How Artisan Distillers Select Copper for Their Stills
When Forsyths of Rothes, Scotland's pre-eminent still maker since 1932, begins fabricating a pot still, the first critical decision is copper selection.
Daniel Hurst · 2026-05-31
Craft
Artisanal traditions, maker culture, and the handmade.
Showing 41–60 of 167 articles
The Cabinet of Curiosities: Tools Every Serious Woodworker Covets
In the cabinet of any devoted woodworker, certain tools transcend utility to become objects of desire.
James Alderton · 2026-05-31
What the Craft Beer Movement Borrowed from Traditional Brewing Science
When Sierra Nevada Brewing Company released its Pale Ale in 1980, founder Ken Grossman was not inventing a new style but reviving a British one.
Daniel Hurst · 2026-05-31
The Patternmaker Whose Templates Exist Only in Memory
In the fishing port of Essaouira, Morocco, master boatbuilder Mohamed Guennoune constructs wooden fishing boats without drawings, templates, or written measurements.
Thomas Nakamura · 2026-05-31
How a Single Workshop in Sheffield Supplies Blades to the World
Taylor's Eye Witness, founded in Sheffield in 1838, continues to produce knives and blades from a factory in the city's Stainless Quarter, the district that gave the English language the word cutlery.
Daniel Hurst · 2026-05-31
The Goldsmith Working at a Scale Invisible to the Naked Eye
Micro-goldsmith Elizabeth Galton specialises in work so small that finished pieces must be viewed through a loupe to appreciate their detail.
Marcus Wei · 2026-05-31
How a Master Dyer Achieves Colour Without Synthetic Pigment
Michel Garcia, a French botanist and master dyer based in Lauris, Provence, has spent four decades extracting colour from plants, insects, and minerals to dye textiles without a single synthetic molecule.
Catherine Avery · 2026-05-30
The Shipwright Building Wooden Boats in a Fibreglass Age
At the Wooden Boatshop in Sorrento, on the southern shore of Melbourne's Port Phillip Bay, shipwright Tim Phillips has been building wooden boats since 1992 in an industry that fibreglass has dominated since the 1960s.
James Alderton · 2026-05-30
What an Antique Tool Collector Learns About Ingenuity
A Stanley No.
Thomas Nakamura · 2026-05-30
The Saddlestitch Binder Whose Client List Reads Like a Library Catalogue
At the Ludlow Bookbinders workshop in Shropshire, master binder Kate Holland produces saddle-stitched pamphlets and limited-edition publications for clients including the Bodleian Library, the Royal Academy of Arts, and the National Trust.
Marcus Wei · 2026-05-30
How One Atelier Makes Bespoke Luggage From a Single Hide
At the Bertoni 1949 workshop in Milan, a single piece of bespoke luggage is made from one carefully selected cowhide, ensuring visual consistency across every surface.
Sebastian Cole · 2026-05-30
The Ceramic Engineer Bridging Ancient Kilns and Modern Materials Science
Professor Pamela Vandiver at the University of Arizona has spent her career analysing ancient ceramics with modern materials science tools, using electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, and neutron activation to decode the technical choices of potters working thousands of years before these instruments existed.
James Alderton · 2026-05-30
Why the Mortise-and-Tenon Joint Remains Undefeated
The mortise-and-tenon joint, in which a projecting tongue of wood fits into a corresponding rectangular hole, has been in continuous use for at least seven thousand years.
Catherine Avery · 2026-05-30
The Instrument Maker Who Sources Wood from Fallen Trees Only
Luthier William Cumpiano, based in Northampton, Massachusetts, builds guitars exclusively from wood salvaged from naturally fallen trees.
Daniel Hurst · 2026-05-30
How Handmade Bricks Are Staged, Fired, and Graded
At Northcot Brick in Gloucestershire, England, bricks are still made by hand-throwing clay into wooden moulds, producing the textured, irregular surface that machine-pressed bricks cannot replicate.
Sebastian Cole · 2026-05-30
The Clock Restorer Who Reads Time Backwards
Jonathan Betts, former Senior Specialist in Horology at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, has spent his career working backwards through time by deconstructing mechanisms that once defined it.
James Alderton · 2026-05-30
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What Marquetry Demands of the Eye and the Blade
A marquetry panel by Andrew Crawford may contain over five thousand individual pieces of veneer, each cut to a tolerance of a tenth of a millimetre and assembled into a pictorial composition achieving the tonal range of an oil painting.
Thomas Nakamura · 2026-05-30
The Dying Art of Hand-Painted Porcelain
At the Meissen porcelain manufactory in Saxony, Germany, fewer than thirty artists still paint freehand decoration onto porcelain using techniques virtually unchanged since Johann Friedrich Bottger established the factory in 1710.
James Alderton · 2026-05-29
Why the Best Tool Handles Are Still Made from Hickory
When the head of a framing hammer strikes a nail with sixty pounds of force, the handle must absorb the shock without transmitting it destructively to the user's wrist.
Sebastian Cole · 2026-05-29
The Foundry Casting Bronze Fittings for Wooden Sailboats
At the Lunenburg Foundry in Nova Scotia, Canada, bronze fittings for wooden sailboats have been cast using methods that have not fundamentally changed since the yard began supplying the Grand Banks fishing fleet in 1891.
Sebastian Cole · 2026-05-29