alex@redkitecraft.co.uk

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Welcome

To Red Kite Craft, a small site to showcase some of the craft I make.

My aim here is mostly to have a place that I can link people to whenever someone asks what I’ve been up to that’s caused me to have numerous burns, cuts, or abrasions again, and that will explain how and why I have a faint whiff of sawdust about me.

Photo of a cake knife resting on a wooden table. The knife has a large handle suitable for two hands to hold at once. It is made from curly birch, birch bark and iroko. The blade of the knife is hidden by a burgundy leather sheath held together with copper rivets.

What I do

I tend to make things that I feel like making… if that sounds like a tautology, please consider that my making is intended variously as a source of pleasure, personal challenge and sort of therapeutic hobby, in more or less that order. Making things has to be fun and it has to be engaging for me, or I don’t do it.

While I’m open to selling items, that’s very much secondary and intended primarily to recoup material costs. I have no desire to make for the sake of money.

  • A photograph of a chopping board, with a breadknife on top of it. They are resting on a white and blue chequered tablecloth. The chopping board is made of squares of wood, with the end-grain facing up.
    I started out making things in wood. As a child, I learned how to make a whistle from a piece of willow, and my friends and I would often make rudimentary bows out of hazel branches. As a teenager, I spent a couple of summers helping my uncle restore and maintain traditional wooden dinghies – lots of sanding, lots of varnishing, lots of sanding varnish. There was a long pause while studying for my degree in which I stopped working with wood, but I discovered in my early twenties that you didn’t need a workshop to work in and that a kitchen worktop would do as a bench… much to my partner’s chagrin.
  • Photo of a leather trug sat on a bench. The trug is pale with dark red leather straps for handles. It is laden with cut flowers, and a pair of secateurs is sat next to it on the bench.
    Leatherworking was a natural follow-on to the woodworking; once I started making handles for knives the logical next step was to make sheathes for them, too. I mostly make sheathes, as well as small bags and pouches, such as for storing tinder or a flint and steel in. Where possible, I prefer to use veg-tan leather, as it holds shape beautifully when wet-moulded and the tanning process for it doesn’t involve heavy metals like chromium. I’ve yet to experiment with tanning my own hides. It’s one for the future…
  • A small raku dish sits on a bedside table. The dish is white inside with a yellow dot in the centre of the base. The exterior is a glossy metallic blue. There is a silvery metallic fleck to some areas inside it, too. The glaze is crackled from the rapid heating and cooling from the raku firing process.
    Having watched John Plant’s Primitive Technology channel on YouTube for many years, I was intrigued when he began to experiment with firing his local clays in simple wood-fuelled fires. It hadn’t occurred to me that early ceramics had been created in such a low-tech fashion, but it immediately caught my imagination. For several years now I’ve been periodically been using my BBQ as a makeshift kiln, firing low-temperature clay bodies. With suitable glazes, it’s been possible to make small, raku-style pottery in our back garden.
  • Photo of a Pen-F digital camera sat on the grass. There is a small ladybird walking across the top of it next to the flash shoe.
    Photography has probably been my most consistent outlet throughout the years, albeit less eye-catching than the fires of the ceramics or the warmth of the wood. My favourite subjects are landscapes and wildlife, and living close to the New Forest means that each autumn I’m able to head into the woods to capture the sights of the annual rut. We’re also blessed with being on the doorstep of the South Downs, and with visits to family we have frequent visits to the big skies of North Norfolk and the soggy hills of the Pennines.

About me

I’m Alex, and I’m a registered mental health nurse working full-time in clinical safety. This is how I keep myself well.

I spend a lot of time sat at a desk and looking at screens; making things is my escape. Crafting gets me up out of my chair and invokes a tactility, a physicality, that is otherwise missing from my day-to-day life.

It’s also a great way of reminding myself that it doesn’t matter if what you end up with is not what you had in mind when you started out and can still be beautiful even if they’re not perfect.

Working with my hands is a way for me to look after my own wellbeing, and I hope there’s as much pleasure for you in the things I make as I get from them.