Heritage crafts for slow living, taught & made in an old Lincolnshire schoolhouse.
We swapped classrooms for benches, presses and spinning wheels.
After years of teaching, we wanted a slower, steadier way of life, one where we could keep traditional skills alive and pass them on.
Old School Crafts grew out of that shift. What started with a spinning wheel from an auction and a box of bookbinding tools from an antiques centre turned into our everyday, repairing books, spinning wool, weaving, making jewellery, and passing those skills on.
The schoolhouse isn’t just where we work. It’s part of the story... creaking floors, chalk-dusted history and all. We’ve restored it into a space for making, teaching and gathering. A place where heritage crafts are lived, not just demonstrated.
ABOUT
I spent 25 years teaching Religious Studies before swapping classrooms for spinning wheels, wool, and a slower pace of life. What started as crochet on winter evenings grew into a love for fibre, weaving and jewellery-making.
After being treated for Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in 2019, (now in full remission) I knew I wanted to spend my time differently. A life-changing experience makes you see things differently so craft stopped being a side project and became the centre of all things. Now, I spin, weave, make, and sell.
When I’m not at the wheel or the bench, I’m in the veg garden, wrangling the animals we’ve rescued along the way (I’m a sucker for strays), playing music (flute, piano, a bit of singing) and while I love to perform the classical repertoire, I am more likely to be found listening to 80s/90s rock and metal.
Eclecticism is one of my favourite words.
ABOUT
I spent over 30 years teaching Physics, eventually becoming a headteacher, before trading in lesson plans for books and book repair. These days, instead of marking coursework, I repair family Bibles, cherished cookbooks, novels that have been read to pieces, and the odd book that’s been chewed by the dog.
For me, book repair isn’t about making things look brand new. It’s about helping them last, reinforcing spines, mending joints, and making sure they can be read and handled for another hundred years. Quiet work, but meaningful.
Music has always run alongside everything else. When I was seven, my dad bought me an upright piano, and I’ve been playing ever since. Blues and boogie are my first love, though I’ll happily lose hours to anything with a good groove. These days, I play in several bands, switch between sax, piano and whatever else is lying around, and make sure the schoolhouse is never without music.
When I’m not repairing or playing, I’m teaching workshops, showing people that yes, you can sew paper, and no, it’s not nearly as complicated as it looks.
The old schoolhouse isn’t just a backdrop, it’s the heartbeat of Old School Crafts. Built in the 19th century, it once rang with the noise of lessons, assemblies and playground games. Today, its brick walls and big windows hold a different kind of learning: benches, tools, wool, books and tea breaks.
We’ve kept much of its history intact. The Assembly Room, a classroom once filled with rows of desks, is now where we run workshops. The Music Room still carries its name proudly, only now the soundtrack is everything from blues and folk to audiobooks and rock. The library shelves creak with old manuals and novels we’ve collected over the years, sitting alongside the tools we use every day.
It’s a building with memory in its bones, and we like that. When people step inside, they feel the history as much as they see it. That sense of continuity is what makes the schoolhouse the perfect place to learn heritage crafts.
OUR PHILOSOPHY
we believe:
A.
B.
C.
D.
Old School Crafts is about useful skills, meaningful things, and the slower pace of life that comes with both.
Craft should be accessible, not intimidating.
Repairs and restoration are worth the time, because the things we keep matter.
Community and learning go hand-in-hand with making.
Slow living isn’t about nostalgia, it’s about choosing well and keeping what lasts.
The schoolhouse has always been full of music, and we like to keep it that way.
WHAT’S PLAYING:
Radio 3
Anything featuring Jools Holland
Moulin Rouge soundtrack
Jimi Hendrix Experience - Voodoo Child
George Melly and the Feetwarmers - Son of Nuts
Blues Brothers Soundtrack
Planet Rock Radio
Audiobooks - currently Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series
Shiraz Lane - Carnival Days
Guns n Roses - Appetite for Destruction
Midnite City - In at the Deep End
JOIN THE ASSEMBLY
Get registered, no homework required.
The Assembly is our way of gathering everyone together. Add your name to the register and you’ll get occasional notes from the schoolhouse… first dibs on workshops, a peek behind the scenes, and the odd bit of news from the bench and the wheel.
No detentions, light reading only, no tests at the end.
JOIN THE ASSEMBLY
Get registered, no homework required.
The Assembly is our way of gathering everyone together. Add your name to the register and you’ll get occasional notes from the schoolhouse… first dibs on workshops, a peek behind the scenes, and the odd bit of news from the bench and the wheel.
No detentions, light reading only, no tests at the end.