Why woodturning Part B.

Why Woodturning?

Continuing from my first post, I try to answer why I “do” woodturning. In the last post, I explained my background, and how I started woodturning. I spent a few years pottering away in my #ManShed when the following occurred. I call the story “granny’s six pens”.

One day in autumn 2013, an elderly client of my father’s called to my house and asked me if I could fix a wooden chair he had. He brought me to the boot of his car and in was a pile of smelly damp wood-wormed pieces stuffed into and old plastic fertiliser bag. When I took the pile out of the boot, some of the pieces of the chair were rotten or missing. He accepted it couldn’t be repaired, but of the few pieces remaining, I told him I’d make a few pens for him. He told me to go ahead, as he was only going to burn the pieces otherwise. I turned six pens that night. The chair was made from very old oak and the pens took a wonderful sheen when they were polished. Each pen was a light brown in colour and I used silver plated pen parts to finish them. I even got a few boxes from a local jeweller. This was the first time I had a pen in a box for a client. The next day, I called into the man’s office in town (he was a managing partner in an old Galway law firm) and nervously presented the pens to him. He took the pens, sat down at his desk, and broke down in tears. I was shocked as I thought I’d done a good job on the pens. He explained his emotional outburst was caused by the fact the chair was his grandmothers. As a young boy, over sixty years ago, he remembered sitting in her lap as she sat in the chair by the fireside and she held him telling him stories. He said that the pens gleamed like the way the turf fire-light used to glint on the old chair as his grandmother took pride in keeping it clean (his grandmother had inherited it from her grandparents as one of her wedding gifts). Over time, he told me, his grandparents passed, and the family grew up and scattered. The roof eventually fell in on the old house and everything rotted. He told me he has visited his grandparents’ house recently and found the remains of the chair still by the fireside which he took and put in the boot of his car. He opened a drawer in his desk and took out a small wad of money and started to count out some notes. I refused to take any payment from him, telling him they were a present. To be honest, after seeing his emotional response, I just couldn’t take a penny from him. I met the same man two days before Christmas later that year. He told me he had given a pen to each of his siblings, and they too had a similar emotional response. He said they were all writing down the stories they could remember and that if he would ever publish them, he would acknowledge me. The stories were to be put into a book and copy was to be handed out to all his grandchildren and his siblings’ grandchildren too. When I think about the pens I made for him, they came from a piece of timber that passed through five generations of his family and by the time his grandchildren inherit the pens, the piece of timber will have passed through seven generations of his family. He has now semi-retired from work, and I meet him out walking regularly. He always has one of my pens in his jacket pocket.

This story of how the timber was reused and upcycled influenced and inspired me to think about going into business. This would be one of my unique selling points. I would take timber from a client, or source some timber and turn it into a nice pen that actually meant something to the owner. After all in this digital age, we learned to write first before we learned to type and who doesn’t like using a nice pen? However, I would spend the next two years continuing to practice my turning, getting my fingers smashed up, experimenting with different timbers and finishes, working on my social media and learning how to build my brand GalwayPens.

To answer the question, why woodturning, well I think the best answer is that I do it because I like it. It’s true that if you do something you actually enjoy, you’ll never work a day in your life again. Working with your hands, and using your head, is real and honest work. There is a level of pride and satisfaction in doing it that could never be achieved by working for someone else. I’m not knocking being employed in a day job by someone else, I work hard and deliver results every day, but doing something you enjoy, especially for yourself, gives you a different, and positive emotional satisfaction that helps bring a better balance in your life (I’m reminded of a motivational quote that helped inspire me – if you don’t build your own dream, the best you can hope for is to be hired to help someone else build theirs). By August 2015 I’d made and given away over five hundred pens. I decided it’s time finish my self-imposed apprenticeship and to go into business making and selling hand-made wooden pens. I know that I’ll never make enough money to leave my current job, but I don’t think it was ever in it for the money anyways (if your only goal in life is to make money then you’ll never become rich). However that’s a story (blog post) for another time.