Helping to put together the Meadow at Shambala festival 2017

Shambala is a music festival held in Northamptonshire in August. Since 2014, I've made furniture for the Meadow area at the event every year and was invited to do it again in 2017.

The Meadow houses the Healing Field, at the centre of which is a fireplace surrounded by seating and plants. It's a beautiful spot and I love to see people relaxing and unwinding on seats that I've made, surrounded by tents that healers are working in.

A week beforehand, bundles of scrap wood from sawmills are delivered to each area of the festival to build seating, fences or whatever else is required. It's always exciting to cut the straps, pick through and see what timber there is to work with! It could be oak, larch, lime, cherry or something else and much of it is reused from previous years. Sometimes even the strapping itself is reused in a design...

This particular festival is very keen on having as little environmental impact as possible. To help with that goal, we try to reuse as much as possible from previous festivals when making new furniture. Since a lot of the benches and tables are made from durable timbers such as larch or oak, they last well outdoors and so between festivals they are often used by visitors and fishermen on the estate. At the beginning of the next festival, we wander around hunting out each piece from wherever it has been spirited off to. There is always real excitement when a particularly-loved item of furniture is found!

Some of the benches from 2014 are still going strong today. When much of the rest of the site has new woodwork every year, I really like that the Meadow has furniture that is really 'of the place' - it stays there all year round. The patina of age suits it well.

Another thing that I really love about working in the Meadow area is that many of the crew have been doing this for years and know each other well. Some benches reuse pieces of timber that were originally part of seating made by Bertie, a stalwart crew member who sadly passed away before I started helping at the Meadow. It's nice to think that his work is still present in some of these benches.

I also enjoyed working with some of the younger crew members on making items for this festival. This seat was a joint effort, using materials found onsite, and we had a great time putting it together!

It's not just seating that gets made for Shambala. For the last two years, one of the featured workshops has been paddleboard yoga. The people doing it head out onto the lake on their paddleboards and do yoga there. 

We were asked to make a jetty, so that the attendees could get onto the water easily. It's now a permanent feature in the grounds. 

It's not only useful for the workshops but is also a nice place to sit, surrounded by swan mussels and water plants. Don't try swimming though! The water is quite shallow and the thick, black mud is deep. The swan mussels shouldn't be eaten either, by the way. Just relax and enjoy the view.

Building a shelter/gazebo at the allotment garden using reclaimed materials

Recently, work slowed up a bit. It's a natural part of the cycle of being a self employed maker but can certainly be stressful - wondering when the next job will come in. However, it does give a chance to catch up on things like website updates and also doing projects that are a bit different.

Luckily, this period of free time coincided with some redevelopment work at the woodyard where I have my studio. As part of this work, a quantity of reclaimed European larch was up for reuse. This larch timber is very durable outdoors and so I decided to use it to build a shelter at the allotment that I share with a friend.

For those who don't know what an allotment is, most towns and cities in the UK have areas that are owned by the local council which are rented out to local people for them to grow their own flowers, fruit and vegetables. There are usually regular inspections and some rules about what can be grown. I find the allotment a great place to unwind - digging all day certainly clears the mind.

Our allotment really needed somewhere to shelter from rain (ah! British weather!) as well as a place to just relax and enjoy the place. As well as the larch lumber and some slab wood left over from milling timber, a couple of larch trunks were available which had been drilled full of holes by wood wasps (horntails) and so were not suitable for use by the businesses that had bought them originally.

I set to making the structure. All of the work was done using hand tools (apart from a couple of battery-powered drills) as there was no power on site. There was also no one else to help with the build but that was quite nice - being free to just do it by myself.

After a few days of work, the main structure was finished. I then fitted a small jettied platform going out over the pond. It was lovely to sit and watch the wildlife around. Brightly coloured damselflies flitted over the water and several different kinds of wasp and bee flew around the posts. Some were large, strange looking parasitic ichneumonid wasps - harmless to humans and looking to lay their eggs on the wood wasp larvae. Others were small bees investigating the holes as nest sites. They were no threat to me and some, in fact, were helpful predators on pests feeding on the plants. Another welcome creature that is happy to eat garden pests is the slow-worm. It's neither a worm nor a snake, being a lizard without legs. I think that they are very beautiful animals and they can live for around twenty years.

