A website update in is progress, and lessons are about to launch, which means some new pictures of the workshop were well overdue. And so I spent a day hosting Zac to take video and still footage of the workshop and of lessons in action. Slots will be advertised soon; in the meantime, feel free to contact me if you’d like to enquire.

I was also lucky to spend three days in Mirfield this month, as part of the Emerging Turners Programme. The sessions were led by Richard Findley and Colwin Way and focused on bowl turning, including processing and working with green wood. The most nerve-wracking part of the weekend was probably – having spent a morning making a bowl of perfect proportions and even wall thickness – watching Richard cut it in half on the bandsaw to ascertain exactly how successful we had been. Luckily, mine wasn’t too bad.

And finally: I had an interesting commission recently: a customer contacted me asking for an exercise mace with a 4kg head. After much head-scratching and crunching of numbers, we settled on a sapele head, about 25cm in diameter, and a head in oak, with an overall length of 1m exactly. The handle has grooves to facilitate use and the whole thing has been finished in Danish oil. Maces such as this have been used in traditional exercise regimes for thousands of years in Asia and the Middle East, and it was an interesting project to turn my hand to.