Stuart King Craftsman, artist, woodturner and photojournalist

How long has man been turning wood? Almost certainly longer than we have evidence for! What did the first lathe look like? We are not sure, but we can come to a reasonable conclusion bearing in mind the materials and technology available. There are just a few early illustrations that give us some insight plus the continuing use of simple technology in parts of the under-developed world. (more…)

Forget Lapland and Father Christmas, cease searching for Gusepie’s fictional workshop where Pinocchio was created. The real ‘toy-land’ is alive and well in old Saxony, This beautifully rural East German region encompasses the Erzgebirge mountains that shares a border with the Czech Republic. This whole area is dotted with small medieval towns and villages with half-timbered buildings that would be quite at home in any European fairytale. In fact when I reached my destination, the toy-making village of Seiffen, I had to suspend belief that this little community was part of a Disney film set. (more…)

The Doomsday Book records the Northhamptonshire hamlet of Clive (Kings Cliffe) as, ‘standing in 4 acres of meadow with a wood a mile long by half a mile broad’. In medieval times the village was one of the ‘Twelve Forrest Villages’ within the 250 sq. miles of Rockingham Forrest, originally owned by the crown and used exclusively for hunting.

One of the earliest recorded woodturners was Nicholas Baylye who married in 1597 and there has been an unbroken succession of Baylyes (Baly, Bailey) employed in woodturning right through to the 1940s. (more…)