Invite to important free craft skills event

The Heritage Crafts Association have been working with Government to highlight some of the issues facing craftspeople in the UK. The Skills minister John Hayes and his officials have been very receptive.

HCA have now organised a craft skills forum where craftspeople of all different disciplines can come together to discuss issues facing the sector and feed directly into the process of developing new strategy to support and promote the crafts. John Hayes will be speaking on the day as will Jo Reilly of Heritage Lottery Fund. Thanks to generous sponsorship from the Balvenie, the most handcrafted single malt Scotch whisky the whole event is free including lunch and at the end of the day there will be an optional whisky tasting.

If you care about the future of your craft, please consider coming and sharing your views with others. The day will involve lots of facilitated discussion groups so everyone will get the chance to air their feelings and contribute and everything will be noted down to feed into a cohesive voice of the sector. This strong voice is what we have been missing and part of the reason why crafts have been rather overlooked. So whether you are a quilter, blacksmith, potter, or basketmaker we hope you will join us for what promises to be a very important day for the crafts.

HCA Skills Forum

Wednesday 11 May 2011, 11.45am to 6pm
Chelsea College of Art and Design, 45 Millbank, London SW1P 4RL
Want to shape the future of traditional craft skills?
With generous support from The Balvenie, the Heritage Crafts Association has organised a Skills Forum on 11 May 2011 at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. It is free to attend and the afternoon will include:

• Keynote speech by Jo Reilly, Heritage Lottery Fund
• Speech on craft skills by John Hayes Minister of State for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning
• Discussions facilitated by Hilary Jennings, Crafts Consultant
• Summary by Robin Wood, Chair, Heritage Crafts Association
• Networking with other industry professionals
• Whisky tasting following the Skills Forum, kindly arranged by The Balvenie, the most handcrafted Single Malt Scotch Whisky

Can you add your perspective to the debate?
The HCA are looking for craftspeople, representatives from craft groups, guilds and membership organisations, livery companies, training providers, government bodies and support organisations to participate. We need you to debate, share training experience and set in progress a strategy for ensuring the continuance of traditional craft skills training in the UK.
Book your free ticket here

is that "the old way" of doing it?

 How often do folk who choose to use hand tools hear this? The implication of course is that there is now a newer, better, faster way and that I am doing it "the old way" just to show how it was done.

There is a common misconception about technologies in the Western world, we think that new technologies replace older ones because they are somehow better. This sometimes happens but it is rarely that clean cut. New technologies are often introduced because they are cheaper to make, demand less skills on the part of the user or create more profit for the manufacturer. Older technologies often run alongside newer technologies because they offer considerable benefits in many circumstances, particularly for the folk that have the skills to use them.

Ewan Clayton made this point very well in his speach at the launch of the Heritage Crafts Association
"As a calligrapher you only have to walk into a bank and you pass stone carved lettering or bronze cast lettering on the outside. You go inside and you see inkpads and stamps being used, fountain pens and ballpoints. You see carbon paper, fax machines, computers, handwriting – it’s all there at the same time."

What brought this all to mind today was a passer by at my workshop this afternoon who asked "is that the old way of doing it?" My answer was, well yes this was how it was done in the past but it is also the way it is done today, it still works well. My workshop is passed by a busy footpath, I thought afterwards that perhaps I should have asked the lady walking by if she was "doing it the old way" as a conscious decision not to drive, or use some other modern transport technology. Some things like walking, using a hammer and nail, carving with a knife or using a hand plane have been with us a long time but still work. In fact walking it seems is more common in the most advanced cities in the world like London, Tokyo and New York since driving is just not practical. There are many reasons to use simple technologies; they are cheap, tend to have a low carbon footprint and be eco friendly, they tend to be safe and offer a sense of fulfillment in the work, the products of hand tools tend to have a different feel which I like "showing how it was done in the old times" whilst valid is fairly low down on my personal list.

how to sharpen woodcarving knives and tools course

Good sharp tools are essential for woodworkers and learning to take a blunt piece of metal and get it to razor sharp is a very empowering experience. There is often a lot of mystery involved but there should not be, sharpening is simple and it all hangs on proper understanding and learning of basic techniques.
In my experience most woodworkers study sharpening just long enough to find a system that works for them and then they stick to it for a lifetime swearing that it is by far the best way. I like to keep an open mind. All sharpening systems are effectively doing the same thing, they are using something abrasive to cut away metal, removing the damaged or worn edge and revealing a new sharp edge underneath.

