sutton046

We seem to be motoring rapidly into 2016 already, so I don't want to miss this opportunity to reflect on the 2015 year. As I write this, I am away on holidays, 200 miles from home. So amid the canoeing and other summer activities with grand kids and other family members, I have grabbed a few rare quiet moments to write this post. The dilemmas of Social Media and the time it consumes. There have been many less posts this past year on this blog than previous years. I lay the blame squarely at my own feet for putting time and energy into posting on both  Instagram and the Joy of Wood's Facebook page. With limited computer time, getting involved with both of these platforms has reduced the time available for the blog. However I have found that the FB page has become a useful local communication tool and Instagram has become a great source of inspiration - seeing what others around the world are creating with wood. The other great source of...

The October / November 2015 public Workshops have been arranged! Here is some info about the first few:  Tuesday 20th October Carve a Wooden Spoon from seasoned wood. Using seasoned wood, usually rescued from the waste stream, we will transform these pieces of wood into beautiful functional and/or decorative spoons. We will use mallets and gouges, scrapers and saws, then spokeshaves and rasps in this wonderfully creative process. By the end of the three hour workshop, we aim to each have a completed and oiled spoon. It's a heap of fun, it's tactile and sensual. What a delight! Make a Spoon Carving Scraper from an old saw blade. Curved scrapers are just the thing for cleaning out the bowls of spoons after we have carved the shape with a gouge and mallet. The steel in the sawplate of old saws is beaut for making your own scrapers - so long as the sawplate is not too pitted with rust. We make them with different radii, and straight sides. The straight sides mean the scrapers can ...

Apologies to the regular readers for the lack of posts over the last couple of months. So much to write about, and so little time to bash away at the keyboard! Over the last few months, I have been gradually setting up a dedicated teaching space. Located in Canning Vale,  this space is being set up for teaching hand tool woodworking. For years I have been lugging tonnes of gear around, hiring various venues, often only for a day or two, in order to run public workshops across a wide range of woodworking skills and projects. A huge amount of energy and time has been expended to deliver each workshop series. My home has been so full of tools, wood and too much gear! Imagine the idea of having a place set up for teaching, to remove the need to shift so much stuff back and forth and in and out of my ute and trailer each time. Imagine the possibility of running evening workshops, day time workshops, after school workshops, and one-on-one tuition whenever I choose!...

There is a growing interest in Green Woodworking across Australia. This has been unfolding for some years in the USA and the UK, but down here in the Antipodes we always seem to catch on a few years behind our cousins in the Northern Hemisphere. (Except in the uptake of new technologies, where Australia funnily enough has one of the fastest uptakes). However, we are talking here about the uptake of ancient technologies... I went on my Green Woodworking Odyssey to the USA in 2013, and since then have been sharing the joys of Green Woodworking with many people here in Perth, Western Australia. It is a different smorgasbord of timbers here to that traditionally used in Europe and North America. ' Riving a piece of Black Birch into section for spoon carving, at Drew Langsners,  NC, USA. My focus has been on using timbers obtained from Perths "Urban Forest",'the trees growing in suburban backyards, parks and gardens. The cover of these trees continues to diminish in the gu...