Top Tips Galore

Nina and Charlotte, hosts of the Stone Carving and Lettering Takeaway podcast, are reflecting on their 12 months of spreading knowledge about stone carving. They discuss their dedication and perseverance in learning new skills and software, such as video editing. They also talk about their different learning styles, with Nina preferring YouTube videos on cats and Charlotte enjoying tutorials on LinkedIn Learning. They share their top tips, including being kind to oneself and using a cornflour paste for carving letters on limestone. They emphasize the importance of finding joy in life and not solely focusing on work. Hello, Charlotte. Morning, Nina. How are you this morning? Good. Good. I've got some sunshine beating through my south-facing office window, so that's lovely. It's a lovely thing to see after all the grey skies we've had recently. Me too. I also have a south-facing office window and the sun is shining in on me. I thought it was just you lighting up the room, but I think there might be... Well, it is that as well. Your smiling face. So, welcome. Welcome to the Stone Carving and Lettering Takeaway. I'm Nina Bildy. And I'm Charlotte Hower. We are 12 months into our endeavour to spread the good news and the good practice of stone carving across the globe, just about 12 months. We thought we'd do a recap, like a recap and a review of our 12 months. Is that right? Is that what we're going to do? We're going to do a top 10 tips countdown. We're going to do a countdown, right? In no particular order of our top 10 tips. So, when we started out a year ago, Charlotte, did you imagine that we would be here a year later or did you think we would like flash and burn after a couple of months? What did you think? I never thought we'd flash and burn. I'm far too dedicated and full of perseverance. Yeah, that's true. I think that was new for me, but for you, it's different, isn't it? You're this most optimistic, driven person. Well, it requires perseverance, stone carving. And I think many of us have that tenacity to keep going. And I think it's just a normal part of, you know, it's like pushing through a big, shifting the material. You just have to get on and do it. You never get anywhere. And I think for me, that's just part of my work ethic, is that tenacity to keep going, even when you don't feel like it or it's difficult. I always think of that as a stone thing. I have that to a point, I think, but I quite like the fact that you drive it. You're really the engine and I'm the happy passenger. But yeah, I mean, you've really taken it on board. You've learned editing and new software and people think, you know, oh, if those two can do it, anybody can do it. But actually, there's a lot of hard work behind the scenes, isn't there? There's a lot of commitment and... There's a lot of commitment in terms of time and energy and certainly at the beginning, a lot of learning. But I'm a very good learner. I quite like sitting down, watching those videos that tell you how to do things and then doing it, watching a bit more. I love learning like that. Whereas, yeah, you watch a lot of YouTube videos, don't you? Yeah, and I subscribe to LinkedIn Learning. I love LinkedIn Learning. It used to be called lynda.com and I always used to say that I was in love with Lynda. You just learn anything, you can learn so much. I used to always like manuals. When I first got my computer in 2000, I spent £1,500 on an iBook, early iBook. I had no idea how to use it. And then I spent another £900 on software. And so I'd invested £2,500 on something I didn't know how to use. And so I had to learn how to use it or it was a waste of money. And so I bought myself a brilliant how-to manual that started from turning on and then took you through the whole system. And it had this brilliant phrase, read the manual. And then in brackets, it would have RTFM. And I've always read the manual. Oh, I see. And as it taught me, you just need to knuckle down and learn all this computer stuff. You can learn a lot of it, but it is time consuming. And I think you have to have the brain tight that enjoys it. Yes, I would totally, totally agree. You watch YouTube videos on how-to and I watch YouTube videos on cats. So that describes us differently. I quite like a cat, you know, with a fake voiceover, whereas you're looking at how to learn how to operate audio or whatever you want. I do love that early dog video, the funniest dog video ever. I do still sometimes like to watch that and it does make me laugh. Me, it was always cat versus printer for years. If I felt bad, I'd just watch cat versus printer where a cat voiceover is just like, take the F in paper. You know, the cat is just smacking the paper as it comes out. So yes, that's a sideline for today's podcast. The inner workings of our learning or non-learning brain, isn't it? I think we have to have things to make us smile as well, don't we? I think so. If we can't have some joy in our life, what's the point? No, exactly, exactly. And it can't all be based around food, which is generally what mine is. Food can bring a lot of joy. Anyway, we're going to start with the top tips. So if you haven't listened to our podcast, we try and include a top tip at the end of each podcast and we're going to do a rundown of our best, well, probably all of the top tips. I say their best. And I like the fact that you've prioritised the top tips over our interviews. So in your mind, our top tips are far more interesting than our extraordinary guests. But we've had some amazing guests. We have, we have. But you're prioritising the top tips. Let's do that. What's your top, top tip? Try saying that. My top, top tip. Top tip. What would be the one, if you had to choose out of any of them that we've given in the last 12 months, what would