If you'd like to learn to weave amazing baskets from home and have all the materials you need delivered to your door, check out our range of basketry courses and kits. We offer variety of projects from complete beginner to advanced that let you learn from home at your own pace, without having to book time away to do a course.
To find out why learning to do something with your hands is so good for your wellbeing, check out our recent blog post with American Neuroscientist Dr. Kelly Lambert.
We hope you enjoyed your free course and we can't wait for you to start your weaving journey with us.
]]>Choosing and preparing a site for willow farming
Willow for weaving needs to be planted close together in rows to encourage the growth of kind of long straight shoots that make good baskets. And this means you generally you don’t need as much land as you might think to grow enough for your own use. Plenty of people grow it on a patch at the bottom of their garden. Willow likes very damp soil and it needs sunlight, so don’t plant it in an area that’s too shady.
The first thing you will need to consider is how you will keep weeds under control in the areas you are planting in. It’s important that there aren’t a lot of weeds growing around your willow as this will use up water and nutrients and reduce it’s growth. . In the old days people had to weed their willow farms by hand, which was backbreaking work.
These days a lot of people either put down a silage groundsheet and plant through it, or plant their rows of plants far enough apart that you can get a rotavator (powered weeder) in between them. If you’re just panting in your garden, we would suggest using silage sheet. Lay your sheet out on bare soil and dig in the edges with a shovel. Then weigh it down very thoroughly or it will shift and can end up damaging or burying your plants. The best thing to use for this is old tyres from the local garage, as they’re free and they won’t tear your sheeting. You’ll also need to think about how to keep deer away from your willow as they like eating the fresh shoots when they come up. Many growers with larger plantations put deer fences up.
Planting
Willow should be planted during the dormant season between December and April and is planted using willow cuttings. These are simply 12 to 14-inch sections of green willow shoot that have been recently cut. To plant your willow, first mark out a straight row of the desired length with some pegs and a piece of string. To plant a cutting, make a hole through the ground sheet and into the soil using an old screwdriver or a spike. Then push the willow cutting about 12 inches into the ground, so that only a small section is visible above the soil.
Make sure you plant each cutting the right way up so that the buds on the side are facing upward not downward. You also need to have at least three buds visible above the surface of the soil so that these can grown freely.
Plant each cutting about 12 inches apart and leave a gap of about 3 feet between each row. Planting the willow close together will encourage it to grow straight upward to reach the light and will meant it won’t form branches - no good for weaving baskets.
Coppicing
Let your willow farm grow for a year and a few good shoots will form on each plant. Then next winter, coppice these back down to the ground. This will strengthen the root system and encourage more shoots to grow. You can also take the shoots you have coppiced and cut them up into new cuttings to plant more willow with. This approach is a great way of expanding your willow farm for free. You can use the shoots that grow in year one for weaving, but they won’t be of the highest Quality. Coppice in the same way for the next couple of years, always in the inter when the leaves are off. You will find that the willow forms a head at ground level at the point you have been cutting it back to. This will get wider with time and start producing more willow shoots every year. The yield should increase every year for about 5 years. Again, the denser the rods growing on each plant are, the longer and straighter they will grow, with less side branches.
Harvesting your Willow Farm
Harvesting from your willow farm can be done any time between November and February, which is the period when the leaves are off. Snip the rods off at the base, being careful to leave the head undamaged, and then sort them into bundles of four, five and six feet. You can weave with willow when its still green but sometimes the basket can become a bit loose later once they have dried out. For the best results, tie the willow up into bundles and leave it to dry standing up in a dry indoor space for a few months. A barn is Ideal or a shed if its dry.
We hope this has been a useful introduction to willow farming. If you are interested in willow and willow basketry, check out our lovely home basketry kits. They contain everything you need to get started.
If you would like to read more about crafts, check out our blog on how to weave a willow basket, six amazing baskets you can weave from home, or why learning to make things together is by far the best way to spend time with family and friends.
]]>You arrange to meet up with a group of friends but all anyone wants to do is go to the same pub and talk about their recent house renovation. You feel like you’re not connecting with anyone and nothing that you do with your spare time seems to make you feel better. Panic builds inside you and pretty soon you’re wide awake late at night screaming THERE MUST BE MORE TO LIFE THAN THIS!!!
OK - perhaps a bit extreme - but you're not alone if you feel like this sometimes. Despite all the many ‘joys’ of the internet, humans seem to be getting more disconnected. We’re insanely busy, we text each other instead of calling, when we do see each other it can be brief and filled with distractions. Connecting with family is also getting harder, with devices and social media platforms that are specifically designed to kidnap our attention.
At the same time as all this, many of us also have no creative outlet. The generation before us knew how to make and mend. Until the 1980s many people cold fix their own car, make their own clothes and or make toys for their children. Our generation tends to ‘consume’ instead of create. We don’t make or fix anything ourselves, instead we specialise in one thing and pay others to do everything else for us.
The problem with all this is that being isolated, passive consumers is pretty much the opposite of what the human brain needs to be happy. Neuroscience tells us that we are at our best when we to feel connected to each other and also capable of doing things ourselves, not beholden to others to do things for us.
A great way to get a major hit of both these human needs is to set aside some time and learn to make something together. Practicing a craft like wood carving, basket weaving or even crochet can releases oxytocin, the brain’s bonding and trust hormone, and if you do it with your loved ones we guarantee it will be some of the best time you have spent together in ages. You will also talk more deeply as you work, really connect and really catch up. Plus you'll bond over helping each other with the project.
