I’m still grateful for the workshop I work in: it’s the one I close the door on at night and then open at first light. I reach inside for the light switch and light floods what was left the night before. There’s always the certainty of gratitude that so too floods my mind for the…

I don’t follow but two others online. One is a cafe I haven’t been able to go back to because I no longer live near to it and the other is a support for those with a disability. But I clicked on an Instagram account of someone following me and saw something I had not…

I have called myself a lifestyle woodworker for a decade on a public level but two when I include talking of it in more isolated pockets as in my woodworking classes and courses. In reality, though, I have practised it for much longer than that it’s just that the term lifestyle really didn’t exist before…

. . . that the work is always easy for me as Paul Sellers. It’s not, not at all. The flow seems fine in the reviews I check before videos go out, but getting there takes structure through planning, micro- and macro-adjustment, attitude changes and other such things too many to list. In the making…

It looks excessive and might be for some but it’s not in the life of a productive maker. Woodworking with hand tools in the life of a productive worker must be strategised throughout. Strategic planing soon becomes a way of life when you are a full-time maker but anyone can adopt the practice to make…

I looked for a second Stanley 60 1/2 block plane of the old style but didn’t want to pay the price they were going for. In the end, I bought two, a secondhand one for £39 and then a new one for £50. The new one was so very disappointing and I’ll go through the…

I go into Oxford on the bus each week to choir practice for a two-hour session. I am a novice chorister in an Oxford-based choir made up of like-minded people who volunteer into the event where everyone sings their hearts out to make sound happen for others. You’ll see where I am coming from in…

I am hoping that most of you have made the upgrade to the Paul Sellers’ Router Plane because once you have made your own from the kit and used it just once you will most likely never go back to an all-metal version. The router plane kit comes with a Sheffield-made, 3/8″ (10mm) ready-hardened tool…

Slopes have purpose and meanings we might pass by and take no stock of in our passing but to designers, they are as highly relevant as arches to openings for doors and windows, to tables, chairs and a mass of other furniture pieces. Whereas the core reason in both arching and sloping is not for…

Planing wood along its long axis, from the bottom to the top of the tree, is generally straightforward enough; wood grain dips and dives in places, but most of the time a simple flip around of the plane to the opposite direction cures the recalcitrant and tames the fibres with a skew here and a…