How do you get inspiration? For Edward Hopkins it comes from looking about him: furniture in his local café gave him the idea of a table he and his daughter could make together. For cover star Marc Fish it is seen all around him and translates into gorgeous shapes that may or may not be made of wood. For Bernard Greatrix inspiration was dictated by shape and space available. Regarding the Wood Awards, we’ll fully understand if…
Years ago, when I was on the antiques, I was helping a dealer to load a large break-front bookcase into a Luton van when he happened to remark – between breathless gasps – that if he ever had his time again, he’d be a dealer in watches and jewellery. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘just put the stuff in your pocket. The most you’d have to carry around would be…
It’s all too easy to forget that it all happens with wonderful live trees, so this issue gets to the, er, roots of our obsession – in an entirely good way – with timber, from its felling to ingenious ways of using it. We meet David Vickers who runs a training school that aims to qualify students in safe chainsaw practice among other objectives, and we feature the wooden bicycles made by a Dutch company. A…
There’s nothing like a spot of travel to liven things up a bit, both while you’re there and for the following days as well. New sights, places and people are almost always guaranteed to stimulate the imagination and to give the hungry woodworker an idea or two. During a couple of days in Bath (as opposed to the bath) recently, I started to feel as though I’d achieved one of my historical fantasies and…
… to our Kitchen Special. We’ve got Andy King meeting a man whose business is designing and making bespoke kitchens, and, if that has whetted your appetite, showing you how to cut the hole for a Belfast sink, place Hot Rods and make draining board grooves using Trend jigs. He also awards the coveted five stars to Bosch’s new jigsaw, so you’ll be all right cutting out your sink apertures.
There’s something about working with wood which seems to be universally attractive to the average human being. It’s not just the beauty of the material itself; it’s something more than that. Is it the ease (!) with which a person can put their own stamp on a simple artefact they’ve made? Or maybe it’s the opportunity it provides us with to exercise our technical skills in a clear and potentially…
Hugh Croft is as happy as a man can be, living in the country and making furniture for a living. His workshop is hardly the last word in comfort and yet he is utterly content. Edward Hopkins discovers his philosophy. Meanwhile I squeeze myself into a workshop no bigger than a double garage and find out how father and son carvers, the fifth generation to earn their crust from the craft, are adapting to changing styles. While…
Intellectual copyright is a shadowy area but one to which we should pay lip service. I was preparing recipes for publication on the website of my local community garden when I realised that one or two were acknowledged as being from published cookery books. It is likely that these publishers would welcome the publicity but I couldn’t face the palaver of getting permissions so omitted them. The point to this, however,…
It used to be that this time of year was pretty quiet when it came to work. Most customers – and a lot of other tradies – were on holiday, and the suggested indolence suited the siesta-inducing weather. Not any more. With signs that the world is waking up to the fragility of life and the limitless potential that some of us have before us, a spirit of making full use of every second of the day seems to have taken…
Why do we bother? I mean, look at the picture and see how graduate Hannah Knowles has dispensed with all that stuff woodworkers take a lifetime to learn – butt joints through to the complexity of secret dovetails – by nipping next door to the plumbers’ workshop; not for her the cheats of dowels and biscuits, but straightforward copper fittings for her Apto shoe rack. Seriously though, while I was knocked out by this…
The Woodworker this month has a wide variety of useful, informative and down right interesting articles within its pages, and I strongly advise you not to miss it!
With Building Crafts College, London, course leader Colin Eden-Eadon out of action for most of their final year his furniture-making students could have panicked, but, backed all the way by tutors Rod Wales and Tom Kealy whom Colin describes as the lynchpins, the 15 students worked as a team, supporting each other with the result that not only have some very special pieces been produced but the graduates have a good idea of…
They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and it’s true that need and want generally do drive the creative process, in woodwork as in everything else. So when it comes to choosing the next project to undertake, I think that the choices are very simple.
What has wobbling around on a bike around a slalom course in an old aircraft hangar at Berlin’s iconic Templehof building got to do with woodwork you might well ask. Well, the cycle was powered by a very special Bosch battery. In years to come, when resting your power tool on an induction plate is the norm, you will probably be telling your grandchildren about the olden days when you had to have two heavy batteries as each had to be…
