A year has passed since the 2014 Handmade By Machines show at…

Time to allow myself the luxury of a weekend in Edinburgh with nothing to do but see some friends and go to the opening of Stephen Bottomley's first retrospective.

I always sleep very well in Edinburgh: I stay with friends and the room in which I sleep overlooks a graveyard! Much needed as the changing clocks, seasons and the travel to and from the US has made my sleeping patterns somewhat messy.

 …

I've been a bit distracted by family matters over the last two weeks and haven't really been doing very much of note, though unfortunately, I have had to cancel the "Scotland the What?" exhibition on Crafthaus, scheduled for the end of this month. Both Jeff Zimmer and myself have independently suffered a personal loss at the same time and have not managed to collate the show at all. The plus side of this, however, is that Brigitte has re-scheduled for October 2013 and this gives us the…

I wanted to have this piece finished for Hallowe'en but things got in the way, so here is my Spoon Skull Cross, a bit of fun made from iron wire from a building site in Brighton, a rusted bolt, some flat ground tool steel from a derelict workshop, a silver souvenir teaspoon, silver, copper, rubies, sapphire, garnets and carnelian:

 …

Fairly easy day today. Spent the morning in the workshop and the afternoon with my students with learning difficulties, all of whom have studied with me before: gratifying to know that they wanted to come back again! A lovely group to end the week with, I think. The workshop is proving a little bit frustrating at the moment, as I am between several projects, all of which need some serious time spent working through the details on paper, or 3D models need to be made or I am waiting for…

Well, the students are back and their usual daft fun has begun. I came into the workshop today to find this on my benchpeg:

A present from Sweden. Unfortunately, the new students who don't quite have the same…