As the old saying goes, people talk better when they are working on something shoulder to shoulder than they do face to face.
Our customer Lisajane recently bought one of our basket weaving kits to do at home with her mother Angela:
‘I bought my mum your shopping basket course and have spent the last 2 days with her while she completed her basket. We had a really special time together and mum loved it. We chatted and laughed and swore once or twice I’ll admit! The videos were fabulous and set everything out brilliantly. The instruction was so soothing and unhurried, making it all so easy to follow. I thought you might like to see the result ! Thank you for a really special experience. We think we’ll do one each next time 😊”
Nigel bought four kits for his wife Sue and her friends to do together. She said, ‘We thoroughly enjoyed the whole process. It was very social and we love our new baskets! Now we all want to make another one!”
Why don’t people do more of this stuff?
A major reason that people don’t end up doing a craft course together is it can be hard to organise. You have to find a course that’s near you on a date that everyone else in your group can do. A lot of people can’t travel or need to arrange childcare, which makes it much more expensive. The great thing about adult craft kits is that everything is much easier to organise. You get lifetime access to an online course taught by a leading expert, and everything you need just turns up at your door. Our courses are produced by our BAFTA-winning team of filmmakers and designed to be easy enough for beginners, but challenging enough that you feel like you’ve learned a real skill.
If you’d like to have a go at one of our craft kits, you can order through our website, or email us a hello@myown2hands.co and we can advise you on which is the best course for your group.
This natural material lets you create elegant timeless pieces that look beautiful in your home and you can enjoy using every day. In this article we’re going to do a rundown of the types of baskets you can learn to weave from home using an adult craft kit.
If you’ve never done any craft before, it’s not a bad idea to warm up by tackling something simple like a willow star or a tension tray. These projects will help you understand how weaving with willow rods works. Willow is a natural material and you need to understand how to prepare it and how to make it bend around corners without breaking. The willow tension tray is a real favourite as it’s a simple project you can use for serving snacks or as a stand for hot pans.
Once you have got a simple project under your belt you should be ready to weave your first willow basket. We suggest starting with a round-based basket as this is the foundation or basketmaking and a core willow weaving skill you need to conquer. The fruit basket is a great first project. It doesn’t take long to do but along the way you will learn all the absolute core skills, such as how to weave a round base, how to but a simple pairing weave up the sides and how to lay a decorative border (rim) around the top, you can use the same skills to weave other simple baskets in different sizes.
A shopping basket is ideal for beginners who want to do a more in-depth project and progress a bit faster. It takes a bit longer to do (4-5 hours) but you can split it up into three manageable 1.5 hour sessions if you’re short of time. You’ll learn to weave the round base but this time you’ll learn a variety of weaves on the sides. ‘Waling’ goes on the bottom of the basket and provides strength and durability. Then you’ll put ‘French Randing’ which is very pretty and a great skill that you can apply to other projects. Finally you’ll learn to lay the border and weave a fantastic willow handle - complete with a beautiful handle wrap using this herringbone pattern. This will make your handle extremely strong.
Another type of basket you might want to try as a beginner is a one with a d-shaped base, like this bike basket. You’ll also learn how to put a multifaceted ‘slewing’ pattern on the sides. D-shaped baskets are great to learn because you can use the same skills on a larger scale to make a willow backpack. You can mount the basket on your handlebars using a couple of leather straps.
If you want to go for something altogether more elegant and sophisticated, a oval-shaped basket is a great choice. Oval shaped basket bases are a bit more complicated, but they are still doable for beginners who are feeling confident or have some experience with other crafts. Our oval basketry kits come with enough willow for you to have two attempts at weaving the base in case the first one isn’t perfect!
Oval baskets are great for taking to the market of for taking on picnics and you can choose to make them in two sizes, 16 inches long and 20 inches long. They have a lovely cable pattern French rand on the sides and they come with a special leather kit to make the leather handles.
According to our customers this is the willow weaving project they most want to learn to do and you can see why. No home is complete without a willow log basket sitting next to the fire, and nothing is more satisfying than making one yourself! Daunting as they may look, these baskets are very doable, but we suggest you make at least one other basket before you dive in.
In our log basket course and kit you will learn how to weave a square base and the best way to approach this at home, how to put uprights on a square base using a special technique called scalloming and how to weave an English rand on the sides, which gives them a lovely spiral pattern. You will also learn how to lay a square border, which is a totally new technique, and how fit traditional a pair of twisted willow handles.
By the end of this project you will be well on the way to being able to handle any willow weaving project you like.
If you’d like to get started with willow weaving but aren’t sure which project is right for you, send us an email at hello@myown2hands.co and we’ll be happy to help. Our kits make great presents and they’re also lovely and convenient to do as a group because there is no need to schedule an in-person class that works for everyone. Plus buy more than one and you’ll get 20% off!
If you'd like to read more about crafts, check out our blog on how to weave a willow basket, how to get started with wood whittling or why learning to make things together is by far the best way to spend time with family and friends.
]]>But beyond that (like many of the adult craft kits we offer) it was a core useful skill for early humans - something we’ve done for most of our time on earth and only recently forgotten. When you make your first basket you will recognise the significance to of this. Weaving feels natural - almost familiar - and it soothes the mind. Basket weaving has long been a communal activity and it’s still a fantastic thing to do with a group today. Scientists have even discovered that it produces oxytocin in the brain, the so-called ‘cuddle hormone’ that brings out feelings of empathy, bonding and trust. Many of our customers order four or five basket kits from us and then get together for a lovely afternoon of making and learning from home, without the need to travel or find a course that fits in with everyone’s schedule.
