Blog RSS

From the M&T Daily Dispatch: 

From the M&T Daily Dispatch: 

Where then can the workmanships of risk and certainty be found? Neither are strictly time- bound, that’s for sure. Not only can free workmanship with hand-guided tools be found today, but its antithesis, the workmanship of certainty, has been around from antiquity. “The workmanship of certainty has been in occasional use in undeveloped and embryonic forms since the Middle Ages.” This concurs with Jonathan Thornton’s observation that “the aim of the careful worker in the European tradition was to reduce variation by skill and increasingly, by ever more complex tools.” Pye explains that the most common reasons for employing the workmanship of certainty are speed or accuracy – both especially important for quantity production. In Pye’s thought, it’s an oversimplification...

From the M&T Daily Dispatch: 

From the M&T Daily Dispatch: 

From the M&T Daily Dispatch: 

From the M&T Daily Dispatch: 

From the M&T Daily Dispatch: 

From the M&T Daily Dispatch: 

M&T: Tell us about your process of making. Are any two objects ever the same? JS: They can be to a degree, but I love to give them a slight difference. For example, when I make butter knives in batches of 20 or 30, I use a paper template to make each outline. But when I shave them down, they always come out slightly different because of small variations in the material. I have to make a decision on each one – is this going to taper a little more here or there? I can’t produce exactly the same thing every time – although it is possible do that working by hand, but what’s the point? My aim is to...