Ben Willis Woodcraft

Making furniture from unseasoned ‘green’ wood is pure pleasure – when a well honed blade slices effortlessly through a lovely fresh piece of ash, there’s nothing quite like it. This course is an introduction to the craft of making furniture using traditional green woodworking tools and techniques. You’ll learn how to use tools such as the axe, drawknife and spokeshave to shape wood into a variety of components. You’ll also be introduced to the magic...

London’s only dedicated greenwood chair-making course…. Run over 10 weekday evenings, it’s a commitment, but at the end you’ll have made your own simple Windsor-style chair. You’ll learn how to fashion fresh timber, straight from the log, into the chair’s main components – the legs, stretchers and spindles – using axe, drawknife and spokeshave. For the more adventurous, or for those who’ve taken part in my introductory courses, you can try your hand at turning...

The Welsh stick chair is the vernacular style of Windsor chair that evolved west of the border several hundred years ago. They’re simple but striking, and will grace any hearth with a charismatic presence. Over this six-day course in a beautiful woodland workshop you’ll be taken through the process of crafting a Welsh stick chair from log to finished piece. You’ll fashion the legs, spindles and other frame parts from locally sourced ash using a...

This course will run over two consecutive Saturdays between 10am and 5pm and involve the creation of a beautiful three-legged Windsor-style stool using traditional chair-making tools and techniques. You'll learn how to split freshly felled timber straight from the log, then fashion the legs of your stool with a variety of simple hand tools such as the axe, drawknife and spokeshave. You'll then use an adze and travisher to shape a comfortable saddle. This process...