Where did basket weaving originate?
Weaving is thought to be one of the oldest and most widespread crafts, existing in almost all human cultures. The earliest examples of baskets can be found in the Middle East and date back 12,000 years, but the craft is thought to be much older than that. Few ancient baskets survive because they were made from organic materials. In in the UK and northern Europe, nature provides the perfect natural material for basketry in the form of willow rods. These long straight shoots appear when willow is planted and coppiced in a certain way (see out blog on how to grow willow) Our willow is sustainably grown and even captures a bit of carbon from the atmosphere along the way.
How can you get started with weaving?
The first thing you will need is a bundle or two of willow. In the UK, most willow is grown in Somerset and it is sold in bunches that are sorted by weight and length. For example you could buy a 5kg bundle of willow rods that are 5ft long. Or a 2 kg bundle of willow rods that are 6ft long. Most rods used in willow basketry are either five or six feet long. There are also several types of willow you can use.
‘Brown’ willow is willow with the bark still on. Different species have different colour barks and this can be a great way to create baskets with a variety of hues.
‘Buff’ willow is the toffee coloured willow that you see on a lot of classic baskets or picnic hampers. This is willow that has gone through a process where it is boiled and had the bark stripped off, which gives it it’s light brown colour.
Each basket you make requires a certain number of rods of each length. One of the nice things about our basket weaving kits is that we will send you the right amount of each length (plus a bit extra) so that you can just get on with the project.
Preparing willow for weaving.
Before you can weave it, willow needs to be soaked, so that the rods can bend without snapping. This is an easy process and totally doable at home. When you are starting out, we recommend using buff willow as it only takes 2 hours to soak and gives your basket a lovely classic look. You can soak your willow in the bath, just weigh it down with a couple of weights to keep it submerged.
If you don’t have a bath, you can use a soaking bag (we supply these with our kits). These are basically a long plastic tube that you can put the willow bundle inside. Lie it flat on the ground and then it fill up with water from a jug or hose. We recommend that you do this outside.
Once you’ve soaked the willow for a couple of hours, take a rod and bend it to see if it snaps. If it will bend without snapping, it’s ready to weave!
To get the best results you can also ‘mellow’ the willow overnight. After soaking it, drain your bath, take an old bedsheet and soak it with water, then wrap your bundle in the sheet and leave it overnight. This will allow the moisture to penetrate deeper into the rods.
Tools
The lovely thing about weaving is that you can do it with very few tools, and this is especially true with the type of smaller projects you will be doing as a beginner. All our projects are design to be done with tools you will already have lying around the house.
The main tools you will need are;
That’s all you need!
If you’re thinking about learning to make your first basket you may feel a bit daunted. Where do you get the right materials and information? And are there any good courses available near you that are taking place on the right dates? That’s where our courses and kits come in. Pick a basket from our site that you want to learn to make, and you’ll get lifetime access to a beautifully produced, in-depth online video course, plus all the materials you need will be delivered straight to your door. Our kits are great to do alone, great to do in groups and they also make fantastic creative gifts.
Weaving your first basket
Before you weave your first basket it’s not a bad idea to have a go at a fun and ultra-simple project first. It gives you an opportunity to make a few mistakes and get used to working with the material.
That’s why we are currently offering our Tension Tray Kit as a FREE bonus when you order our Shopping Basket Kit. The tension tray is a lovely first project that will teach you a few basic weaving techniques and generally get you warmed up to make your first basket. Tension trays are great for serving food like cheese or sandwiches. You can also use them as a stand to put hot pans on.
What’s the best type of basket to tackle?
It’s now time to weave your first basket, and one of the most fun parts of the process is deciding which one to make!
Willow baskets come in a variety of shapes and sizes and it’s important to choose the right one as a first project. They can be grouped into four broad groups: round base, D-shaped base, oval base and square base.
Round base baskets are a great place to start and are the foundation skill of basketry. The nice thing about making baskets is once you have mastered a basic round base format, you can go on to make a great variety of things.
The Willow Fruit Basket is a great first project. You can also use it to serve bread or canapes or as a centrepiece for your table. This project will teach you several core techniques including how to make around base, a basic ‘pairing’ weave for the sides and how to make the ‘border’, which is the rim around the basket. This project covers the basics and only takes about 1.5 hours to complete.
If you are looking to learn a wider variety of skills, we recommend weaving a Shopping Basket. These baskets are gorgeous and you will learn all the main skills of basketry: the round base, three types of weave on the sides that each play a different role, the border and also a lovely willow handle lattice handle wrap.
This basket takes a longish afternoon to make, or you can split is up into three sessions which makes it great for fitting in around your other commitments.
To get an idea of what the process is like, check out this FREE video lesson from our Shopping Basket course, which teaches you how to get started making a round basket base:
Once you have mastered the base you will learn how to insert the uprights, which is known in basket weaving as ‘staking up’.
These vertical rods dictate the conical shape of the sides of the basket and it’s important to get them evenly spaced and bending up in a smooth uniform curve. These are then secured together with a tie at the top.
After the uprights you will put on the waling. This strong 3-rod weaving pattern is easy to do and helps reinforce the area where the uprights meet the base. It also forms hardwearing lip around the bottom edge of the basket that helps it deal with being left on the floor etc.
