You may not know this, but there is phenomenon in London you don’t see in capital cities around the world. It surrounds a unique tree that thrives in inner cities called the plane tree. Here in London the trees shown here have been ‘docked’, pollarded if you will. They are not there to provide shade…
I’m back in North Wales with blue skies, a few puffy wisps of cloud and the same essence of inner contentment I get when I’m on the verge of finishing a new piece of furniture or carving a spoon or building a shed or something like that. I demonstrated to several hundred fellow enthusiasts all…
I hope that by now you can string these posts together and discover that your workspace has critical elements that go beyond the sterile kitcheny look depicted in most magazines and videos. I’ve made it clear that orderliness is important and having a place for everything means it and you have a sense of belonging….
We made it in five hours, hit London and, as always for London, started running ahead of myself to try to catch the pace. We had a safe passage all the way from the beautiful Snowdonia mountains to the epicentre of woodworking commerce and had no problems with traffic hardly at all. Unloading at Alexandra…
I’m looking forward to the Alexandra Palace Get Woodworking Live Show even though I have been to too many woodworking shows to count. I usually find something new to pique my interest and raise my bemusement levels, but generally what’s usually offered as new is a change in the color of the plastic handles and…
I think of my workspace as a creative place in which I spend a great deal of if not all of my time. It’s not comfort I in any way crave so much as a place to create, which to my mind is seldom comfortable. Design and developing designs from two-dimensional images to three-dimensional reality…
John worked last week helping to prepare for the woodworking show. Much to do still, but we’ve made much progress and we are about ready to load up the gear. Though we work hard, apprenticing is not at all about physical work only. So many aspects of woodworking and training have fallen by the wayside…
My workspace is different than my workplace. It’s where I occupy and work, that’s true, but my workspace is the environment where my tools and bench and tool cupboards and tool chests rest. My life revolves around this space and I live a great deal of my life immersed in it. You see, it isn’t so much…
Just to show my point on the different standards between two planes. The image right is the Stanley Sweetheart plane handle. The hard, unresolved line that leaves a flat face connectingto the ill-sized radius reflects an ethic that came as a result of mass manufactured equipment needed to supply WW II. Remember the contrast of…
I’ve never been in two workshops that are the same. The reason partly is that we all have different preferences and different ways of working. Mine is different in some ways and yet harkens back to a more traditional past: Why? Because I’m more a traditional hand toolist rather than a machinist. Most machine-only woodworkers…
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