January Update
January was a long year, but we made it
Well, almost there.
December was a crazy busy month for me, as it is for most craftspeople. I had two great craft fairs here in Madison, a brilliantly timely article about my mugs in a local magazine, and a whole bunch of online orders. It was great to then take a little time off to relax, recover and walk the dog.
Enter January! As I’ve mentioned previously, winter is the time for me to do a bunch of planning, as well as try some of the things I’ve been putting off during the summer, due to focusing on the Farmers’ Markets. I started a little of this before 2020 began, but quickly realised I had to get my nose back to the grindstone to meet the Christmas rush. With all those orders met, I only have a backlog of mugs to make, and the rest of my time can go towards other things.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed a few changes around here. I’ve updated my website a little. There are more changes I want to make, but learning about good website design is an ongoing process and I’ll be trying to apply what I learn as I go. If there are any issues you’ve had with the site, or improvements you’d like to suggested, I’d love to hear them.
I also want to start uploading videos on a regular basis. I’m aiming for two a month. Time will tell how ambitious that is. January’s first video was how to make birch bark stars. Ideally that should have come out before Christmas, but it just wasn’t to be. The second video was a lot of fun. The Anatomy of an Axe. Really happy with how it turned out. Still lots of improvements, but for a bloke who turns mugs and carves spoons in a shed, its not bad. Watch it below and let me know what you think. If you want to catch my upcoming videos, subscribe to my Youtube channel. Feel free to suggest content for videos, if there’s anything I do that you’d like to see more of.
January also saw my last workshop to be hosted at One OneThousand. Unfortunately that space has now closed, so I was scrambling around a little to find a new space in Madison to host my classes. Thanks to the wonders of social media, a suggestion on Instagram means that my classes will now be held at Communication, a funky little non-profit that’s all about ‘fostering a vibrant creative community’. Perfect.
I’ll be teaching my first workshop there on February 29th. I’ll also be starting a new venture I’ve been thinking about for a while. A lot of the folks who come through my workshops don’t have the tools or materials to continue carving right away. So I’ll be running fortnightly drop-in sessions for past participants of my courses to come along and carve at. It’ll give people a chance to continue to use their skills while they gather the tools they need to carve on their own. I really want to build a fun community of spoon carvers here in Madison and I think this is a good way to begin.
The other exciting thing that happened this month was getting my hands on a huge cherry tree.
A homeowner with a small patch of woodland 30 minutes west of my shop took this tree down due to some damage to the crown. There’s about 40’ (12m) of logs now sitting in my front yard. For a long time I’ve wanted to get a log and work my way through it. Now I’ve got that opportunity. Exciting times for me.
That about wraps it up for my January! Don’t forget to follow me on Instagram to see what I’m up to and to subscribe to my Youtube to get a more in depth view of how I do some of the things I do.