We will cover all the different options for hand sharpening systems from abrasive paper and old oilstones to diamond and synthetic saphire stones. Most of the work will concentrate on using Japanese waterstones though all the others are available to try. Waterstones are very easy to learn good technique on and the technique is transferable to any other system. We will concentrate on hand sharpening straight carving knives first but also cover axes and curved hook or spoon knives. The techniques once mastered are directly transferable to all other woodworking tools. Bring along any blunt or damaged tools from home and take them home razor sharp.

This will be a one day course on Tuesday 25th October 10am-5pm including lunch and the cost £85
You get to use over £2000 worth of different stones and sharpeners which is a great way of getting a feel for the ones you like before deciding if it is worth spending your own money. You will also learn that it is possible to get a brilliant edge using a system that costs only £10 it is all down to good technique. I have a very good quality microscope and various other magnification aids which help you really understand exactly what is happening at the edge as you are working, I have found this to be the very best teaching aid.

As with all my courses this will be a relaxed and friendly day aimed at folk with no prior knowledge though I am sure than many folk that have been tool sharpening for years would still find something to learn.

Sir Christopher Frayling on Craftsmanship

Sir Christopher Frayling was chair of the Arts Council from 2004-9 but before that stint he was chair of the Crafts Study Centre for over 20 years. He has just published a new book "On Craftsmanship" I have ordered it and await eagerly.

 

This is a speech he gave at the Crafts Study Centre 7 May 2009

"I was at a seminar the other day – at no. 11 Downing Street – on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Work Progress Administration Artists Project, part of the New Deal – of the mid-1930s, and its possible lessons for the arts and arts education in Britain during a deep recession. There were presentations about how far-sighted President Franklin D. Roosevelt had been, and about the resulting public works created by visual artists – craft-works from many traditions, murals, photographic surveys, paintings of social life – at that time. The ensuing discussion focused on the arts as morale-boosters, as statements of confidence, as contributions to national reputations at a time when these reputations had/have been severely dented, as employment and as stimulants of the creative economy. The discussion irritated me, though, because it assumed that the public sector for the arts and arts education in Britain had everything to learn from FDR and the American example when its real significance is that it happened at all in the context of minimal public investment either before and since. Actually, the British system of public funding of the arts/arts education still remains the envy of the world. A ‘mixed economy’ system, rather than all private or all state. We should be less defensive about saying so.

And then, the discussion at the seminar turned to public support for the arts and arts education during a recession – and the general view was that support for them was particularly important in difficult times. For all the reasons the ‘New Deal’ was significant in the mid-1930s, and many more besides – including the relationship between the arts and the creative industries. One or two people talked about leaky garrets and how art thrives on adversity and how the recession will purge the excesses of the art scene: you always get that sort of talk, from people who never get to meet artists. But the consensus was that the arts should be encouraged to move centre stage at this time – and especially the up-and-coming generation of artists. The biggest legacies of the Works Progress Administration Artists Project of the mid-1930s have names such as Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Orson Welles and Walker Evans.

A speech I gave, as Chair of the Crafts Study Centre in June 2004, five years ago, took place in very different economic circumstances. In those days, Design and Technology in schools still involved a strong measure of making – the ‘C’ had only recently been dropped from ‘D’ and ‘T’. There were many books still in print about the importance of the crafts in general education. Craft or applied art courses at undergraduate level – teaching the students recently coming off those programmes in schools – were thriving. The Crafts had become a category of its own within the government’s mapping documents of the creative industries. And their contribution to the economy was in the process of being measured.

