The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Community => Coffee Lounge => Topic started by: RUSTYME on February 18, 2010, 09:18:07 pm
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00qsc3j/Mastercrafts_Green_Wood_Craft/
the link is for the new tv program about learning traditional crafts , introduced by Monty Don . This week it is about green wood working , pole lathes , bodging etc . Really good program , although there are some almost irritating " oh I can't do this " moments ::) ;D.
Sorry to those who can't get iplayer ....I don't make the rules !!!!
cheers
Russ
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Completely forgot, so thanks for reminding me. I actually got an email from the weaving guild reminding me, and I STILL forgot! Old age, eh? :P
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no probs......I do that too.....er whatever that is ? ....dunno ....I forget....!!!! ::) ;D ;D
cheers
Russ
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What night is it on?
To answer Q in other thread - where am I? I am visiting my pal Jan in Royston and we went to see my nephew and his family today, then going to buy prizes tomorrow for our Club Open Show on Sunday(Brittany Club of Great Britain - www.brittanyclub.co.uk), them we have our AGM where they pull my accounts to bits - well I hope they don't ;), followed by a Committee meeting, then back to Jan's for dinner in a nice restaurant, and flying home again on Monday night. But for my wonderful dog/cat/chicken/duck/house sitter I couldn't do it - only £30 a day, no food provided! Well done Denise, and her assistant, Jenni!
See you all when I get back home! ;D ;D
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tonight BBC 2 9.00pm, Annie. It is about thatching tonight , looks like another good one . Well they will all be good to me , as they are all about subjects I like and actually do .
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qvrcj
cheers
Russ
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Do you weave, Russ?
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I have done some weaving , although it was years ago now . I made the loom (no idea where it went ? ), but I want to grow my own linseed , hemp and even some cotton , to spin and weave my own cloth . I don't need huge amounts , a few yards of each say about 10 or so . I also want to spin and weave my own wool, if I actually get the sheep ? , but I don't mind getting the wool from local farmers , as long as it is free !!!!. I did work in a knitting factory for 3 years , not knitting with needles ... but on a hand operated industrial 'Dubied' knitting machine .
cheers
Russ
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What sort of loom did you make, a static or one with a shed?
Plant fibres are really time consuming and need a lot of effort to spin and weave, so rather you than me! You have to beat the plants to get the fibres, and some you have to soak until it smells like the drainpipes from hell, before you beat it.
It's hard to spin them as well, because you can never get them fine enough to make a fine weave, so you end up with something looking like a sackcloth, and the single ply always looks ratty with bits sticking out, lol.
Wool, on the other hand, is great ;D I always get mine free, because the wool board doesn't pay a lot, and some people actually get a bill FROM the wool board because their fleece weren't clean enough, so people would rather give it away. I get shetland fleeces and jacobs, and they satisfy my wooly interests ;D
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My word Ive seen corn stacks with better thacking done on them that was shown .Me thinks Monti wants to get back to gardening because hes definately out of his depth in these programs ??? :farmer:
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er ... well I made it in a shed !!!! ::) ;D . It was a big square framed thing , a foot treadle floor loom , about 4' wide . It worked really well . I made it from drawings in a book . The same book also had drawings for a spinning wheel made from an old bike wheel . I made that and it did work , but was a bit too big to have indoors by the fire in winter . My late mum then got an Ashford spinning wheel , so we used that to spin mainly wool . I grew hemp and flax (linseed) and yes it does stink like hell when retting it !!! It is 30 years plus now since I did that , and hard to remember exactly what I did . But I know I made a load of string and rope , and with some of it I made some sacking . I made some trousers out of the flax . I can't remember how hard it was to spin or weave either of them really , but I know that after a few wonky attempts I got some usable stuff out of it all . I know that the spinning wheel had to be setup slightly different for flax and hemp than it did for wool , so we used the Ashford for wool and the bike wheel thing for hemp etc.
The loom probably got left at the farm when Mum and Dad left , I had moved out ages before that . I will most likely make the same sort of loom again , I have a few different drawings .
