Drawing, like many things, writing, craft work, woodworking, if you want to do it well, starts out as an interesting notion and then develops into a discipline. You can enter the portals of institutions and learn there or you can find some other way. All will be equally good. I draw for myself and mostly […]
Hannah and I used up some scrap leather and scrap 3/4″ plywood to make a half a dozen strops. I usually make them in small quantities and toss the ones that get gouged up straightaway because once gouged there’s a tendency for them to worsen quite quickly. These are my favourite size of 3″ by […]
…I do get a little flack from time to time. Why I do this or do that, say this or say that and so on. Some of it I wittingly or unwittingly bring on myself. Fitting out my garage workspace has brought some of that but never on purpose and it made me realise that […]
We recently filmed the making of the workbench drawer as a follow up to the workbench build for YouTube (not out yet). It doesn’t take too long to make a drawer but filming makes the wholly simple process much more complicated and it takes longer because of a variety of things. The thing is that […]
I am always surprised how many people I meet have high expectations in their being able to achieve high standards when it comes to more manual types of work yet without ever really having been exposed too much to such labours. I suppose there’s a thinking that if you are intelligent there is an automatic […]
…It’s On its Way (the YT Video) and You Shouldn’t Live and Work Without One! For a few weeks there I had to do that very thing with my new workbench. And I must say it was a strain for me because I have relied on one in all of my workbenches for decades now. […]
The workshop rang with loud singing, singing full-voiced, deep. The men sang all day, old songs I learned along the way as we planed and sawed, quick wristed, smooth actions in time with the notes of songs. I tried singing low and I did, a bit, now and then, high, high, a break, then low, […]
I was surprised by my surprise to the response to the blog post All In a Day’s Recovery. It was in some ways touching and then somewhat saddening too. After seeing the response, since I wrote the draft below, I was further surprised that so many had different points of view. It made me realise […]
Many things affect our ability to work wood. As a kid of 13 my experiences were mixed. I learned first that woodworking planes like the #4 Stanley or Record didn’t work; that they didn’t smooth wood but hacked it. I learned that thick, black, heavy pencil lines made the contrast far greater than a thin […]
Taking Control Saturday is the beginning of the weekend for most, at least in our western culture it is. It’s a two-day culmination after a week’s worth of work and it’s the restoration period allocated for the body and mind for recovery work that requires no input from us. Just as sleep concludes the end […]