This turned into the Crafts Council pioneering survey Making It in the 21st Century – which looked at the life and work of 32,000 makers – and it concluded that craft is a booming industry that was at the time worth over £800 million: up to then, its scale had been based on out-of-date figures dating from the 1980s; now that was put right. And the crafts had definitively joined the lifestyle pages of magazines and newspapers (and sometimes even ‘makeover’ programmes on mid-evening television – for better or worse), and critics had started writing in books and articles about how the crafts – their ‘aesthetic added value’ – had moved beyond traditional forms of tacit knowledge to playing a full part in the wider culture and society. The stand-up comedian Johnny Vegas had said that was much more proud of having a teapot in the V&A than of winning major awards for being a comedian. And Turner prize-winner Grayson Perry was shortly to offer the very challenging thought “I think the art world had more trouble coming to terms with me being a potter than with my choice of frocks … If you call your pot ‘art’ you are being pretentious; but if you call your shark ‘art’ you are being philosophical”.

So, my speech in June 2004 was optimistic. Since then, some things have got worse, some better. ‘Making’ has seriously declined in schools – you can now go from the end of primary school to the beginning of university without experiencing any 3D making at all. The art room, yes. The craft room, no. And yet, as many education specialists have written, the crafts are particularly – maybe uniquely – good at developing ‘the intelligence of feeling’, a fusion of head, hand and heart. Some wonderful courses – especially in the post-1992 universities – have been closed or threatened with closure, most recently Harrow – to make room for more screens, less teaching, less resources, more research – sometimes a euphemism for bad art and craft – and above all more students crammed into the vacated space. The transition from polytechnics to universities, and their rapid expansion, was not very good for the crafts which are difficult to theorise and impossible to mass-produce. I sometimes fantasise about a Victorian-style tableau of a young person standing in front of a fearsome-looking examination board and being asked “And when did you last see your tutor?” And some good ideas for contemporary craft galleries around the country have not come to fruition. I can remember the optimistic discussions about this at the Arts Council, when the lottery still supported big capital projects. And now the golden age of the lottery has gone.

But there’s good news too. Good news that people have at last begun to realise again the importance of making at all levels of education – and reports by educationalists are beginning to reflect this. Good news that there has been some fabulous work exhibited in ‘Collect’ and in exhibitions which emphasise ‘the industry of one’ – the overlap of the crafts and high-end design. Good news that there’s a new seriousness in the air again – rather than always producing knick-knacks for rich people. And above all, there’s been the general realisation that the crafts are about today and tomorrow as well as yesterday.

The first Bauhaus manifesto of 1919, the one with the Feininger woodcut of a cathedral on the cover, began with a clarion-call to artists, architects and designers: “we must all turn to the crafts”. British translations of this manifesto almost invariably translate the phrase as “we must all return to the crafts” – as if Walter Gropius saw the future as lying in the past. Up until the 1960s, when the Crafts Study Centre was first mooted, the word “return” seemed the right one to use of the crafts. Their image, in the public imagination, was one of nostalgia, ruralism and a pre-industrial world. Amongst professional craftspeople, the Arts and Crafts Movement cast a very long shadow indeed.

Now all that has changed. The word “return” has definitively made way for the word “turn”. Crafts are now associated with urban living, interior design, with the shifting borders of art at one end of the spectrum and design at the other, with all colours of the rainbow and with the outer limits of function – to use Alison Britton’s famous phrase. What distinguishes them, makes them highly visible, is the care with which they have been made, the fact that they have been made by one human being for another, the individual ‘take’, the use of materials and the thoughtfulness of their design: design with attitude. They can represent an ethical statement, but they needn’t. And so the things that held the crafts back have largely gone.

