The inner craftsman

The truth is I've always been a bit rubbish at making things with my hands. I was tarred with the useless brush as early as primary school, in an art class where we were supposed to make a papier-mâché pig. The idea was simple: you blew up a balloon, covered it in wet, gunky newspaper, and then painted the shell once it had dried.

The practice was less so. I soon found I had a mild phobia of the papier-mâché and conspired to spend as little time touching the stuff as possible. Then, halfway through, my balloon burst, leaving me with a pig that appeared to have been shot in the stomach. My teacher kindly suggested that I turn the creature into a hedgehog – but even my hedgehog looked like roadkill.

Ever since, when faced with a craft task, I've proven myself to be the equivalent of a thumb that’s been hit by a stray hammer. So the idea of spending two days forging an axe is enough to bring me out in splinters. “You’ll be fine,” master blacksmith Nic Westermann assures me, as I arrive at his workshop for the weekend course at London's Stepney City Farm with the look of a man who can't even do papier-mâché. “It's just a matter of tool manipulation”.

I cast my eye over the workshop. Three metal anvils are strategically placed around the room, each orbited by an array of large, heavy-looking tools. Some of these tools I know to be sledgehammers (they’re very large and very heavy-looking), but most meet my gaze for the very first time. In the middle of the room is a frighteningly hot, gas fired forge.

And everywhere there are buckets filled with water. It doesn’t take a pessimist to guess their purpose. “If you do get burned, get your hand in water immediately,” explains Barnaby Carder, an expert wood carver from the Greenwood Guild who organises the course and leads the handle-whittling section on the second day. “Three seconds makes all the difference”.

Popular course
Barnaby doesn’t elucidate on what it makes the difference between, but then he doesn't really have to. The latent danger of the tools we are going to “manipulate” already has me rattled. Why is someone about to let me wield a block of red-hot steel? I can’t even be trusted with a balloon. The short answer is that, like the five other people doing the course this weekend, I’ve paid to be here. At £350, Nic and Barnaby’s axe-forging course is not cheap – but it does cater to a growing body of people who want to spend their free time making things by hand.

Google is a good barometer of this interest. Look at the list of the ten most searched ‘How to’ phrases in the UK and you'll find ‘crochet’ at number three and ‘knit’ at number five. Similarly, enquires based around ‘allotment’ have spiked since the start of 2014, while the term ‘woodworking course’ has remained popular since the 2008 financial crash. The trend has segued into fashion and lifestyle. Craft is cool: a legion of young and trendy people now walk around in plaid shirts and jumpers that could have been knitted by their grandmas, while drinking organic smoothies and munching on snacks grown by the local subsistence farmer.

For Barnaby – a man who wears braces over his shirt and a beard that’s bushy enough to hide a ferret – it’s all proof that we're in the midst of a burgeoning “folk revolution”. “In the 20th century, woodworking was all about creating your own workshop," he explains. People were spending thousands of pounds on heavy machinery. Now, maybe because we have less space at home and less disposable cash, we’re returning to older knowledge. “It's definitely linked to the uptake in screen use. People are looking for something different to their office job, and I think that's entirely reasonable.”

Poles apart
As a journalist who mainly writes things while sitting on a desk, Nic and Barnaby's workshop does indeed feel a long way from my cosseted office job. We begin with a block of solid steel, which is heated to about 1200 degrees in the furnace
until it glows orange like the setting sun. From there, the steel is transferred to the anvil and bashed in strategic places using a variety of tools. It's a two-man job: one holds the steel in place with a series of tools, the other sledgehammers. After 20 seconds or so, the steel loses its heat and has to go back into the furnace for another baking.

Swinging the sledgehammer is tough work – but not nearly as tough as getting the steel where you want it. Nic explains that there are roughly ten steps that turn the rectangular block of metal into a flattened axe head with a hole for a handle. At each stage, I’m convinced that I’ve ruined my clump of steel: it looks uneven, and at one point bends alarmingly at a right angle, seemingly mocking my masculinity. But at each stage, Nic’s patient hand guides me back onto the right path.

Quite incredibly, by the middle of the second day, I have a forged, tempered and sharpened axe head. Barnaby then takes me to a shaving horse, where he helps me carve a handle from greenwood while delving deeper into his folk theory. “My suspicion is that mass manufacturing has made people feel a bit uneasy, and slightly empty,” he says, flicking chips of wood into his beard. Deep down, we think: ‘Oh I'm getting all these amazing things but there's something missing’.

Beautiful and functional
Making something with your hands is a really good way of reminding yourself that you’re an individual and you can do stuff. To spend time where you grow a carrot or forge a knife or knit a jumper feels very different to buying something from Primark and feeling a bit guilty and dirty. It's very empowering.

One of my fellow students for the weekend echoes Barnaby's words. “When you have a functional object that you’ve created yourself, it just looks beautiful,” enthuses Edward Allberry, a 26-year-old software engineer who says he tries to go on at least one craft-based weekend a year. “Sitting in a chair that you made yourself is so much more rewarding than a chair you bought from a shop. These courses are also therapeutic. And I like being able to say that I made something over the weekend when I go into work on a Monday. It feels less like a wasted weekend than going to the pub and watching TV.”

It's hard to argue with Barnaby and Edward. After 18 hours of graft, I finally
marry handle with axe head and stand back to survey my work. A professional might say that the axe is a little rough around the edges (apart from the blade itself, which is shudderingly sharp). But contrary to my concerns, I haven't made a pig's ear of it. In fact, to my eyes, it’s the most handsome axe I have ever had the joy to behold.
Now all I need is a fireplace at home so I can actually use the thing to cut wood.