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Maker stories, style guides, and behind-the-scenes features from the world of handmade.
The first of a monthly diary about running The Haud. I thought building the shop would be the hard part. It is not. The hard part is that the last step belongs to somebody else, and I have not worked out what to do about it.
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September is when everyone moves. Nine things made by hand that will do more for a rented flat than twenty cheap ones bought in one afternoon.
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The antlers at Abbots Bromley are older than the Norman Conquest and the skill that mounted them is on the Red List. Eight customs for September, from Braemar to the Cotswolds.
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This one is late, and August has already taken one of its strangest days off the board. On the seventh the Burryman walked South Queensferry, nine hours of it, a man encased head to foot in thousands of burdock burrs with two attendants holding his arms out from his sides. He went a week earlier than usual this year to fit the school holidays. If you missed him, you missed him.
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I once drove 400 miles for a basket. Not just any basket. It was made by Simon, one of the few people left who still works his particular tradition of basketry, the kind of skill that lives in a person's hands and takes years to learn. I filmed the trip, put it online, and a surprising number of people watched a woman explain why a single basket was worth 4 trains and 9 hours of travel. That trip is really where The Haud started.
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If June is thin for old customs, July more than makes up for it. The whole country seems to come outdoors at once: rushes carried into churches, a parliament held on a hillside, a sheep roasted at the edge of a cricket pitch. I have picked three.
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June is supposed to be a quiet month for old customs. The May lot have packed away their hobby horses, and the harvest ones are still weeks off. And yet there are three things happening this month that I would happily cross the country for, all of them kept alive by people who decided a tradition was worth the trouble.
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