Soft launching. More makers all summer.Soft launching with our founding makers. More arriving through the summer.
The desk-size brush. Small enough to live in a drawer or a wash bag. The bristles are tampico, a natural plant fibre drawn from Mexican Agave and Yucca, stiff enough to clear keyboard crumb or to brush a nail clean.
Hand-bound in coloured nylon cord, with a choice of cotton handle, red deer oak bark tanned leather handle, matching thread handle, or no handle at all. The shape comes flat-bottomed or tapered.
It is a small object, but the same hands are making it as the swill baskets. Simon is the only person left in Scotland weaving oak swill, and the same precision goes into a desk brush as into a fishing creel.
The desk-size brush. Small enough to live in a drawer or a wash bag. The bristles are tampico, a natural plant fibre drawn from Mexican Agave and Yucca, stiff enough to clear keyboard crumb or to brush a nail clean.
Hand-bound in coloured nylon cord, with a choice of cotton handle, red deer oak bark tanned leather handle, matching thread handle, or no handle at all. The shape comes flat-bottomed or tapered.
It is a small object, but the same hands are making it as the swill baskets. Simon is the only person left in Scotland weaving oak swill, and the same precision goes into a desk brush as into a fishing creel.

Simon Cooper is the only oak swill basket maker left in Scotland. He works from a single room in Crieff, splitting coppiced oak with a cleaver, soaking the strips, weaving them while still wet, the same way the form has been built for four hundred years.