It’s then time to put on the French rand. There are many different patterns of weave that you can put on the side of a basket, but the French rand is one of the prettiest and most accessible. At this point you can choose how high to make your basket as you can either put on one layer or two layers. The process is identical.
Once you have finished sides you put on one more layer of waling which is designed to strengthen and reinforce the rim of the basket. Then it’s time to lay the border.
There are also many types of borders in basket weaving and for the shopping basket you’ll need to learn a so-called four-behind-two rod border. This is a classic that you will have seen on many baskets before. The border is laid in two phases, the initial weaving pattern around the rim, and then ‘weaving away’ the border, which is when you tuck it back into itself at the end to give it a continuous flowing pattern all the way round.
After the border comes the handle, which is the final job and can be done as a separate session. You’ll make a 3-foot-long handle core from one of your thicker rods and insert it into opposite points on the rim to make the basic shape. Then you will wrap the handle with 5 thinner rods to secure it, finishing off with this lovely herringbone weave on the sides. This makes the handle both beautiful and incredibly strong.
If you’d like to learn to weave the shopping basket, take a look at our shopping basket course and kit. All our kits come with a 30 day, no quibble, money back guarantee, so you can try them out risk free. If you’re part of a group, you’ll get an automatic 20% off. Just buy the number of kits you want and then email the participants names and emails to hello@myown2hands.co. We will then get everyone set up with their own account to view the course.
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Whittling can be enjoyed literally anywhere and is the perfect craft to take with you on camping trips and other adventures. Once you get started, you'll start viewing every piece of wood you see lying around as an amazing opportunity to create something.
One of the main obstacles people find when they want to start carving is that they don’t know where to get the wood from and they also can’t book a lot of time away to go on a course. In these situations, a pre-prepared craft kit like this one can be a really good idea. All the tools and wood you need are delivered to your door and it also comes with lifetime access to a beautifully produced, 4-hour video course. This means you can learn whenever you have a quiet moment!
In the above course you’ll learn to make four lovely projects, a simple spatula, a cooking spoon (great for cooking stews), a small eating spoon (great for honing your fine carving skills) and finally a coffee scoop. By the end of the course you’ll have the confidence to start harvesting wood yourself and designing your own projects.
Why is Whittling so good for you?
Wood carving has also long been associated with mental development and wellbeing. Like all crafts, it increases neuroplasticity in the brain, which is your brain’s ability to grow, learn and adapt. It also releases a complex cocktail of wellbeing hormones like dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin, that can have a lasting positive impact on anxiety and depression. Throughout history, it has always been a popular activity among soldiers on the march because it soothes the mind, requires few tools and allows you to make things you could use around camp.
In the late 19th century, the revolutionary educator Otto Salomon recognised that it could be used to help children develop.
Salomon thought that most classroom-based learning in elementary schools was boring, too theoretical and did very little for a child’s personal development. The constant memorising and regurgitation of facts meant that children ultimately grew disdainful of education and misbehaved.
To counter this he devised a syllabus of crafts, which became known as the sloyd movement. This encouraged students to learn increasingly challenging forms of woodwork, starting with whittling. He laid out the potential benefits of his system in the following 10 points:
Salomon said that a child with no training in manual dexterity was only half educated and that is a view that we at MYOWN2HANDS.CO share. Humans are builders, and if we don’t know how to do anything with our hands, an enormous reward centre in the brain lies dormant and we miss out on an essential part of what it is to be alive. Ask anyone who practices a craft, and they’ll tell you the same thing.
What Tools will I need for whittling?
The joy of this craft is that you can get a long way with only 2 small hand tools: the straight knife and the crook knife.
The straight knife is used for general shaping of the wood, and there are many different cutting techniques that you can learn to control the knife better and increase safety. In our course we teach seven cutting techniques for the straight knife, and each one is used in a different situation, depending on the angle of the cut and the direction of the wood grain in the area you are working on. The combination of these two factors makes for a really absorbing puzzle as you turn the piece you’re working on over in your hands.
The crook knife, or hook knife, has a curved blade that allows you to carve out hollows and concave shapes. This includes hollowing out the bowl in spoons, cups and scoops.
The other critical thing you need is a way of keeping your tools sharp. As a general rule it is much better to sharpen your tools little and often. If you let your tools get too blunt it takes a lot of work and more equipment to get them back to a good level of sharpness. In out kits we include a leather strop sharpening system and some special sharpening paste so that you can give your knife a very quick re-sharpen after each use. Sharp tools will lead to much better results overall and a lot more enjoyment along the way. They are also much safer to work with as cutting with a sharp tool requires less force.
What wood do I need for whittling?
One of the tough things about starting out as a woodworker is finding the right wood to make the thing you want to make. Wood is a vast and weirdly intimidating subject and finding it is the number one thing that daunts new learners. Does the wood you have bought have the right grain? Is it the right species? Is it the right state of dryness (seasoning) for carving?
This is why we include four lovely wood ‘blanks’ in our kits. Each one has been pre-shaped to the rough dimensions of each project you will tackle (spatula, cooking spoon, eating spoon, coffee scoop) so that it’s ready to be carved straightaway.
But once you’ve gotten started, you’ll find that looking for wood yourself is one of the most fun aspects of whittling.
In the UK there are many woods that are excellent to use. The best are the ‘leafy hardwoods’. These include Ash, Willow, Birch, Alder and Lime. It’s a good idea to avoid soft coniferous woods like pine as these are less dense and tend to absorb more moisture, which is not what you want if you are trying to carve something useful like a spoon. Fruit woods like cherry are also an excellent choice.
