It would be easy to think, looking at a calm and refined piece of furniture, that the experience of making it is equally calm and refined – a relaxed and measured series of steps that takes you from timber to table. Oh how wrong! What you see is the serene swimming swan, while under the surface……. Continue reading →

If you’ve been reading the recent posts you’ll know that I’ve been thinking about the relationship between woodworking and ceramics, both from the practical point of view – thinking about how they complement one another and how to combine them, and from the point of view of process – wondering what is the equivalent in wood of the chance events that happen in a kiln and give the pot its vitality. Continue reading →

Paul Bradley – the maker of the pot in the previous post  - pointed me at the work of Edmund de Waal.  It’s interesting what he is saying in this video about his Japanese influences and you can see clearly how he is now very much working with ceramics in context.  No wood in sight, just painted MDF, but I can see the potential. Continue reading →

I think there’s a great affinity between ceramics and wood. I treated myself after a recent commission to this beautiful piece by local potter, Paul Bradley.  It’s very refined and yet has a natural coarseness to the surface and obviously a seed-like inspiration to the form; a combination of the natural and refined that I aspire to in my own work. Continue reading →

With all the wonderful bird song beginning again now and Spring feeling as if it must burst out soon, I have been thinking about birdsong as an inspiration for furniture.  In my past life I worked a lot with birdsong – made lots of programmes about it from it’s biology to its beauty.  So to incorporate it in my furniture would have a lovely continuity.
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I was at the Cheltenham Museum the other day – where they have the collection of Arts and Crafts furniture made here in the Cotswolds about 100 years ago.  These makers were shunning the new mass production and promoting the idea of craftsman-made pieces.  But the way the pieces had deteriorated over the last century  made me wonder about their craftsmanship. Continue reading →

Just finishing a particularly large dining table – a 14 seater in ripple sycamore – and then I’ll get this blog going.  For now, there are a few posts below from its predecessor that might be of interest.  Grant

Can a piece of furniture be a sketch? Or more specifically, can it have the immediacy and energy of a sketch? That’s what’s been on my mind. Sometimes I get frustrated by the precision of “fine furniture”… it seems so accurate and so flat. Where’s the life in it? I want to shout at it. To shake it. to get some reaction… not just perfect precision. We makers go on about how we are working with a living material, and yet often we turn out inert furniture.

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Having been in love with wooden spokeshaves, but found them a bit on the high maintenance side, I’ve just sold out and bought a veritas low angle metal spokeshave……It’s wonderful! Continue reading →

At last I have found an insurance broker who seems to understand the needs of a small furniture workshop making handmade fine furniture, and who doesn’t think that we spend our whole life dropping cigarette butts onto piles of wood shavings left carelessly under part finished dining suites! I would thoroughly recommend them to anyone with a similar business to my own Continue reading →