Projects, opinions and creative updates from James.
For a month I took a small project into other people’s garages, sheds and a local men’s shed group, arriving with my own tools and no claim to the bench. It turned out to be less about what I made and more about how to behave when someone else owns the socket set.
For three months I made a simple rule: if a project wouldn't fit inside one ordinary shopping bag, it wasn't getting made. It changed my materials, my finishing rate, and the excuses I used to reach for bigger tools.
I put one of my market-stall pieces in front of five people and banned the word 'lovely'. What came back was not praise but something far more useful: plain description. This is what it taught me about titles, signs and making my work legible to strangers.
I loaded a folding table, a flask and a box of half-finished projects into the car and drove to a wet field at 6:40am. What sold, what didn't, and why letting things go for 50p taught me more about pricing my own work than another month of storage ever could.
For a month I said yes to every small creative request that could be done in ten minutes — village hall posters, proofreads, photos for neighbours' listings. It started as a generosity experiment. It ended as a lesson in where my time actually goes, why a ten-minute favour is rarely just ten minutes, and where the whole thing quietly went wrong.
Six Saturdays, one trestle table, and a steady procession of lamps, kettles and toasters that nobody wanted to throw away. What I learned behind a repair café table is that finishing things is far less lonely than I'd been treating it.
For the whole of October I didn't buy a single material. No screws, no glue, no board, no 'quick trip' to the shop for one thing. Here's what the cupboard had in it, what failed, and the workarounds I'm keeping.
Most of my best decisions are invisible because they are things I never built. I keep a single page of parked ideas — no ranking, no guilt — and it has done more for my taste and my time than any productivity app.
Once a month I turn the upstairs room of a local pub into a cinema for whoever turns up. It has taught me more about whether an idea actually works than any launch post ever did, and most of the lessons have been uncomfortable.
Every project I've regretted started the same way — with me reaching for a tool. The one-page rule is blunt and slightly uncomfortable, and it has saved me more materials, shelf space and self-respect than any amount of enthusiasm ever has.
The branch down the road has become the second half of my working week, and not for the reasons I expected. Here are the five habits I've built between the shelves — the reference-only table, the magazine rack, the one-book rule — and what each one genuinely changes about the work.
Nothing on this list cost more than twelve quid, and three of these things now live permanently on my bench. A field guide to the second-hand objects that quietly outperform the shiny gear, plus what each one replaced.
A long shelf above my bench holds the things I started and didn't finish — bad plywood, half-soldered circuit boards, a zine that never went to print. For years I read it as a list of failures. These days I read it as a record of taste, ambition and the very underrated skill of knowing when to walk away.
For six weeks I stopped posting and started sticking things to walls in my own town — zines in a café, prints in a barber, a full noticeboard takeover. Some of it worked. Some of it flopped. All of it taught me something the feed never has.
The clocks have gone back, it's dark by five, and every project suddenly feels like homework. Here are five small creative experiments for the grey weeks — none of them require buying anything, and none of them have to turn into a finished thing.
My entire production setup lives on ninety centimetres of kitchen table between the toaster and the fruit bowl. Here's the exact kit, what it cost in pounds, what I'd skip, and the £35 purchase that changed more than any software.
In October I stripped every analytics script out of this site for thirty days and tried to make things without knowing whether anyone was watching. It went badly for a week, then it went somewhere genuinely useful. Here's the honest accounting.