it be? My top, top tip would be, and we'll come back to this and talk about it in more detail, is actually just to be kind to yourself. Because I think, you know, we can all do work that we find difficult or frustrating and doesn't go as well as we'd like it to do. Or if you're learning, it can seem very difficult. And I just think acknowledge the good things and be kind to ourselves in the things that we can't or haven't achieved in the way we'd like to. And don't get too down about it. That's my top, top tip. Yeah. And we are going to roll around to that a bit later on, aren't we? Yeah. I think mine might have been the bra emptying. The very first one, you know, how to keep stones dust out of your bra. That was one of my favourites, I think, because every day I deal with that every single day. So that was one of my favourites. So do you now wear a little scarf around your neck? Oh, a buff. A buff. One of those pull on buff things. Yeah, if people don't know what a buff is. Yeah, it's like a tube of material that you put over your head, like a bit of a snood. Of course, these days, it not only stops dust going down my top, it actually hides my mum's neck, which I've developed over the last 10 years. So it hides a multiple of things. And keeps you warm. And keeps me very warm. I now feel slightly naked without it. So I've got a bra. Yeah, I like the bra tip. So coming in at number one, we've got- Be kind to yourself. Be kind to yourself. We don't have to put the bra tip number two, but in no particular order. Well, they say no particular order. No particular order. So you've got them written down. I've got them randomly spread over a stick-it note, but yours is all- Like I said, they're not in any order. They're just in the order I remembered them. So we've got not getting bits in your bra makes a big difference, especially at the end of the day, when you haven't got anything that you have to shake out. The scoop and shake, as you described it, which makes me smile. Dip and tip. Dip and tip. So my second top tip is a recent top tip, is the cornflour paste. Yes, that looks pretty- Recommended cooking up a paste of cornflour as if you were making custard, cornflour and water, painting it on top of your limestone before carving, and then carving your letters through the paste, then gently flood painting your letters and then rubbing the whole thing off. And it's absolutely brilliant. It saves you hours of work. And somebody, yeah, Annette, I was going to say, Annette- Annette Serling, who we did a fantastic interview with, trialled it on our behalf and said it worked absolutely brilliantly and sent me some photographs. So I don't have a recipe because I'm not very good at recipes, but a big spoon of cornflour, a cup of water, mix it up while it's cold, put it on the hob in a pan and gently bring it to the boil and keep stirring. And the cornflour thickens, or as we were always taught, it pops, it goes thick and you get a thick custardy consistency. And then we painted that onto the limestone quite thickly. And when it was dry, Annette drew on top of it and then carved through it. And because it's just cornflour, it washes off quite easily afterwards, but the paint sits on the surface of the paste and doesn't go down into the stone and leach through. I have since heard that somebody else has used polyfiller and said that can work quite well. We haven't trialled that, but the cornflour paste is, you know, give it a go. Don't obviously try it on a big piece of work before testing it at all, but give it a go. We'd love to hear some other comments about what people think. Just on a technical note, can you use that on any stone? Well, first of all, I can imagine it improving the surface that you're drawing on, on a slightly bumpy, porousy stone. I imagine it evens that all out, which is lovely. And the other thing is you can use it on a dark stone. It doesn't affect the surface. So you could use it on slate. Could you as well? It's a temporary surface. It will just wash off. And there's no oil involved. So I would worry with polyfiller that there might be an oil. I mean, I know there's waterproof polyfillers, aren't there? I think it's the powder of polyfiller. I think it's the powder of polyfiller. But the nice thing about cornflour is most people have it in their kitchens. It's dead cheap. It's not got chemicals in it. And, you know, if it were, it's nice. Annette said it was very nice to draw on. So I mean, I guess it's just the fact of boiling it. But actually, if you're making a porridge, you could do that at the same time, couldn't you? Yeah. The important thing is... You have to use it hot. No, you can use it cold, but it'll set like custard. It doesn't set. Right, OK. So you want to use it, you know, you could always heat it up again in the microwave. And obviously, it's not going to have a very long shelf life. So you won't want to make too much. The important thing when you use cornflour is to mix it really well while it's cold. And then gently heat it up. You mustn't... If you add it to warm water, you'll just get a lumpy mix that won't work very nicely for you. If you get a lumpy mix, can you just strain it, push it through a tea strainer or a strainer? Probably. But then it starts to get messy, you know. Right, OK. You know, then you're making a lot of mess. Good advice. Good advice. Yeah. I probably wouldn't be bothered. Just mix the cornflour up with the water cold, gently bring it to the boil. It'll pop thick, leave it to cool and it's ready to go. So another question, because I am fascinated by this. I don't live near my workshop. I've made my cornflour paste. I put it in a Tupperware. I take it to my workshop. It's now cold and thick. If I was to put that Tupperware in a bowl of boiling water, I've made with a kettle