All the latest news from Guy Mallinson’s Woodland Workshop Breaks…
Newly Available Course Dates
We have had a few guests who have had to move their bookings to later in the year. This means that at the time of writing we have one new place available on the May 10th-11th Bowl Carving Course and two new places on the April 23rd-27th ‘Make A Chair From A Tree’ course.
Call – 01460 221 102 – if either of these dates suit before they get snapped up again!
There are a few places still available on the other courses later in the year but do please act now as once they are full they are full.
We will be doing some more filming here this year (more details as and when), and I’m also going to be doing some teaching for the Architectural Association at Hooke Park, so it is unlikely that we will be releasing any additional course dates over and above the ones already advertised. It really is a case of ‘book now for 2012’.
Making Dens
It has been remarkably mild this year (other than the recent but short cold snap), and the willows that form the living structural posts to our main workshops are producing buds and leaves already. It is all very early and means we are under pressure to do our harvesting quickly, before the sap rises. If we leave it too late we will end up with inferior quality timber that is more susceptible to insect attack.
Harvesting aside, it’s been very busy in the woods lately, with Adam, Tom Vaughan, Guy Furner and Jabi (soon to be joined by Austin) all very busy building yurts and working on making the Woodland Workshop and Crafty Camping even better for this season.
Time is going very quickly in the build-up to our first course of the year and opening our new luxury camping facilities on the 23rd April. However, it’s all good clean outdoor graft and it’s very enjoyable. Some might say that really it’s just large scale adult den building!
Chestnut In Posts
The results of our coppicing work in Hampshire last month have started to arrive, in the shape of the first of three huge loads of sweet chestnut, delivered via specialist haulage lorry.
We will be using these chestnut posts for fencing and deck and boardwalk building in the woods. We had to buy a whole acre of standing chestnut and therefore we have plenty of top quality posts available for sale too. These posts have a very long life due to their tannin content and are a far superior option to the modern tanalised softwood posts that are widely available from fencing suppliers. If you want to buy some do please get in contact quickly as we only have a limited stock. They are perfect environmentally sound posts that will give good service for many years.
The other purpose of the chestnut is for building three new yurts, two for Crafty Campers and one as a communal games and relaxing / social room for our guests.
We have been making these using traditional green wood techniques as opposed to the more common machined wood parts found in many yurts. This has involved cleaving the chestnut into components to make the lattice that forms the wall as well as peeling the bark from long poles or ‘spars’ that are subsequently steam bent in the round and set on our massive new ‘chariot’ bending jig.
We do still have our old second hand yurt and this is now ready for converting into our new woodland sauna. There is a short video here showing it being assembled with the assistance of our boys and the invaluable help of Dudley the dog:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5MVO2E6w2c&feature=youtu.be
Oak In Curves
The steam bending process is still pure magic every time we do it, and we’ve been doing it a lot lately, with both the chestnut and some oak.
We have made a short video here showing the large oak rings being bent for the roof ‘wheels’ on the yurts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=6a64EkUs944
Once the components have been bent on the jig they are allowed to cool and set before being removed, held to shape with a more lightweight brace and dried, after which they will hold their new shape and be ready for assembling into our new yurts ready for canvas fitting.
In The Pond
It has been great to see the trout in the fishing pond reappear after being dormant on the bottom for the winter. They are having a feast on all the frogspawn that’s appeared around the fringe of the pond recently.
However, we have had a serious problem with an algal bloom in the pond. This is probably due to a combination of the warm weather and a spike in nutrients due to the local dairy farm spraying the field above the woods with the waste from the dairy cattle winter sheds.
We have taken advice on the best way to deal with this in an environmentally sensitive manner and the expert view has been to use the proven method of barley straw. We’re told that it’s the tannin in the barley straw that rots down and this in turn deals with the algal bloom.
This got us thinking. We have huge piles of chestnut bark in the workshop at the moment that is stuffed full of tannin …
So, time for an experiment and we duly forked a pile of bark shavings into the pond! It has only been about four days at the time of writing and the amount of algae has certainly reduced – fingers crossed, we may have found a natural and free solution to our problem. Time will tell.
It is interesting to note that both oak and chestnut have a lot of tannin and this is the reason we need to clean our tools and hands at the end of a day working with these timbers, to remove the black stains. (And, of course, it is oak bark that our local tannery use for tanning the leather that we employ for our coracle making.)
In The Ether
Away from the woods, we have started being active on Twitter and Facebook again as we now have some nice pictures and interesting goings on in the woods to post about. If you are into this sort of thing have a look at what we are up to here:
https://twitter.com/#!/guymallinson
http://www.facebook.com/guymallinsonwoodlandworkshop
We have also been made aware of a relatively new site called Pinterest. I would be interested to hear if anyone else has being using this.
We only started on it last week but are finding it a very enjoyable way of categorising and storing interesting images of things we like or are interested in, be it for a specific project or just general interest.
I have been collating images of great treehouses and the collection so far can be seen here:
http://pinterest.com/guymallinson/treehouses/
In The Diary
Finally a couple of events for the diary.
For those interested in crafts and specifically heritage crafts, the Spring conference of our friends at the Heritage Crafts Association will be held at the V&A in London on 24th March. Further details here:
http://www.heritagecrafts.org.uk/index.php/about/upcoming-events
For those interested in the increasingly popular craft of spoon carving there is a new event being organised by our friends Robin Wood and Barn (the spoon) Calder called ‘Spoonfest’, 17th-19th August. This looks like it’ll be both great fun and very informative. Details here:
and there’s a brilliant video from Barn here:
If spoon carving is your thing, don’t forget that you can come and do a one day taster spoon carving course here with Adam any weekday that suits you (subject to availability), as well as our two day spoon carving course with special guest tutor Ben Orford on October 4th-5th.
And that’s it for this month. Come March I hope to be able to put up lots of pictures of the developments in the woods. Hopefully, the rain and frost will hold off.
Thanks for reading
Guy and the team
