Ross arrived this week to help in the workshop, valiantly tackling the sanding of the staircase bannister while Charlie and I fitted the posts and labeled everything ready to be dismantled and transported to London.
You can keep your satellite-guided combine harvesters and robotic milking parlours, according to “1001 Inventions that changed the world” edited by Jack Challoner “The scythe is often ranked among the world’s most significant advances in agricultural implements of the past thousand years.” It allowed workers to stand up, gain a power advantage through leverage and increase daily production from only 0.75 acre to over an acre. Even more than that, by the late 13th century the addition of a cradle doubled grain harvesting productivity and retained it’s position until the arrival of the mechanical reaper in the 1830’s.
Work is progressing well with the steambent oak bannister. We fired up the steamers just before I went away to Austria and got two-thirds of the wood in place on the former then Charlie finished the bending while I was away.
For this particular job, we’ve developed a new form of bending compression strap which has made the work a lot easier.
Six pieces of oak are loaded into the steamer at a time which is kept running all day. The steamer features a faceplate with slots for the wood. These keep the boards spaced apart so the steam can circulate and also minimise the amount of steam lost when the door is opened. Many of the pieces were bent in two parts, first around a tight floor mounted former and then free bent around the former. Working like this requires a good team who can see what’s happening, communicate and work together well. The wood is cooling all the time so there is a time factor but it’s important to stay calm and work carefully so as to achieve the right shape and not break wood.
The base of the bannister features four pieces bent in an ‘S’ curve. Since both faces of the timber will now be on the outside of a curve this is a technically more challenging shape. These curves were achieved by steaming first in the steambox for the initial curve and then through use of a steambag, a sleeve of material which covers the area of the second bend and inflated with steam.
Now comes the less exciting process of sanding everything and carving posts to facilitate fixing of the new banister to the existing supports. We’re due to go to London next week for the installation so it’s a busy time; still lots to do.
I’m just back from my week visiting Christiane in Austria. She lives in a small town in one of the national parks, a beautiful place ringed by majestic snow-capped mountains. As a woodworker, I’m always looking around me at trees and timber which in Austria make a wonderful sight. Almost all the houses are heated by a large tiled woodburner, no village is complete without a firewood merchant and everywhere are neatly stacked lengths of split hardwood. Equally impressive are the sawmills; on my first visit I could hardly believe the size of the timber yards with piles of logs 30ft or more high which took 10, 15 or even 20 seconds to pass by on the train.
All this comes from the well-managed forests, some of which we walked through during my stay. Beech, ash, birch and spruce dominate, all gun barrel straight and enough to make this green wood worker drool: cast your eye to any stand or firewood pile and there’s beautiful material for chairs, bowl carving, rakes, polelathe turning and anything else you can name.
Some of the reason for this is obviously the excellent management of this valuable resource but some is also probably in the numbers; the UK is two and a half times more densely populated than Austria which has a whopping 47% compared with the UK’s 12%.
Wonderful as it all sounds, I did feel there was something a little too managed and orderly about the woodland I saw – there was very little diversity of age or species in the stands and hardly any layer structure with smaller, scrub-like cover under the standards or ground flora. In short, not as messy as woodland in the UK; a reflection of our national characters?
As well as being relaxing, folding the small units for origami kusudama is addictive and it’s taken no time at all to fold these 120 pieces for the ‘epcot ball’. There’s still 15 to do but plenty of time when each one now takes just 90 secs.
Walter Lloyd is a well-known figure in the South Lakes. A bow-top caravan builder, charcoal burner, fell-pony breeder and honorary chairman of the Coppice Association (NW), he can often be found demonstrating hay or straw rope making at shows around the county and entertaining folk with his tales. A couple of weeks ago I was asking him if there would be any suitable rods in his willow beds for making rake handles (‘stails’). During the conversation I realised that the cutting had gotten a bit overgrown and Walter could use a hand with this year’s harvest. So this weekend, on a beautiful day that felt like spring was truly here, a dozen folk made up of coppice workers, basket makers, woodworkers and others met at Walter’s place near Newby Bridge to work together.