The next stage of construction was to fit a roof. This meant buying two sheets of FSC-certified plywood - the only timber bought for the project. Getting the sheets up onto the roof was a bit of a struggle but once in place, they could be covered with offcut strips of tough butyl rubber. This was reclaimed waste material left over from building bike sheds. Joined with Sikaflex EBT+ adhesive, the rubber is a perfect waterproof covering.

That's the shelter done for now. I may fit some removable walling to protect from driving rain that can get under the roof but I'm happy with it the way it is at the moment - simple, natural and understated. The local allotments officer likes it and it is definitely a relaxing spot to appreciate the plants growing and wildlife busying around you.

Thanks very much to Roundwood Design, Touchwood Play and the Bike Shed Company for kindly donating the materials used to make this structure.

Helping to make the Meadow beautiful at Shambala festival 2015

The Shambala festival is held at a stately home called Kelmarsh Hall in Northamptonshire in the UK. Last year, I was asked to come along and make benches from sawmill waste boards, to be put in the Meadow field. I was delighted to be asked to come back this year to do it again.

The Meadow is a lovely, calm corner of the festival where the healers practice their skills and Tribe of Doris hold music-related activities.

At the end of last year's event, some of the benches were hidden away in a very quiet area of the site and it was great to see that they had survived quite happily. The sturdy larch timbers showed very few signs of decay, even under a layer of moss!

I used the surface darkening of the wood on one bench to carve lighter patterns, which represented the sun and moon:

Under a tarpaulin shelter, in a peaceful spot under a large sycamore by a lake, it was fun to plan new benches for the field. We worked happily under there, even when the rain came down all day! Everything was made using only hand tools, apart from a cordless drill.

There weren't just benches to be made. Annette, who oversees the healing field, had a special request too.

Someone had asked before the festival if it would be possible to create an area in which he could propose to his unsuspecting girlfriend. A particularly beautiful large tent had been chosen in which to do it:

Now five small shrines were needed, to represent the elements of air, water, earth, fire and wood. I made them using slab wood and also tree branches that had been removed by estate workers just before the festival.

The small tables were put around the outside edge of the tent and decorated with relevant things (because of fire risks, candle-shaped lights were used instead of real flames). It felt like a real privilege to make these items to be part of such an important occasion for the two people, their families and friends.

...and she said yes!

I wasn't the only person working with wood in the Meadow. Len sorted out the structures needed around the campsite, as well as designing a covered seat that looked great with foliage draped over it.

Clyde and Nathan also made structures that helped to make the site look welcoming.

Nathan and I dismantled some older benches and he reused the useful boards in new benches that were sturdier and will hopefully last until next year too. They are at the front on the right in the picture below, with Clyde's fence visible behind:

One new bench for this year was inspired by the straps that tied together the wood bundles when they were delivered. These straps were tough bands, stronger than the woven plastic ones that such bundles normally have securing them. I'd fancied making a suspended seat since the previous year and these straps would be useful. It was also nice to reuse such items from all around the site, instead of leaving them to be thrown away.

All of the benches were designed to be comfortable and I liked the deckchair-like slump of this one, even if it was quite hard to get out of (like a traditional deckchair, when I think about it). All the more reason to stay sitting there and relax!

The straps turned out to be quite strong enough to take plenty of people sitting on the seat, even when Len jumped all over it to test it.

The final thing to be made was a gate to separate the public area and crew camping. Nathan and I reused the gates from last year. One had darkened on its top surface, so that was the night sky (with stars and a UFO carved on it) and the other was day. Between them, the rays of the rising sun were fixed on.

After all the building, it was time to go and party! Here's a few final images of the festival itself. Thanks to everyone for making it a great Shambala 2015. I hope to see you all again next year.