I teach the lads now to make wood products, bowls, plates, chopping boards, mirrors, anything out of timber really, candle holders… clocks, we make clocks… Rodney has made a bowl as well, he loved it… he got on really well with it…
I’ve done loads now; I was never interested in wood turning [before], I’ve been interested in wood working and that all my life, and involved in woodworking all my life, and I’ve been offered the opportunity before to have a go at woodturning in the past, but it was something that didn’t tickle my fancy, but… I think it was actually watching Will turn a bowl one day… that got me quite interested in it…
I found it really therapeutic when I started doing it and then when I started getting the hang of it… You also don’t know what’s going to happen, that’s always the surprise… because what you see on the outside of the blank to start with, isn’t necessarily what’s on the inside… and when it’s spinning you can’t see any of this… it’s a bit like a wheel on a car, when the car’s stationary you can see whether it’s got 2 spokes, 3 spokes or whatever, but when it’s going round, you can’t, you don’t notice it until it’s stopped, and then you get that ooh that’s nice… I wasn’t expecting that…
I like the ones that are spalted wood… they just have like a really, they have a sort of a fungus through the wood… and you get lots of those black lines, black veins through it… there are some in the stall pictures…
It’s just a little wooden bowl… that starts from a blank, well actually it starts off from a plank and then you’ll cut your piece off, and we make the blanks from the planks… You can tell if you’re getting a clean cut to it by the sound it makes… It’s quite magical, I’ve heard somebody else say that before, because it can go from that, just a plain old bit of wood from a tree to that… the end product definitely, well it always puts a smile on my face… Woodturning is definitely a craft… I think it’s definitely a craft because from that blank you could make whatever you want really…
A window into LandWorks 