everything in place and the finished sieve should last a lifetime. I bought an almost identical one in an antique shop not so long ago.

To me it was an absolute delight seeing this old craft given a potential bright future since a visit to Mike's workshop 18 months ago played a crucial step in setting up the Heritage Crafts Association, pictures of that visit and the blog post here 

Some of the press coverage from the last year

Guardian article here
and audio slideshow here
discussed in the House of Commons here

and Mike's website

Bradfield bridge more photos

Having cut the main timbers for the bridge I needed to move them over a wall and to the worksite. It was a fun days work and a friend and neighbour Mark Wallington came to help. Mark is a scriptwriter and author so I think it was a bit of a change for him but a gorgeous day which we thoroughly enjoyed. Ollie was still on school holidays so he helped and took photos. We had lunch of fish and chips sat on the cricket field in Hayfield, wonderful.

These timbers are still a good weight so it is important to work carefully, slowly and use leverage rather than brute strength.

Close to the pivot point, when we get there the weight disappears as the beam becomes a giant see saw.

And sliding down the bank onto a huge flat bed trailer borrowed from a neighboring farmer.

Even so the beams stuck out a little way beyond the trailer.

Hayfield is just the other side of Kinder Scout from Edale and played a critical part in access to the countryside in the UK as it was the starting point for the mass trespass in 1932 the trespassers met in Bowden Hill  quarry before heading off onto the moors, they would have walked past my tree on the way.

I forgot to take photos as we unloaded the timber and put the first beams across the abutments but thankfully Nigel who was helping for the day took some. Bradfield's idyllic cricket field in the background.

 First timber across and I get a really good visualisation of the curve for the first time. I am very pleased.

Third timber in and a well earned break.

This was yesterday and we had lots of folk working on the job. Geoff and Kia walling and me, Andy and Nigel working on the bridge. Here Andy is drilling the main timbers to take a threaded steel bar which will help hold the three timbers tightly together.

The bars also support the uprights which hold the handrails. It took several attempts to get just the right amount of lean out on these but it makes a huge difference to the bridge aesthetically when it is finished so I wanted it just right.

 End of the day it looked like this.

Next week I will be fitting boards across the timbers and handrails.

Bradfield bridge progress

I have had little time for blogging recently but have been making good progress on my green oak bridge at Bradfield. This post showed the start of the work on the stone abutments. The next step was finding a suitable tree for the main timbers. I have been looking for this tree for many months. It needed to be and oak tree 29 feet long by 2 feet diameter and with a nice even curve in one plane only. The perfect tree blew down in a storm in Hayfield 2 years ago and landed perched on top of a dry stone wall on a steep bank.

 It would have been cut up long ago if it was not such a difficult and potentially dangerous position, our first job was to get it off the wall and down to the flat ground without damaging the rest of the wall below. My mate Andy came to help and with a winch and some heavy strops we gradually helped it off the wall and down the bank.

It was a very slow controlled decent that took an afternoon but left the wall unscathed and everybody safe. Big timber like this can be very dangerous and the trick is not to rush and to spend a lot of time thinking and planning.

 

The next stage was a bit of hewing to clean the bark off, this is the first stage in letting me see the timber really, it also cleans off any grit trapped in the bark that would blunt the saw and gives a nice surface for marking out on.

Having marked the best line down the tree with a chalk line I saw it free hand with a huge chainsaw. This is pretty much the same method as used by traditional pit sawyers but faster.

First slab nearly off.

Cutting the tree main beams.

All sawn through and now I decide the exact profile of the bridge and see if I can cut the handrails from the same slabs.

