Goodbye 2013 - Welcome 2014

Tonight we close yet another woodworking year. Hard work, long days and tough, tough decisions. I like these three things the most I think, so with this positive note to close on we open a new door into 2014. We have all invested our lives to work with wood as much as we could throughout this year. In my view this solid investment to the diamond of wellbeing increases worthiness beyond measure. Statistics do of course have a place in helping measure some more basic calculable achievements we have to our account. Yesterday we topped 1.7 million page views to my blog this year. Add in the work of our online broadcast through woodworkingmasterclasses.com and then our unpluggedshop.com we achieved well over 3 million views in the last 12 months.

To date we've produced and posted around 100 videos via woodworkingmasterclasses and YouTube. More of them posted for free access than paid for.

When I look back to July of 2011 when I wrote my first blog we had 60 page views throughout the whole month. With no increase we should hit 3.5 million views by this time next year. And we do this with no advertising on my blog.

Beyond all of this I personally travelled too many thousands of miles to count, but I did clock up 70,000 flying miles and drove what seemed to be that many too. The year kicked off with the Woodworking Shows shows in January. Over the three months of the tour I demoed to 30,000 woodworkers; hour upon hour of good and real woodworking fun.

Without touring the woodworking circuit this coming year we can pursue our training work through the online broadcast and New Legacy School of Woodworking. Combining these two spheres of education has no doubt proven to be our best strategy of all. In the class room we set foundational skills and then follow through online for guaranteed advancement. It's working. What we didn't realise is that students who work online before classes in our NL workshops find advancement works from this direction too.

The greatest success according to your emails and forums has of course been the woodworking masterclasses  training videos. There is not doubt that you are all progressing as we intended and this coming year we have so much more to offer surrounding techniques and the use of hand tools. rse and we feel this is now our most positive approach to passing on our skills and knowledge.

I’m sorry and I so regret not being able to answer all of your emails as in previous ears. We have four people helping with this and that still doesn’t mean we can answer every one. We do however answer every question we can or try to find the answer if possible. I must add here that I do read every email that comes in though and they do so encourage me in my work. Please keep them coming.

In closing I want to of course thank you for everything. You give my work its purpose and somewhere to deposit my skills. Please remember, the best way to preserve a seed is not in a glass jar in a dark cellar but to plant it. That’s what we are doing in the lives of hundreds of thousands of woodworkers around the world. Please continue to support our work as you have this past year.