Live carving demonstrations in London bars to promote 'Naked Grouse' Whisky: Part Two

Six turned and carved oak whisky bottles were in my studio, ready to be carved in bars in London with the logo of each establishment.

However, it turned out that only five bars were involved in the final project. I was sent their logos by Kirstie at Material (the marketing company that had commissioned me). After digitally resizing them, I transferred the images using carbon paper onto the plinths.

The bars were all located around the Mayfair and Marylebone districts of London and were quite a mix;  from a fun party bar, through a Lebanese restaurant to a very exclusive place with no sign and a doorman.

I set off on the first weekend very excited to see the first one but also a little nervous about carving live in front of (possibly drunk) people with a two hour time limit. The first establishment was called 'Match!' and was holding a beach party that night. 

I was working with Donna, who was there to help talk to people (although when it comes to talking about woodcarving, I suspect she may have been required to help rescue them!) The staff made us welcome and we had some great chats with some of the customers.

At the end, the carved sculpture was left with the bar for them to use in promoting Naked Grouse whisky.

The next weekend, there were three venues to be visited. I was working with Nadine and Mark came to take photographs on the Friday evening. First was Apres.

It was quite early and the bar was pretty quiet. Mark did get some great photos though and both he and Nadine were good fun to work with. 

Normally, I'd use a range of traditional lettercutting tools for lettercutting; fishtail gouges, woodcarver's chisels etc. I did feel, however, that a large selection of tools might have been a bit vulnerable in bars (that I'd never been to before) and while being carried around town from hotel to venue and back after dark. Fewer tools also meant they didn't get spread about and that they were easier to keep an eye on, which made things safer for me and others in the bars too.

Most of the carving at these demonstrations was done with 'V' tools, to produce a good standard of work fairly quickly and leave time to chat to people who might be interested in what was going on. A small bullnosed number 3 gouge also came in useful for producing and cleaning up carved curves in the designs. The V tools had to be kept razor sharp (as they would be anyway!) to cut neatly through the oak. I took a couple of sharpened spares of each tool to save spending time honing them at the venues.

The next place was called Hush. It recently won a Tatler restaurant award and was a very well-presented and classy place. 

It was interesting arriving at each establishment and seeing what kind of spot was provided for me to carve in. In Hush, it was at a low table which, as in the other venues, I covered with a black cloth to protect it. It was a bit lower-down than my usual carving spot, but the carving came out well.

As it turned out, the staff were very pleasant at Hush and made us welcome. The food going past on trays looked incredible too!

The next day Nadine and I went to Levant, a Lebanese restaurant off Wigmore Street in Marylebone. 

If pushed to make a choice, I think that this was my favourite venue of all. The staff were very welcoming and friendly, customers came up to chat and the exotic feel of the place was added to by Arabic dancers performing around me at one point!

The design to be carved was also the most complex and taxing. It was a bit of a head-scratcher to work out at times but I got there in the end.

On the next weekend and the final visit to London, I worked with Gillian (one of the managers of Material) and Will, who took photos of the event. We went to Mr Foggs, tucked away in a non-descript back street in Mayfair with no sign over the door.

Mr Foggs has a door policy enforced by a doorman and certainly felt like it cultivated an 'exclusive' air about the place. The staff inside were friendly though and some customers came up to chat. The 'Victorian' decor was also fun to look at as I carved their logo, while sat next to the piano.

I was very happy with the finished carving too:

All in all, the three trips to London were a great experience and thoroughly enjoyable. It was also very satisfying to hear from Kirstie that the client was 'delighted' with the project. 

If anyone reading this would like me to do more live carving demonstrations for them, please feel free to get in touch with me via the contact form on the right.

Thanks to Andy and to Kirstie and everyone that I worked with at Material. Plus, of course, thanks to the staff at the bars who made us welcome and, together with Nadine, took some of these photos.

Making carved oak whisky bottles for the launch of 'Naked Grouse' whisky in the UK: Part One

In May this year a marketing company based in Glasgow, called Material, contacted me about a carving project.  I was recommended to them by Andy O'Neill, a chainsaw carver who is based in Bristol.

The company that make the well-known 'Famous Grouse' whisky were putting a new premium malt blend on general release in the UK, called 'Naked Grouse'. The marketing would highlight the craftsmanship involved in making the drink, which is where my woodcarving came in.

Image from:http://www.worldwhiskiesdesignawards.com/results/best-bottle.php

I was asked if I could make wooden replicas of the Naked Grouse bottle on plinths, to go on display as part of the promotion. The plinths would then be carved live in bars, with the logo of each establishment.

First of all, I took measurements and a profile from a sample bottle...

...then got on with turning six replica bottles using these measurements. The wood came from an oak tree that grew near Nether Stowey on the Quantock Hills in Somerset. Oak seemed a particularly appropriate timber to use, as the whisky is aged in oak casks. It was interesting to note, whilst turning, that the oak shavings had a particular smell that could also be noticed in the whisky.

It's been a while since I've done any woodturning and it was nice to get back to it, even though an electrical fault in the first lathe managed to short out the electrical circuits in my workshop! However, one new lathe later and the bottles started coming out nicely.

The turned bottles were then carved with the embossed grouse logo and the writing on the neck label. I used a Dremel hand drill for this part, as it could reproduce the fine lines that the designs required.

If you are wondering why the tops and bottoms of the bottles still had wood attached, it meant that I could work on them without handling the surfaces of the bottles too much and making them grubby, which can be a problem when working with oak (perhaps because of the tannins in it?).

Once the bottles had been carved, it was time to make the plinths. These were boxes constructed from offcuts of oak floorboards.

At the same time, I did colour tests to get the right blend of stains to match the colour of the oak bottles to the whisky. You may also be able to see that the level of liquid in the sample bottle has dropped by now-all in the sake of research of course!

