You Are Special...

...and then you are the same. It's not a look alike thing, more a feel alike. But it doesn't destroy your uniqueness. Amateur woodworking and its woodworkers is not at all a new thing. In times past most men did woodworking in support of their daily life, a rural worker repaired his cart though he might be a stone mason, householders knew good planing techniques and repaired and restored jamming window sashes and frames. Someone repairing something in wood was really quite ordinary. Such things in most households would be quite commonplace. Then you might not know that the wealthy gentry and even royalty had members of the household who practiced the art of woodworking in all of its many diverse forms ranging from bow making and making fishing rods to furniture making and wood turning. In their case it was their hobby and not a means of support to them as such. I started seeing the demise of real furniture making in the 60s with one furniture making business after another closed with the retirement of its owner and then too educational entities taking over the validation of craft with its introduction of anonymous certification according to written curriculum with choose the right answer from five rather than through peers in traditional guilds. There are a few furniture maker/designers around, many of them finding additional support from a primary earner or family member, parent etc, who pursue their endeavour as a job and can indeed earn well, but most don't. So it does look as I predicted two decades ago that the art of hand working wood for woodworkers will be preserved in the doing of it by amateur woodworkers and less likely the professional maker. The professional makers have become more the boutique maker of one kind or another, studio designers and such. Actually, a few decades ago, they wouldn't have worn much more than overalls, a pencil behind their ear and a long sleeved shirt rolled up to the elbow. Anyway, all I am saying is that most of the woodworkers I enjoy the most are the ones known as amateurs, ordinary, unpretentious characters from every walk of life.

Yesterday someone stopped me in the local supermarket. It happens once or twice a week on average. "I really like watching your videos, Paul." We've not met before but people I meet often feel that they know me and from them I often hear, "This is really quite surreal!" I take it as a compliment. We stop and chat when we both have time. It made me aware of the impact our work has and this enables me to see just where people are in the scheme of what we're doing. It's gratifying that the people I meet are for the main part just like me, ordinary blokes like me but with a passion.

Mostly they didn't know something about woodworking so they Googled it and somewhere from the great abyss of Google my name popped up. It happens frequently enough and I almost always ask them about the their woodworking, tell them about our vision and then ask them about their current occupations. It's true that most of them engineer things using computers followed by people who simply use their computers in the day to day of life. They all isolate small pockets of in their homes and gardens for creativity with wood. That's what woodworking masterclasses.com and then my youtube channel to a lesser degree have done to advance woodworking in the lives of people I may never meet.

Ordinariness is actually a very special place to thrive. These rarer pockets of sanity restore the lost days of other work to stimulate the brain and release the therapeutic value of craft work. It's the ordinariness from past centuries that continues thriving in the private enclave of amateur woodworker's life that matters. These men and women seem to be the ones that withstand the hard knocks of opposition and no matter what comes against them they just keep getting on with it. As our vision into the future unfolds we will build on the past works we have taken on singlehandedly for almost three decades so far. It's these last five or so years that have been the most exciting though. Whereas at one time I could only sow seeds in the lives of 200 people a year, we now reach hundreds of thousands who believe hand tool woodworking is for them. The methods we use seem pivotal to their love of woodworking as much as to their personal growth and wellbeing. My meeting woodworkers everywhere I go proves to me that real woodworking is alive and kicking and that it will be the amateurs like my self that will keep the true craft alive.