Making Your Own Tools

Medieval smiths
Medieval Silversmiths in their Workshop, Niklaus Manuel, 1515

A craftsman would be nothing without his tools. Ask any maker and whatever material they work in, whether it’s wood, ceramics or textiles, they will tell you that they have a favourite tool. It goes without saying that different tools are suited to different techniques: in our case, a forging hammer is very different from a planishing hammer, for example. Sometimes, the only way to get a tool that fulfils a specific requirement is to make it yourself.

Portrait of a Workshop

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Over a trillion photographs will have been taken worldwide before the end of this year. It’s never been easier to show others where you are and what you’re doing at any given moment of the day. The trick, it seems, is to remember to take the picture in the first place! All too often we get caught up in what we’re doing in the workshop and only once a task is completed does it occur to us that it might have made an interesting video or photo.

Over the last few weeks, photographer Ben Boswell and filmmaker Mathy Selvakumaran have photographed and filmed us on two separate ordinary days in the workshop. The resulting photographs (below) and short film (above) capture the day-to-day detail of our workshop – the things and the faces that aren’t usually the focus of our posts.

Coming To A Craft Fair Near You!

deck chair and tumbler

At the Bovey Tracey Contemporary Craft Festival last summer we were quite taken with the Vintage Mobile Cinema that rocked up at Mill Marsh Park in Devon to entertain visitors to the show with Pathe films from the 1940s and ’50s about British craftspeople and their work.

Bringing a taste of something special and refreshing to town halls and village greens across the nation is something we share with the ice-cream vans and mobile cinemas of this world, and we wouldn’t have it any other way!

Our programme for 2017 is already packed with spring, summer and autumn events across 12 different counties, from Edinburgh to Devon, in marquees, grand halls and galleries. We’ve now updated the ‘Events‘ page on our website. We’re coming to a craft fair near you!

A Winter Show

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This year we ended our tour of shows with a debut appearance at the MKG Messe in Hamburg. Held annually in the city’s impressive Museum for Arts and Craft, this event has been running for over 130 years and has only recently begun accepting applications from makers based outside Germany. We showcased a ‘capsule’ collection of our sterling silver candlesticks and tableware and received a warm welcome from the friendly Hamburgers, as they are known.

Fibonacci Vase

Those of you who visited our stand at Goldsmiths’ Fair this year will have noticed the three new pieces we have been making over the summer – a series of solid silver vases.

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This summer project has allowed us to combine our signature sculptural hot-forgings with the technique of raising, a process that requires patience and precision and uses a more delicate hammer than Brett’s favourite 1.5 kilo forging tool.

Inspiraton for the larger of these three vases was drawn originally from the Fibonacci Curve, also known as the Golden Spiral (although we prefer silver!), a mathematical formular expressed in a curve that holds the key to some of nature’s most intricate patterns and sequences, including the fruitlets of a pineapple and the ancestry of honey bees!