Week 3! We have a format?

Here we go, the difficult third album? It’s been a busy week between working on customer orders, hitting the monthly Old Village Market and expanding the workshop so let’s rip through what’s been happening!

This week in the shop:

First and foremost, I finished a gorgeous solid Oak shelf to replace a radiator cover top. Not something I usually take on, but I had a little window of time to power through and it came out great! The customer sent me the dimensions of the shelf top, and pretty much said we trust you which is my favourite way to work! What do you think?

This past Saturday was the Old Village Market in Corby. This is a monthly artisan market that has been on the last Saturday of the month for almost a year now and I was lucky enough to be asked to join in January of this year and I’ve absolutely loved doing it. It’s so great to be able to be face to face with so many people, talk about what I do, talk about what people like/want/need for their homes or even as gifts. It’s also great to hear your ideas on things you’d like to see me make, obviously, I can’t take all your ideas on, but I always love input and opinion because there’s so much that can be done with the materials I use!

If you don’t know about the Old Village Market, definitely check it out, it’s the last Saturday of the month in the Cardigan Arms car park in Corby. Find them on the socials (Facebook/Instagram) for more info and hopefully, I’ll see you there!!

Find the Old Village Market here -> https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100083274911876

The last big news of the week is finally getting to expand the workshop and we’re almost there! Cannot wait to be able to work on even more and scale up how I work so that I can make more, faster and hopefully be able to keep my prices as low as possible. One of the goals in what I do is to make high-end products that are affordable. Too often I’ve seen places selling things very similar to mine that are just priced out so much that ordinary people just cannot justify buying. I started doing what I do because all the nice things I wanted…were just too expensive and (I hope) I’m trying to make sure people don’t need a lottery win to be able to put nice things in their home.

This week I got the old floor cleaned, prepped and levelled with the help of my cousin Gary. After a few days of the new floor drying I finally was able to get in and get it painted. Took a few days for it to fully dry and will probably leave it a few more before I go in this week and start to move tools, machines and materials in to really start using the space and again…I CANNOT WAIT.

This feels like a really long time coming and while I've been waiting for the right time (that never comes) I'm glad I finally bit the bullet and got on with it. It's caused me massive disruption in being able to work but it's definitely going to be worth it!

Before I get back into more stories of old…I also want to tell you about this exciting flash of ADHD. Last week after I’d levelled the floor, I had to leave it for a day before I could start painting so I went out and had planned to start pulling wire ready to install the new lights…instead…I found a wall art stencil and my ADHD kicked in in full swing. So why is this exciting?

Some 22 years ago, at the tender age of 10…my mum bought a stencil to use while decorating my bedroom and the short version is that well, she didn’t use it. It ended up stashed behind my bedroom door for years, then ended up in a cupboard, up on a shelf, in another cupboard. 9 years later we moved house…the stencil moved cupboards and we continued to hoard it and jokingly dusted it off every few years but still the stencil never saw the light of day.

6 years later I bought my first home with my now fiancé and while moving my life out of my mums’ house that stencil came with me. It then lived in my home office and this past week (6 years later)…when I should have been wiring lights…I pulled the stencil out and it finally found a home on the wall of the new workshop space. Now let me tell you that 10-year-old me was SO excited for this stencil and BOY OH BOY I was so excited when I did it. I didn’t know what I was doing, I used paints that I had lying around with no real plan and I absolutely love it. So much so that the second I pulled the stencil off the wall and saw it, the first thing I did was FaceTime my mum to show her (I may or may not have got paint all over my phone as my hands weren’t dry but it cleaned off…mostly). I put a vote out for a name and settled on Dwight the Dragon…thanks to my cousin Gary for that nudge, we’re both HUGE fans of The Office US so it was a no-brainer when he said it. So I hope you guys love Dwight as much as I do, 22 years in the making…never give up…never surrender…never throw away a stencil!

That’s been the week!

Storytime:

I feel like I’ve already done story time with the origins of Dwight but we’ll throw a little bit more of my own origin story with the tales of a drum builder continuation.

Picking up from last week, I was 19 (ish?), had just started to buy raw materials to start building drums from scratch again and was excited to start building on my skills with the vast amount of knowledge I’d gained in the past 3 or 4 years since my first attempt. At the time I was doing my degree in Music Technology at De Montfort University in Leicester so was close enough to home that I could come home on weekends and work on drums while studying. I was also in a band at university called 88 Miles Per Hour. We were an indie/rock 4 piece covering a few songs while writing some tunes I absolutely loved and do to this day.

At the time as I was living away, I didn’t have space for a full drum kit but the gigs we did required me to take breakables (this is the term musicians use to define a subset of a drummers gear that can be taken to a gig when a basic drum kit is supplied for the drummers to use/share. It typically includes stands, pedals, seat, cymbals and most importantly…a snare drum). Knowing that most/all of our gigs at the time were a ‘breakables only’ scenario I decided it was time to build myself my first (playable) snare drum. So I did just that, I got everything together, worked out what spec I wanted, the design and off I went.

Incredibly I found the Soundcloud account that still has the songs and it works so if you’re really bored...there you go for context!

https://soundcloud.com/88milesperhour/heroes-unplugged?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

There might have been some anxiety I won’t lie as my track record for building drums at this point was 100% unusable so showing up to that gig I did actually have a spare drum just in case, and I know you’re all thinking ahh what a shame he had to use the spare and he’d tried so hard and it was another trash can job but astonishingly enough…it worked. Not only did it work, it sounded great and I was asked twice what it was as people liked it so you can imagine, my bass player had to help me back out the venue with my newly inflated ego but it was the first step on the ladder of me being a ’credible’ drum builder. (For the nerds, it was a 26-ply Finnish Birch shell)

So that’s that, build one was in the books it was time to do another. But that’s a story for another day!

Until next time!

JC