Greg Miller
Making a spoon from a bent stick. Green woodworking delights.
While spending Christmas/New Year in Albany, Western Australia, I gave a hand to help with some gardening in a friend’s garden. (For those of you readers in the northern hemisphere, this time of the year is early summer. While you were hunkered down hiding from the cold singing carols around the fire in your winter…
The Joy of Carving Wooden Spoons.
I love carving wooden spoons. And I’m not even Welsh. Over the last few years, Spoon Carving would be one of the most popular of the public workshops that I run. It is a wonderfully tactile process and a lot of fun. In the Northern Hemisphere, wooden spoons are predominantly made from green wood. We don’t have such…
Tool Chest? Nah… give me an open tool box.
There’s been a lot of talk about lidded tool chests over the last year or two in the woodworking world, aided by the US woodworking legend Christopher Schwarz of Lost Art Press. His wonderful book The Anarchists Tool Chest has been a manifesto of hand tool woodworking both since it was published last year and in…
The wonderful campaign chair.
Well known US woodworking identity Christopher Schwarz has recently been researching the Campaign Chair. Reading his recent blog post brought back warm memories of my own experiences with this interesting chair. Way back in 1988, a customer approached me with a chair he said had been in his family for about a hundred years. He…
Creating a Set of 5 Art Deco style Small Tables
A project I have just completed was to make some small occasional tables, a set of 5, using jarrah removed from a roof during a current renovation. This beautiful house, built around 1930, has the most wonderful Art-Deco ceilings – which tragically were very seriously damaged during the recent storms in Perth… but that’s another story….
In Celebration of My Wood Working Heritage
I am fortunate to have benefited from a significant woodworking heritage. Here is a brief look at it. My great-grandfather, William Miller was a coachbuilder and wheelwright, and partner in the coachbuilding business Miller and Cleary in Wellington Street, Perth. The picture above shows the Miller and Cleary display in the 1910 Labour Day Parade….
A Saw Stool on Steriods!
Those who have worked with me know how much I value traditional Saw Stools. I use them in the workshop and out on the job all the time. In fact I am lost without them! I usually have several sets, some low ones at around 21” high and some taller ones at 30” high. I…
Fireplace Surround for a Heritage Building Restoration.
These kind of gigs don’t come around very often… Earlier this year I had the privilege of making a fireplace surround for “Hill 60”, a heritage building being restored in Rivervale. Working from only 6 old photographs, the task was to re-instate the fireplace surround. The original had gone missing some years ago while the…