Woodfest 2013 – What a Wonderful World

I so enjoy my visits to Woodfest each year. As a crafting artisan I know how much it takes to live an alternative lifestyle and supporting my fellow artisans in any way I can is important to me. These are not wannabe’s but people who chiose to get off the conveyor belt and LIVE an alternative lifestyle and pay the price. I talked with my friend Niel and he and his family chilled out for half an hour discussing the things worth sacrificing for. Low or no credit, low mortgage, small simple home, working with your hands, working at hat you love, being with those you love, caring for the little ones and helping them in the early stages of life. Niel Taylor made a decision to be a chair maker in 1998. He’s done it since then and that must have been so against the corporate flow. The Taylors have two boys and we talked about how you train your children to grow into a way of life working with your hands. I spent two decades with my own boys doing just that and now they are all full grown men they think for themselves in ungoverned ways others only dream of. Very freeing. I love what Neil has done yet I know not many feel that they could do what he has done. He is successful and it has nothing to do with working for a living but living for your vocational way of life. I wish his customers could see how badly IKEA and the big box stores fall short. How much they damage society and small businesses that produce stools and chairs like Neil’s that will last for a hundred years and more. Buying a chair from Neil taylor is to support a way of life and a craft that goes beyond economics. Our governments contribute so little to this work and make poor judgements in exporting work to Asian climes to exploit the lowly and we lose our young to stupid smart phones to put more money on the coffers of big businesses. Here are a couple of Neil’s chairs. they are not turned but shaped with a goosewing axe hand wrought on an anvil by another artisan: a blacksmith, a young blacksmith that knows his craft and feels his calling to an ancient vocation.

Spoon making with an axe and a knife is fascinating to see and that’s what was happening at Woodfest. It was fun seeing the children on Dragon benches and watching the woodturning. Children are very much out of the woodworking scene these days because of the mass-manufacturing methods woodworkers use, but here at the show it was great to see them and watch them working with draw knives and such. Axes are a different thing, but the could see clogs, beautiful clogs being made from what looked just like firewood. Phils is another lifestyle woodworker (or should I say clogmaker) from my home town Stockport.  I just sat and chatted with my friends here at the show. The sun was warm not hot and the horses that formed so much of my life stood waiting to work logs. Mike Pritchard and his wife Kelly brought a pair of draft horses to show how they work the logs from woodlands. Mike made a decision almost two decades ago that what he had been doing was damaging the woodlands so he bought working horses, trained them and began logging as a way of life. Tell me that wasn’t a tough decision. But he and his wife work as a team to make the lifestyle work for them. Just as i discovered that the real power of woodworking was hand work, they discovered that horse logging was true power too – horse power.

Across the way was a young man working a kite, a small bird of prey used for hunting. I loved to see the birds being worked. As a lad I watched men working hawks in the countryside around Cheadle. I sat for hours on a Sunday morning in the hedgerows surrounding the fields. Those were days when simplicity and sanity embraced in kindness.