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Our Saw-Some Soapbox

Most job descriptions don’t include “drive a wooden car made in three weeks down a massive ramp, over four jumps in front of 1200 people”.  However in my second month working with Handcrafted, this is one of the unexpected things I have done.

Along with the other teams, we had two attempts to get down to the bottom of the 450 metre track at Herrington Country Park as quickly as possible. This wasn’t without a shortage of drama, mechanical changes and spectacular crashes. Continue reading “Our Saw-Some Soapbox”

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Downhill all the Way at the North East Soap Box Challenge

Prince, Michael Jackson and David Bowie needed a spanner to fix their coffin …

What’s the punchline?

Wait … no. This actually happened?

 

It’s Saturday, August the 18th at Herrington Country Park, and pit crews are making last-minute adjustments to their vehicles before they run the challenging downhill skidaddle of the North East’s inaugural Soap Box Challenge. Continue reading “Downhill all the Way at the North East Soap Box Challenge”

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Enter … Aly – our new Project Development Officer

Narrator’s Voice: We’ve been running a workshop in Gateshead since January 2017, practically working out our conviction that the Handcrafted way of doing things can have a powerful effect in other localities. Initially open for just 8 hours a week, and running bicycle repair courses alongside woodworking in a small workshop, we were helped by a lot of interest from other organisations and began to settle into a niche that offered something new and made a big difference to our first brave group of pioneering trainees. You can read about the early days here.

Having moved to a new space in April this year, the project has picked up momentum and the time has come for it to have its own Project Development Officer, someone with the unique mix of passion, creativity, compassion and practical smarts to take things to the next level.

(Aly enters stage left wearing combat trousers and a headband and brandishing a drill, like some sort of pallet-repurposing freedom fighter) Continue reading “Enter … Aly – our new Project Development Officer”

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First Day in the Workshop is a Lift Off

Even though our trainees keep telling us that they are pleasantly surprised how friendly and inclusive our workshop is when they first come along, those first impressions are so important. It’s like day one in a new job or school: you don’t know what to expect and if you are going to fit in okay.

Adam landed on day one with a skateboard under his arm. This wasn’t his main method of transport for getting to the workshop but a lifelong passion he’s had since the age of six. Together with his previous experience as a joinery apprentice, he was rearing to take things to the next level.

Continue reading “First Day in the Workshop is a Lift Off”

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Backwoods Ingenuity: The Kentucky Stick Chair

When I first heard the words ‘Kentucy Stick Chair’ it was hard to dismiss the image of a piece of furniture somehow constructed from pieces of deep-fried chicken. It turned out that what we were really talking about was no less extraordinary.

The original Kentucky Stick Chairs would have been made from humble sticks and slung together with rope. All that would have been needed was a saw and a way to make holes in wood – a perfect example of ‘off grid’ innovation. Our chairs are made with cut timber and threaded bar, but they stay true to the spirit of their ancestors by using whatever is to hand and keeping the original simplicity of the design. Continue reading “Backwoods Ingenuity: The Kentucky Stick Chair”

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Wisdom from the Workshop

by Justin Lau

‘Why doesn’t the Queen—’ [raises left hand] ‘—wave with this hand?

…

Because it’s mine!’

Laughter erupts around the table over steaming shepherd’s pie as jokes and banter flit across the room one after another like an impeccably coordinated symphony.

Except there’s no one conductor; everyone’s directing, everyone’s performing, everyone’s judging if the joke or remark is worthy of hoots or boos or awkward silences. Take what you have, bring it to the table, share it with everyone: a rich feast.

There’s one area where there’s no judgement involved, and that’s the lives of the lads’: past, present, future. What an array of experiences: the good, the bad, the ugly. How beautiful to see people come just as they are: take it, bring it, share it!

And every now and then, amid the good-natured banter, they let slip profound truths and wisdom, lessons they’ve learnt over the course of their lives. Though they might initially seem like just pithy comments, one senses that they’ve come from a deep, deep place of experience and reflection. Continue reading “Wisdom from the Workshop”

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Reaching Out

Asking a hard question

Every day, we hear stories, big and small, that give us confidence that Handcrafted Projects is making a real difference to real people. We want to meet the people we can help and give them the best possible opportunity to join us.

Recently, we looked again at how many people actually came along to our Durham workshop in the last few years. The figures are encouraging. In four years we went from seeing 68 individual trainees using the workshop in a year to 119 – that’s 175% growth in the number of people we reached.

Then we asked a tougher question: “How many people stick around”.

Continue reading “Reaching Out”

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The Pen is Mightier than the Saw

Reclaiming discarded scraps of wood and turning them into something attractive and useful portrays only too well what we are all about at Handcrafted. Even a bit of timber is worthy of another chance. The Handcrafted Pen has been a “bestseller” since we produced the first batch over a year ago. We can’t make them quickly enough.

To date, over 60 of these little beauties have been turned out, and we are working on another batch for our Christmas Fayre on Friday 2nd December. Continue reading “The Pen is Mightier than the Saw”