When you harvest your own wood, the fresher it is the better. You want to start working on it while the wood is still ‘green’ or still holding most of its moisture. This is when it is softest and easiest to cut and shape.
If you see any tree surgeons felling trees or come across some freshly cut logs in the woods, it’s fine to ask to take some. You can also contact local park wardens, who are usually very receptive. Once you start looking out for it you will find that there is more than enough available. A huge amount of wood has to be felled each year just to keep the roads, parks and rail lines safe, so get out there and start making a few contacts.
What type of log will I need?
The best piece to start with is a nice clean log that is 6 - 10 inches in diameter, straight grained (free from knots) and doesn’t have any branches coming out of it. Branches also disrupt the grain and make the wood much harder to work. You also need to check that is free from rot, especially if it’s been lying on the ground.
Once you’ve found a log, you can easily split it down into smaller using a hatchet and mallet, which is a really fun process. Then you’re ready to start shaping with your knives.
To keep the wood moist during storage you will need to keep it away from heat and sunshine. Some people even store their small billets in the fridge to keep them moist!
Our wood blanks are made of Bass wood, which will make very nice spoons but is still soft enough to be a great wood for beginner carvers. Once you’ve done a few initial projects, your confidence will increase and you’ll be ready to start looking for your own wood.
A word on safety.
Whittling requires the use of sharp tools and there is a small risk of cutting yourself. To mitigate this, it is important to pay close attention to your cutting techniques as these are designed to make is very difficult for you to cut yourself. You always cut with the blade angled away from your body and you position your hands in a way that tightly controls the direction of the blade’s travel. We also recommend buying a pair of knife resistant gloves. These can be bought for only 10 pounds and will protect your fingers while you are getting started. You don’t have to wear a glove on your knife hand, it's more important on the hand that is holding the object you’re carving.
Designing you own projects.
The real joy of learning to whittle is when you start designing your own projects as there are an unlimited number of shapes and styles to explore. The best way to get started is to spend some time on a platform like Instragram looking for designs you like. Then take this inspiration and do a life-size drawing of what you want to make on a piece of paper, viewed from the top-down perspective.
To transfer the design onto your piece of wood, cut it out and stick it to a piece of card (we use old cereal boxes!). Cut this out again and this will make a template that you can then draw around on your piece of wood with and pencil. This will transfer the exact shape you want to create onto the wood. Once you’ve done that you can get on with cutting the wood down to the basic shape required and then refining it into the finished product. Simple as that!
What sort of finish should I give my whittling projects?
There is a big controversy in the world of green woodwork over whether so use sandpaper to finish off a piece or just rely on the multifaceted finish provided by a sharp knife. Our view is that this is entirely up to you, although excessively sanding a piece that you have worked hard on can make it lose some of its handmade character. Some people refine the finish on a spoon by rubbing it all over with a round pebble which can be a nice happy medium.
If you’re making something that you want to use for cooking or eating, it’s not a bad idea to apply a food-safe oil to it. Our kits include a nice little bottle of linseed oil that you can apply to your finished work. Linseed oil is a natural polymer so it will set hard and add an extra layer of protection for cooking and eating.
Thanks for joining us!
We really hope you’ve enjoyed our guide to getting started with whittling. If you have any questions about our course and kit then drop us a line at hello@myown2hands.co.
If you’d like to watch a free lesson which take you through a few knife skills then just go to the course page and click ‘watch free lesson’ at the top of the page.
Our kits make wonderful creative presents, and they are also great to do in a group. If you buy more than one you get an automatic 20% off!
We would be delighted to help you get started.
If you'd like to read more about crafts, check out our blog on how to weave a willow basket, six amazing baskets you can weave from home, or why learning to make things together is by far the best way to spend time with family and friends.
]]>The Men’s Shed Association.
This marvellous organisation helps retired men to meet new people and pursue creative activities by helping them set up communal workshop spaces or ‘sheds’. Some sheds are in garages, some are empty offices, some are warehouses and one was even set up in a disused mortuary. The men in them, known as Shedders, practice a dizzying array of crafts, including woodwork, metalwork, leatherwork, electronics and even car building. They also do projects for their community like fixing bikes and building things for schools.
Why are men’s sheds needed?
When you speak to members of a men’s shed, it’s not uncommon to hear things like “It saved my marriage.” Or “It save my life”.
When men retire, it can often feel like their sense of identity and purpose has been lost. A lot of men’s social lives are based around work, and they can end up alone or ‘under their wives’ feet’ in the house. Although most members are retired, there are an increasing number of members who are younger. Many of them are ex-forces, or performing the role of primary carer at home.
It’s well known that men in these situations typically find it more difficult to build social connections than women and are less likely to share personal worries or concerns about their health. The impact of this isolation can be extreme. Men are three times more likely to commit suicide than women, and research shows that loneliness can be as hazardous to your health as obesity of excessive smoking.
Amazingly, members report that going to a shed can help with all these problems. Not only can men learn new skills, but they also meet likeminded people and have someone to share their worries with. They gain a renewed sense of purpose and belonging and are more likely to deal with health issues sooner, which can increase their life expectancy. As one Shedder put it: “It’s the hour and a half where we sit down together in our break room and have a cup of tea and a bacon role, that’s the Men’s Shed.”
We had a chat with Geoff Allison, a Men’s Shed ambassador and founder of the shed in Dalbeattie, Scotland, which was recently voted men’s shed of the year.
Tell us a little bit about what your shed does specifically...
