A stitch in time!

Published by Les on

Our local customers may well have noticed that the shop is closed this month, due to reopen on 1st February, but that doesn’t mean to say that we’ve got our feet up. We suspended training sessions for the whole of December, so there’s quite a backlog of students calling for a day’s tuition, which is taking up three days each week.

Extra to all that, I’m in the process of writing a new article for “Woodturning” magazine, with a deadline looming for the end of this week. I can’t say much about what I’ll be writing about, but it’s connected to a bowl that I made two years back for a family from Cheshire, using a lovely, but badly cracked piece of cherry from their garden.

We spent a day driving over to Cheshire to meet the family once again, so I took the opportunity of getting a few new photographs of the original bowl. It was my first major piece following the Japanese principles of Kintsugi, which literally means “golden repair”, and of Wabi Sabi, which involves the use of imperfect materials. Well, I couldn’t afford gold, but leather and copper had to do. the result was very natural and organic, so I photographed the bowl in what I thought was a good location, hanging in a tree in their garden. There was a cherry tree, but it had a high canopy and was unsuited, to we settled for a medlar tree instead.

Meanwhile, a set of bowls is under way in the workshop, fitting them in between days of training and today was a photography day, getting images of the various processes involved in making and decorating them.

Good light is absolutely essential at times like this and despite the fact that there’s a good-sized window next to the lathe, artificial lighting has to be used to ensure the same colour and strength of light each time that I set up, so the workshop briefly takes on the air of a studio.

I’ve long since learned my lesson about dust when I’m photographing my work, so now that we have a new camera, it always goes into a clear plastic bag, and there it stays for as long as it’s in use. I’ve also bought a new tripod, but that’s not quite ready for use yet, so the old one will have to do for now.


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