You are looking to upholster your latest chair, bench or stool project, but you are looking for upholstery that requires very little maintenance, will stand the test of time in terms of both strength and style, and is resistant to wear, discolouration and stains…

Have you thought about using Danish Cord?

When answering this question, most people have a notion of the difference between the two terms. It’s common to think of parquetry in connection with flooring (Parque flooring) and marquetry with more decorative pictures in furnishings. There are also a few more distinctions which are worth exploring too.

There is a wealth of furniture design inspiration online and in inexpensively acquired second hand furniture design books. You don’t always need to travel to annual exhibitions to find inspiration for your next piece of furniture design.

What are the best books to read about furniture making and design? There are hundreds of titles available with books focusing on designers, processes, projects for woodworkers and wood theory. Here, Jane Cleal gives us her top recommendations of woodworking books and furniture design books…

If you are designing and making outdoor furniture, how do you make it more resilient to environmental deterioration? This blog gives you several pointers on how to design outdoor furniture, select durable woods and other steps you can take to preserve the life of your project.

We enrich our furniture making courses, with visits out to fine furniture workshops and makers around the UK. It’s really important for our students to connect with the industry and makers to aid their transition on completing their training as fine furniture makers.

From time to time, we invite visiting tutors that specialise in various techniques or materials to the school to lead workshops for our students. This week, we couldn’t have been more excited to invite Charlie Whinney, one of the UK’s leading steam bending experts to join us to deliver a one day workshop to our students and staff….

New materials are emerging all the time. Whether it’s Formaldehyde free hemp MDF, 100% FSC paper composite, or a kind of leather grown from mycelium or re-constituted from pineapple leaf fibre…innovative new products are coming to light – which could have application in furniture making.

Outside the workshop, we have large oak felled by the nearby farm workers some time ago. Being right next to the picnic table, we recently noticed this stunning species of fungi living off the decaying log.

It has a rather cool name ‘Chicken of the Woods’ and grows mainly on oak…

For some there is a stigma surrounding veneer, and a belief that furniture made from it, is something to avoid. This rather unfair perception is often not helped by the adverts we see on television…

Wood is by nature, a biodegradable and dimensionally unstable material, but the process of modification changes that. Modified wood has greater durability, resistance to swelling and shrinkage, and increased hardness (and therefore greater resilience to wood boring insects). The acetylation process also reduces moisture in the cell wall to the point where there isn’t enough to support fungal decomposition.

Woodturning is a unique and useful skill in the world of woodworking.

There will always be projects that call for shaped timber detailing – even if it’s something as simple, or low key as some feet for a grandfather clock, or hand turned fixings for an occasional table…

Japanese carpentry is traditionally intimately bound up with the history of architecture in Japan…

Constructional veneer comes in a variety of timbers and it is thin and pliable enough to bend. You can simply spread glue on their surfaces and clamp them in layers to the shape that you desire and leave in place for the glue to set…