“We set up our men’s shed way back in 2014 and always intended it to be a practical shed that makes and mends things. It's about 4000 square feet now and has five workshops, and we do lots and lots of things - woodwork to metalwork, welding and wrought iron work, fixing small engines, 3d printing, leathercraft pyrography and lots more.”
You said before it's basically a place for men to go who have had some kind of disruption in their lives. What does that mean?
“Well, we started off as a group of retired men. But we've found that not all are retired, we have some men who have become carers for their partners. And that's a very isolating activity. I know because I, I've had five years of that myself. And they love to come to the shed for a couple of hours and just get out of the house. And we also have our younger members, most of whom are ex-servicemen, who have probably had a hard time transferring from military life to civilian life. And some of them are quite injured, suffering physically or mentally.
The common ground between the retirees, the carers and the military men is a 'discontinuity'. Their social life used to be tied up with what they were doing. And suddenly, something's changed. And the social life comes to an end they become isolated.”
What do you think is special about sheds for men in that situation?
"If you forget about pubs and betting shops, there's just not a lot for men to do to socialise. They can be very isolated. There are lots of coffee clubs and whatever, but that doesn't seem to appeal to men. But when there's some nice machinery to play with and a chance to go out and do something, they love it!
I retired in 2009. I was gone 65 and my wife was suffering from dementia. I spent five years 24/7 looking after my wife as Alzheimer's gradually took her away from me. And previous to retirement, of course, I'd travelled around a lot. And again, I was one of these guys who's social life outside the house was with work."
What would you say was the impact on your own sort of mental health as you as you started going to the shed?
"After I’d been looking after my wife for 5 years, eventually I collapsed. And in 2014, my wife went into residential care and I was left alone in a in a house in a town where I didn't know that many people.
But now Ive found the shed I’ve got something to get my teeth into and I'm also spending less time at the doctor's."
Do you think you've improved your physical health as well?
"Oh, absolutely. Yeah it’s been amazing. And a lot of the guys say the same. In the shed movement we often say that instead of talking face to face, we talk ‘shoulder to shoulder’ while we’re working on something. We open up to each other and sometimes encourage each other to go to the doctor if there’s a problem. Often there’s someone in the shed who has had a similar issue in the past."
Why do you think doing stuff with your hands appeals so much to go guys from your generation?
"We’re from the make and mend era. And if you go back to the sort of post war time, things were built to last.
Most people secondary school back then had trades training, usually woodshop, but some guys did metal craft and other things as well. Nowadays, the schools do very little of that. It seems to have been dropped. And again, a lot of our possessions are single use now, and when they when they get to be a problem, we throw them away. But there are still people who have treasured possessions that are fixable and the Shedders can help the with that."
Do you think learning to use your hands is good for people?
"Oh yeah, absolutely. It’s the pride. We had a lady ring us several years ago, and she said “My husband is Italian. And he doesn't speak much English, although he's lived here for 20 or 30 years. The children are grown up and, you know, he’s a bit under my feet in the house. Do you think you can take him to the shed? He's not practical, but can you take him along and do something?” And we said yes, fine."
So you took him in?
"Oh yes! Anyway when he came in, a guy was making chopping boards out of strips of waste hardwood. And he said, he'd like a go at that. So he made one. He planed it all down, stained it, and he engraved it with the name of one of his sons. And it's become a bit of a joke now, because every time he gets back from Italy these days the first thing he does is start looking for wood to make chopping boards out of. And his delight in being able to do it is enormous. It was the first thing he’d ever really made."
If you'd like to learn more about why learning to make things is so good for your brain, check out our recent blog post with neuroscientist Dr. Kelly Lambert.
If you'd Like to learn to make things with your hands. Have a look at some of our amazing courses.
]]>Take a few minutes to watch this film. It's follows a family of Netsilik people way up in the icy wastes of northern Canada as they build a seagoing kayak. Despite having nothing to work with but driftwood and a few worn out tools, they still manage to make a beautiful, strong and water dynamic craft that will last several lifetimes.
The people in this film have 'clever hands' - an ability to take the most unpromising tools and materials and turn them into something incredible. In the arctic, basic resources like wood and steel are scarce, but the Netsilik made everything they own themselves: harpoons, canoes, snow shoes, fur clothing, boots and Igloos.
People sometimes think of the hunter-gatherer way of life as 'primitive', but the mental capacity needed to be able to do such a wide variety of things is huge, and scientific research suggests it's also incredibly good for the brain. These days many of us are increasingly passive consumers, we only learn how to do one job in life and we pay other people to do everything else for us. But research also suggests that this narrow, passive way of living may be bad for us and that our brains are happier doing a wider variety of things for ourselves - and benefitting effort-based rewards.
For tens of thousands of years until the industrial revolution, humans made almost everything ourselves. We had a broad set of skills and could turn our hands to any task. Now we all specialise in one area, and everything we own is made by machines.
This is extremely convenient, but it’s a rather narrow, unsustainable way of life and ultimately leaves us feeling slightly empty and unfulfilled. The enormous reward centre in our brain associated with making lies dormant. We all feel like we should be able to do something with our hands, it’s part of being human, but most of us can’t.
We all know about the benefits of exercise, but making things is just as beneficial in a different and arguably deeper way. Every time we make something our minds improve, and we leave the process better and more capable than when we started. It builds confidence, self-reliance and even a sense of meaning and purpose that we can’t get from anything else. Not only can making make you feel great, it can also be a key tool for weathering life’s storms.
