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The Willow Way - a weblog about woven coffins and social enterprise
WinterWillow is a Social Enterprise - part of WinterComfort For The Homeless
Overstream House, Victoria Avenue, Cambridge, CB4 1EG
Registered Charity No. 1003083 Registered Company No. 2615905
Tel: 01223 518140 Fax. 01223 566973
Email: info@wintercomfort.org.uk
Image credits available on our Site Map page
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WinterWillow
Ethical craft skills and training
delivered to fulfill a social need
Winter Willow is a Social Enterprise
Part of WinterComfort For The Homeless
UK Regd. Charity No. 1003083
UK Regd. Company No. 2615905
Willow Translate
So what to do with my new found knowledge? I started running my own willow workshops, Women’s’ Institute, L.E.A. and the Suffolk Smallholders are just some of the people that made baskets with me.
I joined Hertfordshire Basketry Group shortly after it was formed and enjoyed seeing my old college friends again and meeting new ones. The group is very active with visiting tutors providing workshops, as well as member led activities and visits to exciting places and exhibitions.
For the next chapter of my story I was demonstrating the craft of basket making at Wimpole Hall, a National Trust property in Cambridgeshire.
I enjoyed this very much and was in the public eye and made some good contacts and sold many of my baskets there. It was hard work and many cold and windy Sundays were spent in the draughty stable block with my lapboard and Vanessa for company, Vanessa is a spinner and uses the fleeces from the rare breed sheep that live on the farm, to make wonderful items of knitwear.
I stumbled upon an advertisement in the local newspaper. WinterComfort, a local homeless charity were looking for a basket maker/ tutor for a new social enterprise, WinterWillow. Wow! This sounded too good to be true, and I went along to the interview and met Cathy Hembry, Director of WinterComfort .
After a few day workshops, I was employed full time, to work with the homeless and vulnerably housed at Overstream House. In November 2009 Winter Willow was launched, we make willow coffins and garden obelisks, with all the profits going back into the charity to help and improve the lives of our service users.
This is just the beginning, you can see our work on these web pages... www.winterwillow.org.uk "
A sequence of photographs of Roger at work in our Overstream House workshops...
Pausing to consider
Fitting a woven handle
Really getting down to it...
A journey in willow
Roger Fowle, our weaving tutor at WinterWillow tells, in his own words, of his journey to WinterComfort and how willow captured his imagination.
If you have a willow story to share - let us know.
"I started basket making in 2002, when my best friend Lian gave me a birthday present, it was a two day workshop at the botanic gardens here in Cambridge with Mary Butcher - what an unusual present, so I went along with a very open mind.
Well, I made an oval shopper with the wonderful material that had been gathered from the gardens, it was great fun and the beginning of something big in my life. In the weeks that followed I was out and about gathering my own stuff from the hedges and industrial estates and superstore car parks nearby. I would get mostly dogwoods and hazel and spent many hours working with these materials.
Shortly afterwards I saw that Sandra Barker was doing some workshops at Denny Abbey and at home in Ashwell, so off I went to learn some more and make new things. In the following months I used all the dogwoods to make 15 or so fruit bowl sized baskets, and everyone got one for Christmas, in fact that year I didn’t buy a single present.
It’s now September 2003 and I am off to Bolt Court, Fleet Street, London and the City Lit to start a City and Guilds in creative basketry. Over the next two years I made many new friends in the basket makers’ world and after many journeys on the train with half-finished baskets and bundles of wet willow wrapped in towels and bin liners, I emerged with my certificate and a much greater knowledge of the skills needed to create some wonderful baskets, for which I would like to thank everyone involved.