Leela's rake

Last October I met Miss Kathloon Peart from Bishop Auckland who told me how she’d received her first hayrake when only 3 years old and had been making hay on her farm for the 50-something years since then. So I was thrilled when my friends Paul & Nav commissioned me to make a hayrake for their daughter Leela, also aged 3.
Leela’s rake is a split-stail style, made in exactly the same way as my other rakes from cleft ash, simply scaled down to her size. Yesterday we were all at Haybridge Nature Reserve in Cumbria, mowing the orchard. Leela took delivery of the rake and did her first work with it. As Paul is a keen scyther and the whole family are looking to find a smallholding, this will surely not be the last hay Leela makes and, hopefully, she’ll still be working this way when she’s Miss Peart’s age.