We can't all go back to the hunter-gatherer age, but at MYOWN2HANDS we're starting a movement to encourage people take a small step back towards that approach to life.
When they learn a new skill, start to create a bit more - rather than always consume - and to experience the profound benefits that come with making things yourself that you can really use - a basket, a spoon, a jumper or even a canoe!
If you'd like a helping hand learning to make something, check out our range of adult craft kits. You can learn from home and we deliver all the materials you need to your door. There's something for people of all abilities and levels of spare time.
Please let us know what you think of the film by replying to us at hello@myown2hands.co.
]]>For ten years I worked as a war reporter in the world's most hostile places. I covered famines, civil wars, revolutions and a genocide. I was grazed by a bullet in Libya, nearly kidnapped in Syria and I also had a game of ping pong with Al-Qaeda. By the summer of 2018, I was ready for a break.
I decided to take a couple of months off and try to fulfil an old childhood dream of building a wooden boat. Then something unexpected happened - the experience transformed my mental health.
As soon as my hands touched the tools, I just felt deeply, profoundly better, and by the end of the process I was convinced that making things is a key missing ingredient to fulfilment that most of us aren't getting.
Soon afterwards I decided to start a company to encourage other people to get started.
Why did starting to make things transform my life?
I've been doing some digging and I think the answer begins with the fact that these days many of us are 'knowledge workers'.
We spend all our time absorbing, processing and reproducing information, and most of this work is digital and has no 'real' result that you can hold in your hands. Although I worked in war zones, most of the work I did was also digital. I would produce films that required thousands of hours of screen time to shoot an edit and once finished, they existed only on the internet.
Recent research in neuroscience suggests that this type of work may not give our brains what they need to feel happy. For aeons, human beings made everything they owned themselves, including all the tools they needed to survive. These objects could be touched and used, and our brains developed to derive self-esteem, purpose and a sense of personal power from making them.
Dr. Kelly Lambert is a brilliant neuroscientist from America who believes that one of the reasons levels of depression and anxiety keep rising every year around the world is that less and less people make things for themselves. In her amazing book, Lifting Depression: A Neuroscientist's Hands-On Approach to Activating Your Brain's Healing Power she argues that using our hands to make things is one of the best ways to give the brain what it needs to achieve all-round wellbeing.
"What revs up the crucial effort-driven rewards circuit—the fuel, if you will—is generated by doing certain types of physical activities, especially ones that involve your hands. It’s important that these actions produce a result you can see, feel, and touch, such as knitting a sweater or tending a garden. Such actions and their associated thoughts, plans and ultimate results change the physiology and chemical makeup of the effort-driven rewards circuit, activating it in an energised way. I call the emotional sense of well-being that results effort-driven rewards."
Dr Lambert also explains that 80% of the neurons in the brain are used to control movement, not thought, and that a large proportion of those neurons are linked to controlling the hands. This means that when you use your hands to perform a complex task, it's a great way if giving your brain a workout. Learning a new variety of skills also increases the neuroplasticity of the brain, which means your brain gets better at learning, planning and making decisions - all very useful attributes for the rest of your life.
She also says that modern antidepressants tend to only target one brain chemical, which makes them quite a crude tool that doesn't always work better than a placebo.
Making things with your hands releases a complex cocktail of brain chemicals including dopamine, oxcytocin and serotonin that provoke a more profound feeling of wellbeing:
"Effort-driven rewards and other real-world interactive experiences generate much more intense and pervasive reactions in your brain than the neurochemical alterations produced by a single pill. The result? You begin to feel more control over your environment and more connected to the world around you. This reduces stress and anxiety and, most important, builds resilience against the onset of depression."
In 2019, the BBC undertook the largest study of its kind in partnership with UCL, with almost 50,000 people taking part. The Great British Creativity Test explored how creative activities can help us manage our mood and boost wellbeing.
The research found that trying a NEW creative activity is particularly good for our emotions and wellbeing. Crucially, it also showed that skill level isn't important. There are many people out there who think they 'aren't creative', but they benefit from making things just as much as highly skilled people. It really is the taking part that counts.
The findings also revealed that we get emotional benefits from even a single session of creativity and there are cumulative benefits from regular engagement. If you'd like some advice on how to get started check out our blogs on how to get started with basketweaving, how to get started with wood whittling and six great baskets you can learn to weave from home.
Dr. Lambert kindly agreed to speak to us about her research, Here's what she said:
Dr. Lambert, tell us a bit about your work...
'I am a behavioural neuroscientist and professor here at the University of Richmond in Virginia and the USA. We use animal models to try to understand aspects of human mental conditions such as depression and anxiety. We're trying to understand how the brain can thrive and be healthy.’
What made you start looking into the links between doing things with your hands and the well-being of the brain?
‘A couple of things, I was working on a textbook, clinical neuroscience, where we were trying to look at the biological basis of mental illness.
I was writing the depression chapter, and I became frustrated…We have a huge ammount ot pharmaceutical tools to treat depression. We have many drugs and they have played some role. But when you really dive into the literature, the percentage the efficacy rate of antidepressants is disappointing, it is sometimes little better than a placebo. Don’t get me wrong, we'll take all we can get, but the success rates are disappointing.”
Something you've also said is that despite the fact that there’s a multibillion dollar pharmaceuticals industry around depression, numbers of cases of depression just keep rising every year…
“Right. And if you look at other treatments for other medical conditions, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, death rates are decreasing - we seem to be getting better with those.