We concentrated our efforts on the most overgrown section which will mostly end up fueling Walter’s bow top woodburner but also yielded yurt poles, rods for riverbank spiling work, some basket materials, willow setts for planting and my raw stails.
It was a daunting sight when we first arrived but, as always, with plenty of hands good weather and a steady supply of tea the work was done and became a pleasure. Even more, this was a chance to meet up with friends, make new contacts and help out a neighbour.
As you’ll see if you visit the courses page of Scytherspace, Steve Tomlin and I are now taking bookings for a series of teaching courses this year, in south and east Cumbria. We’ll both be teaching some beginners’ mowing courses, and Steve will also be running peening and snath-making courses. We can promise attendees a fun, practical immersion into the world of mowing, in beautiful surroundings. We can even sell you a scythe kit. Please form an orderly queue …
There are other events to look forward to in the northwest of England too. The second Cumbrian Scything and Rural Crafts Festival will take place on the weekend of 2nd/3rd July, at the Cylinders Estate in Langdale. Last year’s debut festival was a real success, despite the persistent rain. Perhaps the highlight was an impromptu demonstration of how to really use an English scythe, from Cumbrian farmer Jim Capstick. We hope for better weather this year, and we’re looking forward to a weekend of teaching, demonstrations, rural crafts, music and good conversation. There’ll be more on this on this site when we have it.
We’re also hearing rumours of an urban scything event, to be held in Liverpool this summer. We’ll keep you posted. Happy mowing.
Yesterday I was planting oaks on a farm just north of Kendal and today Charlie Whinney & I were working with mature oaks making some new signage for the Halecat garden nursery which opens soon.
To give a strong, organic look we’re cleaving all the posts and boards from oak harvested off the estate. It’s ages since I did some big cleaving with wedges. It’s such a primal thing to bust open a big lump of wood with the simplest tools, hearing the creaks and pops of the fibres as they open up under the pressure until the whole thing falls in two revealing all the beauty of the timber that’s been hidden inside.
Since November, I’ve been enjoying folding paper. Though predominantly a woodworker, I’m interested in all sorts of crafts and making with different materials so when I was choosing a name for this site I deliberately left it open to include other things.
With the exception of a couple of single-sheet patterns, the origami I like is modular origami; building up models from small folded units which fit together, usually to make a ball. In Japan these are called kusudama and were originally used for incense.
Most of the kusudama I’ve made so far consist of 30 units joined in a pattern of hexagons and triangles to form a dodecahedron (12-sided shape). You can see the hexagons and triangles in this model, “electra” which was designed by UK folder David Mitchell.
Each unit is usually very simple to fold and takes only a minute or so. After the first couple or three I can remember the folds and my hands take over semi-automatically. I find it a very relaxing way to take a break, slowing down from whatever I’m doing to fold a few origami units. With a familiar pattern I don’t need to concentrate on what I’m doing but I’m conscious to make the folds neat and the final shape crisp. It’s a form of meditation in a way. I find seeing the pile of completed units grow to be really satisfying and love the patterns made by the repeated form on the table.
With spooncarving I’ll often work on a batch of one kind of spoon, roughing them all out then working through the pile with the straight and then hook knife to complete the first carving stage. A few days later, when they’ve had chance to dry a little I’ll go through them for the finish carving. As with origami, the pattern becomes familiar, my hands learn what they need to do and the whole process flows. Cuts become more confident but at the same time more relaxed and the forms that appear have an easy, natural character.
My girlfriend, who I got started with a few kusudama has now surpassed me with the breadth of the models she’s created and her artful choice of coloured papers. I’m going to visit her in a couple of weeks and I’ve agreed to make half the units for a new model – an ‘epcot ball’ with 270 units.
While I’ve been working on the staircase former, Charlie Whinney has been in Washington installing the sculpture we steam bent back in October.
When I first saw this photo I was amazed by how small the sculpture looks. From filling the workshop and looking huge, it now hangs from the lobby ceiling as delicate looping threads of ash.
I can only wonder at the size of the hotel.
