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.

Some recently carved wooden signs and lettering, for clients including a cider maker and a well-known DJ (together with a sign featuring a portrait of a cat)

I've had a few interesting commissions lately, some of which I'll show on the blog when they are closer to being completed. Some of the recent commissions involving carved lettering have been quite unusual too...

This seat for a swing was carved from locally-sourced oak, which originally grew on the Quantock Hills in Somerset. It was shaped using modern and traditional techniques, including knives and drawknives, then carved with the name of the girl who will receive it. 

The wood was originally destined to become part of a ship's figurehead in memorial of a friend. After that project fell through, it's nice to know that this timber is going to be enjoyed by children playing and having fun.

This sign was carved for clients who wanted one of their Devon Rex cats to be shown on it. It's a bit nerve-wracking carving a portrait of a pet for someone, as they will always know the animal far better than I can from a photograph. 

Happily, they were very pleased with the outcome. It was quite a relief when a visitor to my studio saw the almost-completed carving and said (with no prompting) that it looked like a Devon Rex!

The next sign was carved for the Lenches Cider Company. I was particularly pleased with the lettering on this sign, as the squared shapes of the font used were not that easy to carve by hand and they came out very well. The oak was also a very nicely figured piece.

This project involved carving an inscription on a chopping board for a client, who had commissioned me to carve a similar project before. As you might imagine, it always feels satisfying when someone asks for another carving to be done for them because they are happy with the previous one.

An unusual next project, as the lettering had to be carved onto a sphere. I wondered at the time whether a computer-controlled routing machine would be able to do this kind of work?

I was also asked recently to correct someone else's letter cutting! The client had bought a rustic oak bench but wasn't happy with the inscription on it. It did look like it had been cut by someone with a blunt router blade who was in a bit of a hurry.

What a great afternoon, re-cutting the letters in their beautiful garden!

Everyone agreed that the lettering looked better once re-cut too:

 I received a lovely email afterwards saying ;

'Dear Alistair, Just to thank you once again fro the splendid job you did on my garden bench for me yesterday. I have to say also that it was a genuine pleasure to meet you and 'do business' with you! I wish you every success in the future'.

Finally, this sign was carved for a DJ and music producer. I'm reluctant to name him on the blog, as I'd rather respect his privacy (sorry!). I will say that he was a big part in the early drum and bass scene and is still playing to big crowds now. The sign was carved from oak and then stained.

If you'd like to see more of my previous letter cutting work, have a look at some by clicking on this link to the page on my website.