Three main timbers and a spare 6" x 4" which will make two handrails. Just need to get them over the wall and on to a trailer now. I'll maybe put that in a seperate post with installing them at the bridge site.

beautiful and useful wooden spoons

William Morris famously said “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful” 

Many in the craft community have taken this one step further so that we like things that are both beautiful and useful. For me wooden spoons are a good example. We have been making, buying, collecting and using wooden spoons in the kitchen and for serving food for nearly 20 years. There is still lots to more learn about just what makes a good spoon, they are like functional sculpture. Making a good spoon has all the same difficulties involved in making a fine piece of sculpture but many more besides since it has also to be fit for purpose. The angles should all be just right so that it sits nicely in the hand and stirs or serves the food easily. The design should take into consideration the strengths and weaknesses of the wood fibres since unlike a sculpture it will see hard use for many years. Strange then that such a difficult thing to get just right is still seen as a lower art form than sculpture, it commands lower prices in the market place, is not recognised by the art world and the making of it does not attract the same kudos.


"I am a professional sculptor" would sound far more impressive at dinner party conversation than "I am a professional spoon carver."


I greatly admires good sculpture (Brancusi and Hepworth being two of my favourites) but I still find myself appreciating more the things in my own life which are both beautiful and functional. 

I have made pure sculpture and also have nice sculpture and paintings done by friends, these tend to get noticed a lot when they are new but after a year or two I find they become part of the scenery. A spoon which is used every day somehow gets inside our consciousness. As a maker of spoons and bowls I feel a deep connection with someone who has eaten their breakfast from one of my bowls every day for 10 years, that is 3650 small connections. Few people would consider at an artwork or sculpture 3650 times however impressive.


Nicola and I am currently working on a book on spoon carving techniques and are including a section of spoon photos for inspiration. Some of these will be gallery shots but it felt important to me to show some spoons in use so over the last few days each time dinner hits the table I have taken a few shots before everyone digs in. Some of these spoons are made by us and others by friends who we admire.

And this one is a bit of naughty indulgence, Haagen Dazs ice cream smoothie straight from the tub, a wooden spoon is perfect for this.

One of the fun things about this blog is that it gives me connection with a whole range of people around the world that value "I am a spooncarver" as highly as "I am a sculptor".

pole lathe turning and woodcrafts in Romania

In 1998 Stuart King and I visited Romania to study traditional woodcrafts and particularly to visit the last flask turner Ion Constantin. I had heard about him a couple of years beforehand. in fact I went to the world turning conference in the USA where he was billed as attending only to find that they had not managed to sort out his travel and visa.  Thankfully the organisers of the conference contributed to Stuart and myself traveling to Romania and photographing and videoing Mr Contantin at work. It was clear that he had not made these flasks for many years and the one he made was rather rough and thick walled compared to the delightful old ones, but I was able to see enough of the technique to work out how to make nice ones myself though I have not made any for a few years. Stuart has just put the video up on youtube so now everyone can see it.



and here are some of the flasks I made based on a 15th century design.

On the same trip one of the highlights was this sawmill. It sat on a steep slope within the bend of a switchback on the road. Timber lorries unloaded by tipping the logs off above the mill then they moved down through the mill with gravity helping all the way before finished timber, sawdust and offcuts were all loaded onto waiting vehicles on the road at the bottom of the mill. Having run a far more advanced modern bandsawmill for the National Trust I was blown away by the efficiency of this set up and asked Stuart to film it. At first the cutting speed appears fairly slow until you realise that it is cutting the whole log into multiple planks and it never stops, as one log comes out another is fed in.

HCA planning for the future

Friday and Saturday were spent in London again.

Friday was meetings with charitable trusts who we hope may help fund the Heritage Crafts Association's work and also gave us good advice about how efficient, successful organisations work. Then after a night in a cheapy £35 hotel (a cellar room near Earls Court) it was back to our committee meeting rooms which are a stones throw away from Trafalgar Square, another cellar room but this one is free, loaned to us by a supporter.

After just over a years hard work we feel the Heritage Crafts Association is established as an organisation, we have good links with the various individual craft organisations and many good contacts within government and the charitable sector. We still have no money but as more folk are beginning to sign up to our friends scheme that is helping.