Cheers
Russ
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Monti Don is only presenting these progs George ;D , . He does the odd little thing here and there by the looks of it , but it is about the people having a go at it mainly . I know it is almost impossible to really do what they are meant to in the time , but that is modern tv for you . They can hardly follow an apprentice for 7 years and show that .... :o . At least it is getting old skills into the modern eye again . So many people wouldn't have a clue about any of the things on the program . These crafts were, even just a few years ago, everyday things you saw about . All my Nan's chairs were made by bodgers , we had them after Nan and Granddad died . They lasted well into the late 60's early 70's when mum and dad got new metal ones ( they lasted about 2 years ), Nan's chairs had been her Mum's !!! , and I doubt that she got them new (the sound of the Hovis music plays gently in the background !! ) ::) ;D .
cheers
Russ
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I agree hes only presenting it Russ but it might come over if he learned more about it first.Sorry it was a complete waste of time for me. ??? :farmer:
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no probs George mate ...funny how some things grab us and others leave us cold ... I myself would rather watch something like this than the X-craptor , I find that dire !! , but plenty of people like it .
I think the next one is Blacksmithing . That should be fun if some of the hot flaky bits jump up and land on their arm ...he he he ... don't arf make ya jump !! :o ::) ;D
cheers
Russ
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Darn I missed it - I am downloading the iplayer desktop now to watch it tomorrow.
Will have to get the next one on tv when its on.
Ta
Baz
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I hope you enjoy it Baz I was most disappointed. ??? :farmer:
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Cheers Russ.I am downloading it today to watch tonight. I'm impressed with your weaving and spinning experience. I pick up old bits of looms at farmsales and stuff. Quite a few people seem to have the frames in the sheds and don't recognise what they are anymore. OH made a great 4 poster bed from a big one. Lovely bits of furniture. I researched and wrote about harris tweed quite a bit at art college and went to Harris to meet a wonderful woman marion campbell
http://www.harristweedandknitwear.co.uk/family.html (http://www.harristweedandknitwear.co.uk/family.html) a couple of years before she died. She gave me a whole afternoon of her time and a wonderful insight into the way that her whole life was based around crofting and weaving. I spin but not enough and I haven't had my loom set up for years. It is really important to learn from these people while we still have their wisdom in the world and I shall enjoy Monty Don for his program and actually just to watch him for an hour too.. Smallholding woman's crumpet -
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Ah ah Mari thats cheatin ;D ;D :farmer:
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I call it multi tasking :)
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Agen Mari The mind boggles (see answer to Sandy)
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Russ I shoulda said static loom or moveable shed - but the point is moot anyway since you constructed floor standing loom. I'm seriously impressed; I'm assuming it's a treadle loom, and how many shafts? Also the bike wheel, was it manually operated like a great wheel, with a horizontal distaff? Retting stinks like anything - I tried it with nettles, and couldn't smell anything else for days afterwards :P
Marigold, I'm envious. You got to meet Marion campbell! What sort of weaving do you do, or rather have you done? I've woven a sort of harris tweed, but I prefer experimenting with patterns, and brighter colours.
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I haven't done any weaving for years - I studied silk weaving in Japan for two years and then came home to learn about Scottish textile traditions. Went to art school in Dundee and got diverted into all sorts of other things. Mostly because I realised that weaving was never really going to feed me.
20 years later I am building up a few different skills to get back to that idea, or at least to have several different activities that all together might feed us.
The weaving that really interested me was ikat - just dyeing and then colour - also spinning an interesting weft and simple plain weave or a twill with a straight warp. I demonstrated linen weaving on an old jaquard at the Glamis folk museum for 2 summers. That was fun I must have woven about a foot each summer - I wasn't very good or very quick - but the tourist were fooled.
Are you weaving now sagehen?
:)
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Yes I'm weaving, although I'm not weaving as much as I should - mainly because I'm slightly depressed and can't face warping anything at the moment. I mainly use a rigid heddle when I'm sat watching the telly, or a four shaft in the other room. The house is too small to contain a floor standing one, and I'm hoping for my OH to be a darling and build a nice studio for me ;D Very impressed with your credentials though, and I'm surpised you didn't pursue it, although I do understand about weaving not making any money. I suppose one can always teach, or join what I call the 'museum crowd' and get grants for exhibitions ;D Do you know Tim Parry Williams? He went and studied in japan as well, I think, although he experiments with odd materials like metal or something.
Never tried a jacquard loom before - too complicated for my poor ickle brain, but I like ikat as well, although there aren't a lot of ikat 'masters' here you can learn from. I would love to go to South east asia and learn their different weaving skills, or India, like Peter Collingwood :-\
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Yes Kirsty the old looms were really nice practical items . I have seen many in sheds , sadly most have lots missing . I had forgotten that I made the big floor loom , till I was sorting out in the shed and found some old blankets I had made with it years ago . They have since been used as dog blankets and no longer exist ::). But they reminded me about the big loom . I remembered making a smaller one out of an old wooden bed frame ... the complete reverse of your OH lol.