It was back to school for the next bit. I stopped studying physics back then, but found that making the circuits for the LED lights was going to require some education online. Resistors, diodes, voltages: phew!

By this time, the bottles had been carved and I'd started to stain them.

I fitted the LED lights into the plinths using some short lengths of aluminium tubing, to give a neater uplight effect that showed off the grouse logo and the carved label nicely: 

After some adjusting of the height of the plinths, six bottle sculptures were nearly complete.

There was just the final, very important, part to be done. I needed to travel to London to carve the names of the bars on location!

And that will be in the next post...

Visiting Barn the Spoon, spoon carving at his shop on Hackney Road in London

Barnaby Carder, or Barn the Spoon as most people now know him, is a man dedicated to one particular passion; carving wooden spoons.

He has spent time with many well-known faces in green woodworking, people like Robin Wood and Mike Abbott. However, Barn's path is definitely his own. When I asked him if he'd mind me writing about him on this blog, he said that he didn't but that he neither looked for nor really needed publicity.  A lot of people are very interested in what he does and the shop isn't usually short of visitors. 

Some woodworkers can be a little taciturn (well suited to a workshop-orientated life I suppose) but Barn was friendly and happy to chat about his projects, surrounded by wood shavings and tools. It was a very enjoyable afternoon spent talking with him, with occasional breaks so that he could chat with other visitors and customers.

As well as carving the spoons, Barn also teaches spoon carving and organises Spoonfest, a festival of spoon carving that was sold out this year.

It was interesting to hear him say that he didn't have many pictures of his spoons. He was interested in perhaps getting some black-and-white photos one day, as he said that they could show the form of each spoon more clearly. Forms are more important than colours to him in his spoon carving (although the one that he was working on was carved from a beautifully-coloured piece of damson wood). 

The spoons are also left with the facets of the carving cuts still visible. He prefers this finish to sanding, which he feels 'deadens' the surface finish. He also said that, even though he has carved hundreds of spoons, the fascination with it hasn't diminished. In fact, quite the opposite.

The shop at 260 Hackney Road in London is only open from Friday to Sunday, to leave time for other things. The first time that I met him, Barn was sitting on the pavement in Stoke's Croft in Bristol, selling his spoons from a blanket spread out on the ground. He said that he still really values time spent like that and enjoys getting out of the shop to roam when he gets the chance; although that's not too easily done at the moment as he is so busy.

I couldn't resist buying a 'cawl' spoon carved by Barn from rippled sycamore while I was there. Here are some photos of it:

The mysterious carved symbols on the kerbstones of London

Whilst walking from Oxford Street through Soho in London, I saw this symbol carved into the kerbstone at my feet, then another further along the stone. The stones each side were not marked in such a way. At first they looked like stonemason's marks, cut to show that a certain number of kerbstones had been completed that day. But, in common with some other kerbs in the area, why two marks on a single stone?

London is not the only town or city in Britain to have such markings on its kerbs. There are apparently many in Glasgow too. No one seems to be exactly sure what they mean. Some say stonecutter's marks, showing either a certain number of kerbstones that had been laid within a particular time or a certain number shaped at the quarry. Some say that they mark surveying points, while others even say that they mark secret Masonic meeting places or are related to the Great Plague or local executions at Tyburn. These particular marks are also repeated on other stones in the area.

My own feeling is that they are probably stonecutter's marks or road laying crew signs. Maybe two symbols show either the end of one cutter's work and the start of another's, or are the foreman's marks from a particular gang of workers either shaping or laying the stones. I wonder who they were and where the stones were quarried? A visit to the remains of the stone quarries on Dartmoor will show half-finished kerbstones lying around in the wild landscape. It must have been a tough life being a stonemason up there, are those weather-beaten quarries where these stones were originally shaped?

On New Oxford Street, these signs were all carved within a run of fifteen kerbstones, with whole streets nearby not showing a single one:

Although nearby Museum Street has a few symbols on display too, surely too close to each other to show the start and finish of a run being laid:

A week later, I was walking through Bristol and noticed these marks on the kerb of Gatton Road in St Werburghs, unlikely to be a centre for Masonic ritual in my opinion: 

The same marks appeared three times on stones within a run of fifteen. The D-shaped mark then appeared again about half a mile away, alone on High Street in Easton:

...and again on South Street in Southville, on the other side of the city. This time it was accompanied by a circular mark that I haven't seen elsewhere in Bristol, apart from on that street.

While walking down Western Road, between Hove and Brighton, more kerbstone marks could be seen. These were at Second Avenue in Hove:

further along Western Road towards Brighton, more cross-shaped marks could be seen:

before letters started to appear.

Further still towards Brighton and these 'N' shaped marks could be seen. They are a little different to the others, as they were clearly made using a modern stone cutting circular saw rather than cut by hand. They were accompanied by long saw cut marks running along the kerbstones for a few metres.

I wonder if these marks point to such symbols being a road maintenance crew's work, or if it was just a bored workman messing about. The cuts along the kerbstones are pretty haphazard and not very straight.

Peter Dolan has written two very interesting articles in Geoscientist, the magazine of The Geological Society, which I recommend reading if you are also intrigued by these enigmatic markings. His first, Kerbstone Conundrum, introduces the subject and includes a list of symbols that he has seen or heard of. The second, Kerbstone Markings 2, goes into more detail. Peter has told me by email:

'Suffice it to say at present that I am 90% sure that most of these markings do relate to utility services, but haven't followed it far enough to get independent, documented verification.'

I like the way that the exact meaning of these symbols is still somewhat mysterious and subject to debate, whilst some of them are being walked past by hundreds of people every day.