Whittling at the Woodmill

Our 9th meeting took place at the Woodmill studios in connection with the Heat Haze outdoor sound seminars. We had the pleasure to whittle while listening to Mark Pilkington's talk on 'Western occult tradition, told through British popular music' & the evening ended with a screening of William Eggelston´s film ´Stranded in Canton´.

Note plaster

Little horse on pillow by Ksenia

Multi-tailed cat by Jana

soft object by some visitors

A young boy called Liam dropped by the Woodmill and did some whittling while on his way home. Staying out way longer than he really should, he figured he could appease his mothers rage by whittling her this heart.

Cat by Little Jack

Jack´s finished spoon.

Paper Birch

There is a street in north London lined with Paper birch trees. The thin bark is peeling of the trunks in crisp layers and if you get hold of a piece you can pull it right of in the size of a page. The bark can be separated into extremely thin, but still durable and flexible sheets, a quality that explains why it was frequently used as an early writing material. There has been hundreds of old Birch bark letters uncovered around the Novgorod area in Russia. Some of them date back as early as the 11th century. The famous mathematical Bakhshali manuscript was also written on birch bark and is believed to be from somewhere between 200 BC - 300 AD. It might be one of the earliest documents to use the concept of zero (0).

Soviet knives

These knives were made by my grandfather a long time ago in Ukraine during the scarce days of the USSR. It was very hard to get hold of a lot of things so my granddad made these in the factory where he worked from some scrap. Pretty nice job with proper rivets and so on.