Old News!

I ran a Spooncarving and Conservation Day course on Thursday 1 November 2012 in the beautiful grounds of the Sharpham Estate in South Devon, on the banks of the River Dart. The day was hosted by the Sharpham Outdoors Project as part of Devon Hedge Week. For more details please click here.


I used to base my courses at the Flint Mill Workshop at the Beamish Museum in County Durham, managed by Maurice Pyle. Here are the workshops being prepared for a days activities

Spooncarving course for 2010

Spoons and Turned Bowls (2 days, course fee £130). Saturday and Sunday 19 and 20 June 2010

This is essentially two courses in one, a total of twelve students will be split into two groups of six, each group will spend one day learning to carve spoons and one day learning to turn a small bowl on a pole lathe.

Carving a spoon, ladle or scoop from a piece of green roundwood is an immensely satisfying, creative purpose and creates a practical item that can be personalized to make a wonderful gift, if you bare to give it away! By working with the grain, freshly cut wood reveals itself as a flexible material, easily worked with sharp tools. During the course of the day we will consider the unique properties of wood, especially in the green, work safely on a simple spoon design using axe, sloyd and curved knife and consider the philosophy of crafting the everyday objects around us from sustainable, renewable materials.

Turning a bowl on a pole lathe is incredibly satisfying.  We will be using axes to shape the rough blank then turning tools, including hooked tools to shape the bowl on our treadle operated pole lathes.  We will use reasonably freshly felled native species such as alder or birch.  Tutor Maurice Pyle has been a professional green wood tutor for more than 15 years.

Please book via Maurice Pyle’s website. Click here