Although I make as part of my living it is still also my favourite hobby and now and then it’s lovely to work with a new material and make something just for the pleasure of it. This weekend I got out some of the birch bark that I collected on a North West Coppice Association day in the spring. It’s thin, delicate stuff to work with and needed a fair bit of preparation to clean and smooth out the surface. I followed a traditional pattern, cutting notches into each end of a strip of bark which is then curled round and interlocked. A second piece of bark is glued inside to add strength and so the inside and outside of the pot can have the smooth inner bark showing though I decided I wanted the outer bark on the inside for texture. While the glue sets I used carved blocks and wedges to press the layers together. A handy hazel stick was cleft and shaved to make the base and lid. I carved the lid with a taper so it is a snug push fit and the pot makes a satisfying subtle ‘pop’ when opened. The handle is another piece of hazel with a round tenon carved onto it which passes through the lid and is fixed with a tiny peg inside.
It seemed to occupy a lot of the weekend though I wasn’t working on it solidly and it was very pleasing and satisfying to do. I’m very pleased with the result and will definitely make some others.
I started with practising axing with the left hand which was a brilliant experience. I kept swapping the axe back and forth to feel the action in my dominant hand and try to copy it in the other. The key is to relax and be confident at which point I started to feel comfortable with it and quickly got the accuracy to start axing spoon blanks with both hands. After that I worked on some simple knife cuts and straight away saw the benefits. It was also really fascinating to have to ‘learn’ to carve again, examining the way my hands normally work together and transpose this across to the other side. It’s a brilliant exercise for anyone thinking of starting to teach spooncarving. You also see how the ‘non-dominant’ hand is doing just as skilled work in holding and manipulating the spoon while adding support to the cut.
Last week I spent 3 days in Edale as a student on a spooncarving course organised by 
I got back last night from the second round of filming the mowing scenes for Anna Karenina by Tolstoy. While we were away somebody told us about that the filming had made the papers because of extras being supposedly underpaid. Read the article in the Independent 
My skin-on-frame recovery kayak attracted a fair bit of attention as soon as I drove into the campsite at Ullswater with it on the roof of the car. I was suprised how many people remembered and recognised it from 2 years earlier when it was unskinned.
It did feel very exciting to carry the kayak down to the water knowing that this was the real moment of truth and I would find out whether it would actually work. Once I’d managed to get inside, using the paddle to balance I was grateful that Dave and Richard were there to stabilise things. The recovery kayak is designed for surf and manoeuvrability so it feels unstable for a complete novice like me but once I’d got back out Richard took over to show how it’s done and it was brilliant to see it properly in action.
Another great group of folk made for a fun and interesting day for this year’s scythe peening course. I was especially pleased that Jim and Chris came up from Cambridge and Hampshire respectively for the course.
look at getting the setup right and choosing tools, particularly this year with respect to peening hammers which I’ve been exploring during the summer. Most people were familiar with the jig but had struggled with this turning up the edge of the blade. It’s a common problem which is easy to solve so we were able to speed through that and get on to the real fun and intrigue of freehand peening with the anvil. In a beginner’s mowing course there isn’t enough time to teach all the ins and outs of peening (it’s a lot to fit into one day on it’s own) and there’s really only so much you can get from reading a book or even watching a video. There were several ‘eureka’ moments 
during the day when I explained something that suddenly clicked the pieces into place such as the benefits of a cut-down hammer and getting the lighting right. I was learning too, techniques for corrective treatment for curled-over edges and coping with scythe blade edges which had become very thick through years of not peening. We made great progress through the day and everyone’s technique improved a huge amount, ready to go away and put in the practice with the foundation of the techniques and knowledge.
We finished the day with some sharpening with whetstones. Once your peening is good this isn’t necessary but if you can still see light reflecting up off the scythe edge then it’s not sharp and some work with the whetstone is needed. That’s especially true with the jig but often forgotten or not mentioned when people demonstrate it’s use.
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