It was a treadle loom Sage , but I really can't remember any more details about it , it was 33 years ago ::) . I know I made a few different patterns with it , checks and stripes etc . Mainly using white wool and black (really brown ) wool , from the sheep on the farm we lived on at the time . We also dyed a lot of wool with natural materials , plants etc. It was funny looking at the blankets again , I could see how the spinning had gone from very iffy , to really quite good , the same with the weaving . Some of the spinning was done on drop spindles . I sat for hours in the winter time , with home made drop spindles . I must knock one up again , I got really good at it at one time . I hope it is like riding a bike after a long time , you wobble a bit at first then it just comes back . Will have to get some wool to practice with , god ... that means I will have to get some carders .....they are a bloody fortune now days . I wonder if I could make them out of extra long staples and a bit of an inner tube ? MMmmm
cheers
Russ
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Russ you don't really need to card before you spin - you can spin straight off the raw fleece. Just pick out the veg matter. With four dogs, I also assume you've got a dog comb ;D, and you can comb them for a worsted yarn.
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you don't really need to card before you spin - you can spin straight off the raw fleece. Just pick out the veg matter.
Thank goodness, someone else who thinks like me!
The amount of people I have met who have been told that they MUST card their wool before spinning and that spinning raw fleece is just not the done thing.
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Hahaha! ;D I know, everyone follows the rules so strictly don't they? ;) Great great wheel you've got there! ;D
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Enjoyed the program Rusty. Would have liked to hear Mike Abbott say a bit more about his work though. Anyway it is good to have these crafts out there on telly.
Monty is ageing a bit - What a shame that the tone of the teaching for the new people learning the craft was competitive. I know that the program makers think that competition equals good telly but I don't agree. Watching them being taught with patience and good instruction would have been more informative for us too. Anyway it was good watching and thank you for telling us about it. Looking forward to watching the thatching one next week. I could never imagine managing that. Looks way to physically challenging for me
Sorry to hear that you're not feeling great Sagehen. I be Marion Campbell did most of her weaving in the summer too. She had a shed with a dirt floor which kept the humidity up which helped for tensioning the warp. So maybe you could follow her example, wait for the better weather and then warp up outside? Have you any photos of recent work to show? it would be lovely to see - perhaps that could be a new thread on the crafts bit?
:) :) :) :) :)
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yes I would like to have seen much more of Mike Abbott too . I have his first book on green woodwork , excellent stuff . I will get his new book as soon as I can grab it secondhand ...lol .
The format of competition, isn't my cup of tea either for the program , but I can mostly ignore that and just enjoy seeing the crafts . The thatching one has already been on tv , the next one is blacksmithing I think ? Here is the link for the thatching one :
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00qyjlm/Mastercrafts_Thatching/
If you want to see more traditional crafts then take a look at some of the old Out of Town programs with the lovely old Jack Hargreaves.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaolgMIKIZk&feature=related
there are many on youtube , and many show the real old craftsmen still around in the 60's and 70's performing their crafts. The old rakemaker in the above link is but one example . I have the entire out of town set on dvd , and get lost in them for many hours .
cheers
Russ
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Heya Marigold
Thanks, I feel a bit better now actually - went driving in the country, with the windows down and the music blaring hehehe ;D Disturbed a few sheep but I was feeling a bit boxed in, so that helped! I've got things to show, and it'd be great to start a new thread with pics to show off whatever craft we're doing at the minute. Err how do we post a pic again? :dunce: And yes, that's a good tip for tensioning the warp, thanks!
Russ, I'd personally like to see crafts like coopering or wheelwrights. That'd be good telly for me! ;D
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Sage I liked Fred Dibnah and the places he went to and things he saw but was not impressed withMark Evans to much fooling about and money id no object :farmer:
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not quite hand made wheelwrighting , but this link shows how many thousands of wooden wheels were made :
http://www.youtube.com/user/lowebeck#p/u/18/7F4kIAD7_qA
http://www.youtube.com/user/lowebeck#p/u/17/u7vvqv38M-s
a slightly more traditional way of tyring a wheel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBM0RzElvRE
and still some more:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCojJ-K3Ad0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO_yketZyUM&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-RttIyIad8&feature=related
and also a modern way of making barrels:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvW8g42a4kw&feature=related
really anoying music and voice , but interesting to see how they make them nowdays.
and then there is the company called ' perverts r us ':
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta72Tv4sqD0&feature=fvw
hope all the links work !!!
cheers
Russ
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More clips from the 'Hands' series , this time rushwork :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGjKRvGH17U&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvTlnnSoWRI&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YELhnSftwS0&NR=1
cheers
Russ
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Have you seen the tillers international one? Just type in tillers international on youtube.
