Issue #11 The Miscellaneous Adventures Digest

On failed adventures and shrink pots

Hello and happy February! After last weekend’s successful snowy adventure, this weekend was something of a let down. We dilly dallied on deciding where to go and what to do, the weather dull and dreary. We thought of canoeing, then it started raining so we abandoned and settled on doing some woodworking and jobs at home, then the sun came out so we decided we would go canoeing after all and raced over to Coniston where it wasn’t actually sunny. We did have a nice little paddle, but Benji wasn’t feeling it and loudly let us know all about it. By then we’d missed lunch and the road out of Coniston was blocked in the direction we wanted to go so we had to detour all the way around the lake and ended up eating chips by the side of a busy road followed by a stop at the supermarket and an hour’s journey home.

I thought this was worth sharing because perhaps it’s good to know things don’t always go to plan, especially when trying to do adventurous things with kids in tow. We all tend to only put out the highlights on our feeds, but it can be draining constantly hearing about what a seemingly good time everyone is having. So here’s us saying, don’t worry if things aren’t going to plan, they aren’t for a lot of people a lot of the time, despite how it might look. And since we’re sharing failures, I also forgot to put the handbrake on in my car when I got home from work on Friday and it rolled backwards down the drive and crashed into a stone wall. I could go on but I’ll stop there.

It’s not all been bad, I did have time to experiment with some woodworking ideas. I have been cutting plenty of small birches over the last few weeks and scavenging offcuts and interesting looking sticks all the while.

A selection of birch makes.

The silvery bark of birch trees is so aesthetically pleasing that I wanted to make a few things honouring the natural beauty of birch. I made a batch of coat hooks utilising branchy bits and also a few shrink pots. Shrink pots are made by hollowing out the middle from a piece of freshly cut (green) wood and fitted with a base of seasoned wood; as the fresh wood dries it shrinks, locking the seasoned base in place, which is really rather magical. I like the two little ones with carved oak lids. What do you think? We might add a few of these to the store over the coming weeks…

Well, here’s to successful adventures ahead. If you’d like to make us feel better by sharing your own misadventures then we’re all ears…drop them in the comments for us all to enjoy.

Warm wishes,

Andrew, Emma and Benji

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