This committee meeting then focussed on revisiting our priorities for action. This is something we did last November when our prime priorities were advocacy work within Government and DCMS and holding a forum to bring all the various craft organisations together.

Now we are established we feel we can start to address some of the issues facing craftspeople more directly.  Our key focus over the coming months will be on these issues. Broadly they are either about helping make businesses more viable with promotion and marketing help or about issues of passing skills on to the next generation.

We hope to create a database of traditional craftspeople working around the country. This we hope to make publicly available through a craft map which will be searchable by region or craft. We are already being asked regularly by journalists for details of craftspeople that they can do stories on and it would be good for this information to be more widely available so that say someone in Suffolk looking for a basketmaker or boatbuilder could easily find them. The research needed to create this database will also highlight any particularly endangered crafts so we may have an endangered list such as the rare breeds survival trust have. We also hope to run a course in internet marketing for craftspeople, we have many skills in this area within the HCA committee and with recent developments in web2  software it is easier than ever for craftspeople to sell their work direct to customers at retail price.

On the training side of things we wish to support the transmission or passing on of craft skills, especially in the most endangered crafts. There will never be one simple solution to training needs, different approaches will be needed for different crafts and situations. It was interesting to see from our online survey of craftspeople that only 8% of respondents came into their craft through traditional apprenticeship and over 50% were in one way or another self taught, perhaps drawing inspiration from having done a short course and read all they can on the subject. In each individual case we will hope to find ways of helping skilled craftspeople pass their skills on to new learners using methods that suit both parties.

We also discussed the closure of the excellent NETS training at Hereford and the cutting of Weave at Dundee and will be doing whatever we can to oppose and publicise these losses.

Professor Ewan Clayton on why heritage crafts are important

No blog post from me today but I wanted to share Ewan Clayton's inspirational speech from the Heritage Crafts Association forum at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Many folk found it incredibly thought provoking and asked for a transcript, thankfully we had a recorder running and Ewan gave permission for it to be published. I am sure my blog readers will enjoy it.

Here is the link

And here is an overview of the forum with the results of all the delegates input in their own words. It really is a snapshot of where folk think the traditional crafts are at in the UK at the moment. Link

kesurokai

In August Nicola and I are heading to Japan to work with traditional craftspeople there and learn about how they are working to share traditional skills. Nicola did her PhD looking at how traditional skills are exchanged in the UK and this will form part of her ongoing research, she is also doing publicity for the event and has a very informative blog. from which I have shamelessely stolen the post below. 

Kesurokai meetings started in Japan in 1995, organised by the highly respected temple carpenter Sugimura san. His aim was to bring together different craftsmen who normally work remotely to exchange traditional craft techniques and knowledge.

These events serve not only the practical purpose of ensuring age-old skills are maintained, but also create a sense of community amongst the craftsmen, helping them maintain their businesses. The Kesurokai movement has around 1500 members in Japan and holds twice yearly meetings all over the country.

A friend just brought this web site to my attention which has some images from a Kesurokai meeting in 2006 which show just how large and well attended they are:

 

 

There are also some really superb videos on the web site showing how various woodworking tools are made.

English country pottery

We have a fantastic heritage of pottery in Britain with many threads. Medieval earthenware jugs are universally praised then there are gorgeous 18th century slipware dishes, the rise of industrial ceramics in the Staffordshire potteries, salt glazed stoneware in the 19th and early 20th C and finally the studio pottery movement and Bernard Leach's fusion of East and West.

I have recently been sent links to some great pottery videos that I wanted to share. I have a great love of old earthenware pottery and used to visit Roly Curtis at Littlethorpe potteries many years ago and dig clay and try to throw pots for fun. http://www.littlethorpepotteries.co.uk/curtis_tradition.asp


So on to the videos, the first one is Isaac Button the speed and ease of working are a joy to watch.




This one is not English though he has visited and learned from many of the best old English potters works very much in that tradition and is a keen supporter of British traditional crafts. Guy Wolff centering 50lb of clay.



and finishing the pot