There are still debates about the word ‘crafts’ and parallel muddles about where the crafts ‘sit’ exactly – with a proliferation of subdivisions which would make even Polonius dizzy: the crafts, the decorative arts, the applied arts, makers, designer-makers, artist-craftspeople. Closer to design or closer to art? But these are now seen, I think, as a range of possibilities rather than as inhibitors which is how they used to be seen. The crafts are a spectrum, and the more inclusive and varied and versatile the better. It has become more important than ever to draw attention to this, at a time when crafts and materials-based courses in colleges and universities are seen as too heavy on resources and at a time of recession, like that seminar about FDR I mentioned. Actually, there are fascinating and important cross-overs to be explored between the crafts and digital technologies – a way of reuniting the crafts, maybe, with manufacturing and with ‘industries of one’, where they also touch the design world. But it doesn’t always happen that way. When the ‘C’ was dropped from ‘D and T’, something important may have been lost. We’ll see."

20 May 2009

I don't know why but I have never visited the Crafts Study Centre or been very aware of it's work. Edmund De Waal just retired as Chair to be replaced by my friend Glenn Adamson so I must pay a visit.

nice article in Permaculture magazine

Very nice article on heritage crafts in the current issue of Permaculture Magazine by Beth Tilston. Click on the images and hopefully they will appear large enough to read.

How best to teach and learn craft skills

The way craft skills are passed on has changed dramatically over the last 100 years. As with much of education the focus seems to me to have moved from knowledgeable teachers deciding what is good for the students whether they like it or not to the students being customers who get to do what they enjoy most or what is required to tick the boxes of the qualification required to obtain the funding. The reason for the wooden spoon will become clear below.

Those of us who don't rely on public funding are in the lucky position of deciding exactly what and how we want to teach. There are many folk out there that want to experience making beautiful functional things. Since folk are paying out of their own pockets and fitting it into busy lives the main demand is for short courses from a couple of days to maybe 10 days. What should we as craftspeople/teachers try to pass on in that short time? It seems to me there are two options. The first is to accept that this is just a taster, the customer is on a holiday and we are holiday experience providers. We make life easy, help them lots, and make sure they go home with a wonderful end product. Perhaps if they enjoy their holiday and are inspired they will try to take it further and set about acquiring the skills they need, they will also have gained a meaningful insight into the world of craft.

Personally whilst I think the holiday experience is a great thing to do when I started teaching I wanted to do something more empowering and long lasting. I was less interested in what people made on the course and more interested in whether I could pass on the skills in a short time so that they could go away and make beautiful things at home. Friends who teach chairmaking courses tell me that less than 5% of people ever make another chair where I estimate  95% of my spooncarvers carry on at home. When I teach the first day of a course we make nothing but woodchips. The emphasis is entirely about learning skills and when you come to green woodworking with no prior experience you need to spend time learning those skills properly before you can make things efficiently, safely and well. I believe it is really worth while investing this small amount of time in learning basic skills and doing it in a very concentrated way. You can learn these skills over a longer period whilst also making things but if I ask folk to carve a spatula all their focus is on the thing they are making and not on making sure they are mastering the cuts correctly

Anyway back to the spoon. Three weeks ago I taught a foundation spooncarving course. This really is a basic introduction for folk with no prior experience. Today one of the course members sent me the pictures of the spoon above and below. David carved this spoon at home using the skills learned on the course and has been eating his breakfast cereal every morning with it. The thing that excites me about this is that it is a far better spoon than the ones we carve on the course and shows the benefit of concentrating on a foundation of basic skills which can be built on at home.

gorgeous Swedish wooden spoons and a special opportunity

I thought I would share some inspirational pictures of wooden spoons. These are my favourites from the kitchens at the Swedish national folk craft school Saterglantan.

This one (above and below) is by Wille Sundqvist

After picking out my favourites to photograph I found they nearly all had the same makers mark, at a glance it looks like a fish but on closer inspection it is FR and the maker is Fritiof Runhal.

I have admired Fritiof's work for many years, it seems to combine the best of tradition with modern design whilst using the strength of the wood to best effect. I bought on of his spoons at the Saterglantan shop and use it regularly at home. I am delighted that now Fitiof has agreed to come to the UK to teach a spooncarving course in Edale. If you would like to join me in learning from Fritiof then the date of the course will be September 27, 28, 29. All tools and materials will be provided as well as the usual bread and soup lunches and tea and buscuits. This is Fritiof.

