Forgotten Crafts Project

During my rehabilitation from THE THESIS I spent a day tarting up our bedside cabinets and watching films. One such of these was Julie and Julia. If you haven't watched it, it's the true story of Julie Powell who decides to cook her way through Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" and blog about it. It stars Meryl Streep and Amy Adams (reason enough to watch it, imho) and is fab.

Reaching the end of the film I thought "wouldn't it be great if I could find a book to do that with? If only I was committed enough to actually follow recipes when I cook..."

*sigh*

My eyes roved our bookshelves, across the multitude of cookery, gardening and nature books, and settled upon our copies of John Seymour's "Forgotten Household Crafts" and "The Forgotten Arts and Crafts". The latter caught my eye, as being a bit of a tom boy anything with the words "household" in makes me groan inwardly... ugh, 'household', BORING!!
 

  

But there's a hitch, I thought: arts and crafts take time to learn. There's a reason that back in the day young men would take up an apprenticeship, then progress to being journeymen, then masters, and finally artisans.

And you don't become an artisan in a week.

And there is absolutely no point me attempting to make a barrel. There just isn't. I simply don't have the time to commit to becoming good enough to make it worthwhile. That said, if I got offered the opportunity to have a go I would totally be up for it (Any coopers out there? There must be - they need barrels for the vital process of MAKING WHISKY).

So while that would be an interesting project, it would be a life-long one, and not the stuff of regular blog posts. I promise I will update you if I decide to try and learn how to make a besom, dye cloth or shoe a horse though. Interesting stuff.

So it looked like it would have to be the BORING household crafts book. Ha ha.

However, when I looked through the contents of Forgotten Household Crafts, far from exhaustive  instructions about how to clean skirting boards and sweep a floor, it basically listed all my favourite things... knitting, preserving food, making beer - and a host of things I don't know how to do: making butter and soap, smoking food, spinning yarn (and only 12 pages on cleaning in the whole book!!).

So, dear reader, if you wish to join me, I will undertake to go through this book, try out each of the 'forgotten' household crafts, and report back to you on each of them. See here for a full listing of the crafts.

If you want to get hold of a copy, it is currently retailing for ONE ENGLISH PENNY on Amazon (plus £2.80 P&P, of course). Apprarantly if these crafts were 'forgotten' in 1987, they're completely forgotten now.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the bedside cabinets now look like this:

Not bad, eh? (before they were just plain wood)