Naughty Fun Making a rubber band gun is a bit of a dilemma. Is it an encouragement for naughty behaviour? Is it a precursor for violent solutions to problems? As a child, the rubber band guns I made were delicious! Mum didn’t like them; that made them more fun! I didn’t shoot dogs or people;…
I Broke a Promise… …but I also made a discovery. When I began doing wood projects among my disabled friends I made some promises to myself. The promises were a personal, but unwritten, statement of policy. I promise to: do work that is engaging because the thing we make is interesting, never to do all…
Here are the parts of our back scratcher. As with most of our work, fixing is achieved by belting 6mm dowels into 5.5mm holes. The handle is well suited to batch production but the body of the scratchy bit took a while. Each had to be individually marked out. It was the least efficient part…
This blog is the work of a retired woodwork teacher, me. A wonderful career of making cool things with kids has loaded my head with lots of stuff to make and share. Lessons are an Act of Sharing My inventive/creative work continues through opportunities to share what I enjoy. There are customers at a wood tools shop where I work part time….
My friends wouldn’t stop playing with this toy. For me, that is enough evidence to call the project a success. Most of the workers in my group do not interact easily with other people, so their play didn’t consist of shooting each other. They found enormous satisfaction in the challenge of loading a ball and launching it…
It has been a long absence from blogging. To explain would take a box of tissues and a patient listener. …suffice to say, I lost my workshop, but am now close to finding it again. A workbench on castors suffers from lack of mobility when small diameter wheels bump into chunks of stuff on the…