 And a couple more examples of recent work.

The course cost will be £245 just a little more than my usual spoon courses to help cover travel costs but for three days with such a talented teacher I hope it will be very good value. Just 8 places available so email asap to confirm a place.

spoon carving course review

A nice review of my foundation spooncarving course in this months Bushcraft Magazine. Paul who did the review has been carving and teaching for some time but still enjoyed it and learned some new things. Hopefully if you click on this image it will enlarge big enough to read.

When I started I wondered whether it was a good idea teaching other teachers, particularly since it took a long time to perfect the teaching methods and techniques that I pass on. I decided the more people who teach carving in a well thought out structured way the better. Paul says he finds some of the bushcraft schools are disapproving of folk running basic introductory 1 day courses for lower prices as he does with spoon carving. Again I feel this is a good way for folk to give something a go and if they want to take it more seriously then there are more comprehensive courses out there. It's a remarkably good magazine considering it is fairly specialist and presumably fairly small circulation, good content and decent editing and design.

Craft Zeitgeist

What is the current zeitgeist or "spirit of the times"?

Every country in the world seems to be in debt and times are hard. But there is some real positivity here too. Whilst the money was flowing everyone wanted new fashionable things, new furniture, white goods, kettle, giant fridge, giant tv, a new kitchen and oh yes granite worksurfaces are fashionable this year. Much of this stuff ended in landfill, when we buy a kettle we expect it to go to landfill within 10 years if not 3, stuff does not last but then how old fashioned a 10 year old kettle looks anyway.

There seems to be a reassessment going on at the moment, people are thinking about purchases and looking for things that will last longer and not date so fast. Some would say traditional craft is not up to date, I would say it has timeless quality, my wooden plates are the same design I made 15 years ago and the same design was popular in every century going back to Tudor times. They came not from some sweatshop in the third world but grew as a tree within 20 miles of my workshop, one day they will decompose back into the earth or perhaps become fuel for a fire, either way not landfill. In the meantime they give pleasure to the folk that use them and I think there is meaning in knowing where they came from and how they were made.

I spent Yesterday in London with HCA vice chair Patricia Lovett and had 4 of the most positive meetings imaginable all about craft.

We started at the House of Lords, a meeting convened for HCA by Lord Cormack with representatives from a range of government agencies, Heritage Lottery Fund, the V&A and others interested in the field of craft. Top outcome from that meeting was a commitment by CCSkills to develop creative apprenticeships for craft and also to help HCA create a framework for a group of 20 apprentices across the country in different traditional crafts as a pilot. We still need to secure funding but those present in the room were confident that it could be done.

Next meeting was a working group of the Prince of Wales charities connected with craft which was brought together by Skills Minister John Hayes to advise on Government Policy. It was a tremendously positive meeting with the BIS officials proposing some really useful actions that will make a significant difference to the craft sector. It will be some time before these can be shared publicly but we believe it will make a real difference.

Next meeting was with Loyd Grossman who is chair of Heritage Alliance, an umbrella body for a wide range of heritage organisations. Thus far most of their members have been from the built and industrial&transport heritage sectors. We are keen to see them expand their coverage to support and promote intangible heritage or crafts, folk music and dance, customs and traditions etc. Loyd was totally in agreement and feels these areas are every bit as much a part of British Heritage as the built environment.

Last meeting was with our friend Mark Henderson of Savile Row Bespoke to discuss how we market craft as high value desirable products in the 21st century. Again lots of really positive thoughts.

We finished the day feeling the time for the crafts has come, we are on the brink of seeing the sort of resurgence that has happened over the last 20 years in the local specialty and organic food sector. Another freind from the Prince's meeting Ewan Clayton mailed afterwards to say he was reminded of the Shakespeare quote 'there is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune'.
The mood of the times is for local handmade quality produce with meaning and a direct link to the maker, a rediscovery of the joy of making and thoughtful living. Craft zeitgeist.