October Update
I love the transitional seasons of Spring and Autumn. Coming out of the cold and gloom of Winter always feels great. Seeing green again, fresh shoots, sticky buds and new life. Now, after a long, hot and busy Summer, the quiet of Winter once again has its appeal.
Throughout the Summer I was vending at two local Farmers’ markets. I’m extremely lucky to have one of America’s biggest farmers’ markets just down the road from me. There’s also a Sunday farmers’ market about a mile from where I live. It’s a lot smaller than the Saturday market but it has much more of a community vibe to it. For about six months I spent my weekdays making and the weekends selling. In fact, this was my actual schedule:
While not every week looked exactly like this, you get the gist. By the end of September, the Sunday farmer market was finished with it’s outdoor season. The Saturday market is still going, finishing its outdoor season on November 16th. Last year I hung in til the very end and had at least two markets finish early due to to a snow storm rolling through. So this year I decided to switch from summer mode to winter mode when the Northside Farmers’ market finished.
Throughout September I could smell the barn and was eager to switch modes. There are a lot of plans, projects and ideas I’ve been putting off throughout the summer, waiting for the winter the enact them. Now’s the time! To help ease the transition, I decided to give myself a week off at the beginning of October. Oh boy did that feel weird! When I was busy with the farmers’ markets I started to yearn for a little more downtime. When I finally had it I honestly didn’t know what to do with myself. I guess the grass is always greener.
A lot of October has been spent sitting and thinking. It’s been a little difficult for me. The nice thing about my summer schedule is that I know exactly what I have to do. I make stuff, sell it at the markets, then I make more stuff to replace the things that sold. Rinse, repeat. For six months. Putting my head down and getting on with making is a great source of contentment for me. With October came a new schedule. One that looked pretty much like this:
Whenever I have an idea for a product or some online content I try to write it down. More often than not these ideas will come at a time when I’m not able to act on them. Getting them stored outside of the mess that is my brain gives them a fighting chance of coming into reality. So the first task was to go through my journal and my phone’s note app to collate all these ideas. Some are as simple as ideas for silly videos, others are suggestions I’ve received for new products. The important ones are for bigger projects I’d like to do. They include:
Website redesign
Actually adding products to my website
Weekly Youtube videos
Fortnightly blog posts
Designing some new products
That’s not an exhaustive list, but each of those projects is made of a variety of tasks. Figuring out what those tasks are has been interesting. Once I had a rough idea of the steps involved in each project, fitting those pieces together so complimentary tasks from different projects are done together has been the main focus of my time. To give you an example, here’s the task list for the Website Redesign project:
Research website designs I like
Find Squarespace templates
Update logo
Create map of website pages
Write copy for pages
Take photos for pages
Export current website into new template
Some of those tasks are probably mini-projects of their own, with sub-tasks that need to be done to complete them. It also shares space with the project of adding products to my site, which shares space with designing new products, which overlaps with…. Anywho, you get the picture. After hours of head scratching, gallons of tea and more procrastination than I’d care to admit to, I think I’ve got myself a solid work plan for the next six weeks. With that in hand, I can resume my more comfortable role of head down, getting on with work.
Alongside all this planning I’ve been doing a few other things. If you follow me on Instagram, you might be aware that I’m a ‘Local Guide’ for Fjallraven in Madison, which is basically their name for a brand ambassador. It’s a pretty cool opportunity. I get some free Fjallraven kit in exchange for doing social media posts and a few in store events. October saw me participating in their nationwide Axes and Flannel campaign. Unfortunately, the weather was terrible on the day, but I had fun teaching the staff about axes: how to use them safely and some tips on maintenance.
#malemodel
While we’re on the topic of axes, I got my grubby mitts on a Julia Kalthoff axe. I’ve given my first impressions of it already. Having used it for a month now, I’m very happy with it, it’s an excellent little carving axe. It’s not substantially different from axes like the Hans Karlsson Slojd axe or Svante Djarv’s Little Viking, but it’s nice to have high quality options out there for people looking to get a dedicated carving axe.
Last week I had a really fun afternoon with some grad students from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The professor of woodworking, Tom Loeser, stumbled across my work at the Sunday farmers’ market and wanted to introduce his students to a new (for them) genre of woodworking. So we squeezed 12 people, a mix of students and staff, into my workshop for a turning demo. I prepared some mugs at various stages of the process and gave a brief overview of the process. Since I only have the one lathe, I took everyone outside, showed them a few knife grips and had them carve some butterknives while I took aside one student at a time to play on the lathe for a bit. I really enjoyed it for a lot of reasons. Most of the students were post grads, so already had a deep understanding of woodworking, so the questions and discussion were a little deeper than what I was used to with the mainly beginner carving classes I run. Selfishly it was great to practise teaching turning. I’ve had quite a few enquiries about pole lathe classes. I still feel that I’m pretty fresh to pole lathe turning. I’m happy with my skill level for making work, but teaching a skill requires a very deep and slightly different kind of understanding. You can know how to do a thing yourself, but being able to pass that knowledge on to others is quite different. Having 10 two-minute sessions showing beginners how to stand at the lathe, how to hold the tool, describing to them the movements you need to make was great for getting me to think about turning from the perspective of teaching, not just doing. In one form or another I’ve worked in education for about 11 years, from classrooms, to teacher training workshops to my carving classes. So I have a good understanding of how to break information down and present it to a variety of students. Even so, teaching a new topic will always have its stumbling blocks and the visit from the UW students was a fun and low risk opportunity for me to explore those issues. 2020 might see me start to offer some turning workshops, but it won’t be for a while yet.
Looking ahead, I’m excited to start working on the various tasks in my new six-week schedule. I’ve got some more carving workshops to run, two winter markets to stock up for and some exciting content to create.
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