What an amazing time we’ve had running a craft skills village here at the Land-Workers alliance First Annual Gathering!

Kermit and Kris ran tool repair, restoration and sharpening workshops and drop ins. Duncan & Liv took a group out to forage for wild food while Emma and Elizabeth processed and butchered a whole deer, which proved an extremely popular workshop!

Stella taught spinning, and Elizabeth brought her amazing sheep skins and some fleece for people to have a go at creating a weave on a peg loom.

One of the most popular crafts by far was willow weaving with Dunc, there must have been around 40 people at any one time sat busily weaving and chatting, and we loved making our way around chatting to everyone about our project, and future plans and so many people want to come and get involved with what we do which is amazing!

Fleen had a very exciting project - creating a pit fire with some very special clay with properties known to withstand the changes in temperature. Lots of people enjoyed creating beautiful pots and on day 2 the exciting pit firing process began. Unfortunately the clay didn’t seem to have the same hardiness as its properties suggested and some pots were lost in the process, but some amazing patterns emerged and the clay made the magical transformation into ceramics none the less!

Ooh we also had Coco here who set up a pit forge which the kids absolutely loved. We love playing with these ancient technologies - it’s so empowering being able to put these skills into practice to make and create with such simple materials.

Scott was around chatting and helping with the deer butchering too (although mostly done by workshop participants) and a fab guy with Jamaican heritage took lots of meat to cook up as part of the feast. Such amazing collaborations going on all over the place.

There were many other amazing craftspeople here too, doing green woodwork, hide tanning, and weaving, as well as inspirational talks from the likes of Martain Crawford and the team from Wakelyns Agrofestestry Research Farm and we also enjoyed taking a tour of Abbey Home Farm and hearing about all the enterprises being run from here and how animal welfare and land are managed.

Thank you to our amazing team of volunteers too, we couldn’t have done this without you guys -, Kasia, Ilarna, Alicia, and Eva.