I've seen the Victorian farm one, and the modern coopering pah! What a soulless video that one was :P Mind you I liked that one where they initiated the apprentice - anything with Steve Vai playing in the background can't be bad ;)
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and it'd be great to start a new thread with pics to show off whatever craft we're doing at the minute.
Hiya Sagehen and Russ
I have been immersed in books for the last few days and not got back here. Thanks for the latest links I am definitely going to watch the Jack Hargreaves. I was working with an artist friend last week who wanted to teach her students at college about wood block printing and we found great links on youtube. We decided in the end that if we got them to research the topic on youtube and then teach us how to do it it would resource them in two ways - they may then be able to teach themselves a variety of skills from such wee films.
Glad you're feeling a bit better SH. There is a link under crafts where people do post their latest works. Happyhippy and fluffwelshsheep have some great photos there. The other way to do it is to load images to flickr or some other pic sharing site and put the link into a message on Crafts. Russ does that and might be able to advise us which is the best share site to use.
The link below is to my flickr site which has images of my ceramics pieces I make at my Thursday night class. - it is better than yoga for my head.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kirstyintercreative/ (http://www.flickr.com/photos/kirstyintercreative/)
Would be great to see your textiles SH Shall we start a new post under Crafts?
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Hiya Marigold
Wow, you've ventured into ceramics and sculpting, and I can see the Klimt element in the bread bin actually. I do like Gustav Klimt's works, but I'm more into surrealist art than any other. Was the block printing on textiles? I did lino printing for a while, but I wasn't very good at it LOL! I couldn't convey what I wanted onto the lino. Don't think I was meant to be an artist ;D
Yes, start a new thread, by all means. I'm slightly technologically challenged, so I need to figure it out (how to post pics/reduce their size) at my own time ;D
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Thanks SH for your kind words. Which surrealists do you like?
Don't worry about the technological challenge bit
Annie told me how to post pics
When you reply to this add any old pic by clicking on the additional options link at the bottom left hand side of the reply box. then to get to the pic you want click the browse button that appears and that should take you into the normal file function on your computer.
When you have selected the image and the link to it appears in the browse window just press post.
To scale down your pic before you do any of that - open it in your normal photo viewing way and then do 'save as' select JPEG and file size and make sure that the file size is less that 128kb.
If you use flickr for example you won't need to reduce the sixe of the photos so much which i think is the main advantage.
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I have seen the international videos before , they are very good , as is the web site of theirs too. I had forgotten about them though , so thanks for the reminder Sage.
The modern coopering video is as you say ' soul less ' , and that was one of the less robotic ones I found . As for the apprentice initiation video , more one for the girls me thinks !!! ::) but funny none the less , Steve Vai ? , not into music much at all really .
For putting pics on the forum I use photobucket . There are others, picasa , flickr and more who's names have gone for the moment , but all that I have tried , other than PB , I find leave me scratching my head not knowing what I am doing !! Photobucket is simple (like me !!) , works and is free.
cheers
Russ
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Okay here goes...
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Okay meddled about with picasa and have no idea what happened to the pic, but lessee..
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What lovely pieces and great colours!
Well done for posting photos too.
It looks like very careful well tensioned work. You're inspiring me ..... thank you :) :) :)
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pics worked fine Sage.....nice work too.... the last one made my eyes go wobbly ::) , till I made the pic bigger and it was fine then ... a nice pattern.
I will have to start sorting out loom plans and get some work done !!! even if it is for a smaller loom to start with .
cheers
Russ
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00r34zx/Mastercrafts_Blacksmithing/
as it says on the link ...blacksmithing tonight !!! best one so far I think . Plus my great Auntie lives in Barton on Humber so a family link too...
cheers
Russ
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Thanks for the compliments, guys ;D
Marigold, yes, I'm quite obsessive with tension. I know loose tensioned work has more movement and flow, but I do like balance in my work. Who knows, maybe i'll be brave one day and try loosely tensioned weaving *gasp* :o
Russ, when you start on your loom, you'll have to post pics of it in progress ;D I''d be interested to see how it's constructed.