Chippendale News

It’s a console table that now graces the hallway of Fiona Gilfillan’s home in East Lothian. Fiona is our second student on our new month-long intermediate course and, apart from her console table, has also restored another old piece of furniture and is completing the restoration of a third table. Fiona is a keen woodworking […]

One of the great things about the Chippendale school is that we have incubation space into which graduates can move and set up their own businesses. It means that students can avoid the cost of buying machinery while negotiating the early months of self-employment. It’s a route that was taken by Ewan Ogilvie when he

What do a graphic designer, sheep farmer and an architect have in common? On the face of it, not a lot, except for one thing.  They’re the day jobs of just three of our students on our latest one-week introductory course. Darren Kirk from Essex is a graphic designer who is more used to creating

This week we’re running one of our Chippendale school introductory courses, which are designed to give students an opportunity to try their hand at woodworking. Students on the one-week course are given an introduction to some basic techniques and skills, as well as learning how to make a small wooden upholstered stool and a lathe-turned

It was the year in which novelist Emily Brontë and philosopher Karl Marx were born, and the year in which Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was published. It was also the year that words and music were put together to create the Christmas carol Silent Night, and also marks the USA/UK treaty that created a Canadian border

For the past two weeks we’ve been privileged to have at the school one of the country’s leading experts in woodcarving. When he’s not teaching, John White runs John White Woodcarving, and is a renowned authority in this age-old craft. While some aspects of woodcarving can now be handled with CAD and CNC technologies, nothing