The workshop is quiet without John. The dust from the bandsaw work and sanding settled on everything overnight, so I vacuumed everything before I disturbed it. You don’t have to live with dust if you vacuum as necessary at the start instead of the end of a day. I like this to be done before…
I walked in the woods at Penrhyn Castle to look for some turning wood. I have some Christmas presents to make and I also need some tool handles for some chisels I have. Laurel works well for some of this and we have been culling out the laurel for a few months. …
We take skill, tools and craft work by artisans past for granted here in Britain. A car boot sale is a mixture between the American garage or yard sale and a flea market. They can be in a farmer’s field or in a building like this one shown here. Wherever the venue, they range in…
Some times I simply want to declare that my day went great today even though so many things tug at my time. I am not sure who the first person was that said “I had a great day.”, but somehow it seems, well, flat. Going into my workshop doesn’t so much excite me but, more,…
The eye scans, the mind plans and the hand grasps the wood and then the sharpened tool and cuts away the waste from the wanted leaving the new formed from the wildness once growing, now halted. The eye scans and with the mind plans each step I take to make from wood with steel and…
The unique symbiosis between the wood and the craftsman has been sadly diminished over the previous centuries, to the point that the connection between the two has very much been lost. The significance parallels that of the megalithic grocery supermarkets providing everything we need and the simplicity of growing your food in the garden, having…
Harvesting mesquite logs My arms lift the dead stumps over my head to the truck bed of my old Dodge and my chainsaw lies throbbing at the base of a mesquite. I wander away a little distance to see the tree I have been searching for for weeks. It’s straight up, one stem, two feet…
I didn’t get as far as I thought I would today, but I did have a good day. I don’t think that I have seen such forceful winds before today, (winds recorded of 169 miles per hour) but they don’t make much difference to the three-foot thick stone walls of Penrhyn Castle. I totally finished…
Our Winter 2011 Newsletter is available by email or by regular mail. If you want to keep up with the school, its future goals and ambitions please let us know. The newsletter is a little more private for those who want the additional teaching beyond the Paul sellers blog and videos. You can sign up…
Here is the dovetailed box I did on YouTube; to show how to apply shellac with a brush. I am using an artist’s 1″ Hake brush, which I use for most of my finishing. For a more detailed article on shellac see my earlier blog from April 2011. I think that we have been deceived…