And it's interesting that in these medical conditions, the pharmaceuticals and medical treatments seem to be working. However depression rates continue to rise, death by suicide is scarier than ever, especially with our young adults. So if the drugs (anti-depressants) help, why are the numbers not getting better? That is a mystery that I'm very interested in.
Something that you've said, when talking about the sort of limitations of antidepressants, was that is that it's hard to mimic nature. What do you what do you mean by that?
“So our brain is incredibly complex, and it has lots of parts, and it has lots of chemicals. So it makes sense to think that maybe some disruption of a chemical can lead to neural psychiatric illness, and especially neurological illness, which is different. For something like Parkinson's Disease it is a little bit easier to nail down exactly what's going on there and then treat it with drugs, but with depression, all these neuro-chemicals are firing at different rates and modulating each other.
I always tell my students: context matters! Most of the antidepressants target serotonin, which is involved in a lot of different functions in our brain, including mood regulation, but it’s also involved in temperature regulation and aggressive behaviour and sexual behaviour. So there's no real clear evidence - when you walk into the doctor's office - to determine that you have low serotonin levels, and that this can be fixed by taking an antidepressant.
Now - I'm not a clinician. So I'm not saying if you're on these drugs to not take them, but I kind of look at it as a tow truck. So if your car breaks down, you can have a tow truck carry you around. But you really don't want to do that, you want to be able to drive your own car - to have the agency the autonomy to do that. And what we do see with a long-term use of these drugs, it seems like we're not getting out of the tow truck situation.
So it is complicated. And again, I'm not saying that we should show throw the drugs out, but at the very least, we need to include lifestyle. What can I do through exercise or using cognitive behavioural therapy or learning a new hobby so that the brain can start to take charge, and have a sense of agency and control again. If you had diabetes, a physician would never say, oh, take this insulin without having a conversation about your lifestyle, what you're eating, your diet and your exercise, because it all goes together.
You've said we view the brain as being a thinking organ, but it's actually mostly an organ that controls movement. How is how is that relevant to treating a condition like depression?
“In my latest book, Well Grounded, I kind of asked this question and it has multiple functions. At one level, it's taking care of our bodies, kind of the physical operations plant, maintaining our heart rate, and our hormonal secretions and muscle tone and such. But also, it's this information processing organ that's bringing in sensory information to allow us to make the best decisions. And we can talk about that as well. But when I went back to the Blackboard of the brain to think about depression, and you just map out the real estate of the brain, well one clue is what are the parts doing? And there's one area that is called the cerebellum, which literally means a little brain and hangs off the back of our brains. Most of our neurons are actually in this area called the cerebellum - like 78% of our neurons are there. So this tells us this is an important area. So if you look across the brain, most of the real estate is devoted to movement.
But in the last 100 years our behaviours have changed a huge amount. Now we're perfectly happy sitting in front of screens. But if our brains evolved to move, to coordinate movement, to really be in synchrony with our environment, physical environment and real social environment, the way we live now seems like a step backward.
I always tell my students that we're accountable for the environments, and the lifestyles that we put our brains in, our brains are changing from the womb to the tomb. So that gives us the responsibility to make sure we're putting it in a healthy environment.”
For tens of thousands of years, everyone made a living to an extent by doing something with their hands…
“Right, and I would argue that our ancestors who were using their hands instead of sitting in an office being informational experts, were probably using their brains more than we do now.
The other key thing is our ideas about prosperity. In the culture that I'm living in, prosperity is connected to the idea that you have enough money to pay someone to do things for you. So going to restaurants and paying someone to cook for you, maybe you pay someone to clean your house or to mow your lawn, do your yard work, to make your clothes. And that makes us feel like we we've made it because we don't have to do that. But the brain prefers it when we do things for ourselves. It make the brain feel in charge and in control.
Why is using your hands specifically so good for the brain?
“One thing that I should say that's very important, is that motor cortex that I talked about that is involved in the movement of different areas of our body, a huge proportion of it is related to our hands. So we're activating more of our brain by using our hands than other parts of the body. Our entire back or legs, are controlled by such a small proportion of the brain compared to our hands. So yeah, so you're activating more of the brain by using your hands. The way real estate in the brain is divided up is telling us that evolution has invested in our hands, so that we can manipulate the environment. We can use our hands to create shelter, clothing, food, to survive. So that's an important part of our existence and our success.”
And do you think we sort of give that up at our peril, to a degree?
“Yeah, I call this the contingency conundrum - that we've used our brains in the best way possible to be creative and think of new ideas. And what we have done is created a world where we don't have to use our brains very much… We sit at the beach in our chair and have people bring us things. And maybe we don't have to use our brain so much. So we're in an interesting experiment, we are using our bodies less, so maybe our brains are going to downsize become smaller, our ability to problem solve may become compromised. So that's an interesting question. We've used our incredible brains to create a world where we don't have to use our brains, which will therefore compromise our brains. That’s kind of depressing.”
How does doing things with your hands affect your wider abilities on decision making and planning?
“So as I mentioned there is a thing called neuroplasticity, we now know that we create new neurons throughout our lives, we build new connections. There's something about exploring something new that seems to be incredibly satisfying for the brain. Creativity, doing something new is good to get ourselves out of a funk and increases neuroplasticity so the brain can start to reconfigure and recalibrate for some new experience”
Can that also affect your kind of wider ability to make decisions to plan and make things happen?
“Absolutely, because if you're doing something new, you're building new circuits. So it's just expanding our neural and mental horizon and giving us more equipment, resources to deal with what life gives us."