and warmed it up that way, would that work? Probably would. I think we'd have to experiment. I don't have the answer straight off. We'd love our listeners to have a go. Yeah, have a go with that. Yeah. Let us know how you get on. Because by the time I get to work, it would be cold and I'm sure there's a lot of people out there. It would be the same issue, wouldn't it? In fact, we've got an add-on top tip here for something else I've trialled in my workshop. I love messing about. I love cooking and I love carving. And when the two combine, I'm really happy. So I've been carving a stone similar to an abracena and there's no contrast between the cut and the polished surface. And so that makes it quite hard to see, especially when you're carving very fine lettering. And so what I did to see if it worked was I got, I have some graphite powder and I mixed it with egg white and then I... Of course you did. That's the way you do it. Exactly. So I take it onto the surface of my stone and let it dry and cut through it. And so I had a beautiful clear contrast between the darker graphite and the clear white of the cut. You could probably use cornflour as well. You could probably put some graphite in the cornflour if you wanted a contrasting cut. Because the graphite's not a pigment, it is unlikely to stain. And then when it was finished, I washed it off with some soapy water and then gave the stone a final clean with some 600 wet and dry. And again, it worked beautifully and it transformed how I could carve because I could see I had a really lovely clear definition between the cut and the uncut, which I was struggling to see. Especially when they're quite small letters, I was struggling to see. So that also worked fairly nicely. I got the idea of the egg white, tempera painting, did you? No. There's a brilliant book called Sign Work by somebody called Bill Stewart, and it's got all sorts of tips and tricks for sign writing. And one of them is if you're gilding on a painted sign written panel and it's oil-based paint and you put your gold sides on, the oil-based paint is likely to attract bits of gold as you rub it off and you'll get gold everywhere you don't want because it's naturally going to stick to it, even if it's dry. And so what you do is you paint on a solution of egg white and water and then let that dry over the whole sign and then you paint your gold sides on top. Then you do your gilding and then you wash the egg white off and it takes off the little flecks of gold where you don't want it to be. So it was always in my head for many years that this is a technique that sign writers can use. You have to be careful on the oil paint not to leave egg white solution on it because it can crack the surface of the oil paint over a period of time, you know, and obviously if you're carving stone that's unlikely to happen. So I think there's a lot of messing about. I'm sure there's lots of other things. I know, again, people do use clay, but it's not a technique I'm familiar with. I don't have clay. I'd be nervous about staining some of the paler stones with clay. You really can because I've come unstuck doing that sometimes. Yeah. So having pale stones next to a terracotta recycling bin, you know, and being a bit casual about, you know, opening the bin and throwing stuff in and droplets of slip going onto a white stone can be an absolute nightmare. It's a bit like throwing tea or coffee on it. It goes straight into the matrix of the stone. So you have to be very careful. Well, the beauty of egg white and cornflour is it sits, I mean, it does go into the stone, but it's a soluble solution. It's not pigment based and it will wash off. So we'll do some more tests and we'll let people know how we get on. Sounds fab. So that's moving down the list. Holding down your work. Yep. On the workbench. You had a great idea of using an old inner tube from a tire. I recycled an inner tube from my neighbour's defunct wheelbarrow wheels. And so I had some lovely small inner tubes zip tied up at the ends. If you don't want to do any kind of rubber gluing, you can rubber glue them or just zip tie them up. Filled with sand and they are invaluable in the workshop. And I was always, the other day I just used them to keep down, I had a kind of tabletop easel with a model on it so I could see it at a different angle and it was a bit front heavy and I just chucked the two inner tubes on the back and it was, you know, really stable while I was moving it around. So yeah, I think a sandbox and the inner tubes are brilliant ways of keeping things down if you can. Especially sculpture. I'm not talking about flat relief work. I'm talking about three dimensional things that need to be moved around. Well, after that conversation we had, I made my own sandbags out of an old pair of trousers. Yeah, just cut the legs off. Yeah, just used them. I don't know why I never knew about it. It's so funny, these things we discover, you know, 30 odd years into our practice. Did you, I imagine your trousers were incredibly sturdy, knowing you, and ones that you would have worn out a bit enough to cut up, I'm sure they were sturdy. Did you line, did you put the sand in a bag? I double bagged. You double bagged. Yeah, I've done the same thing where I put it in a pair of old work trousers, cut up an old pair of work trousers, and what I found was the sand dust came through the surface, which could be a bit, sand dust isn't very pleasant to breathe in, actually. So double bag. So I found that really, really useful. Moving down the list, we've got a few things to listen and watch coming up. So the first one that, again, you introduced me to Nina and I've been really enjoying is the podcast, The Sculptor's Funeral. Yeah, Jason Arcles. Jason, it's such a good listen. I'm slowly working my way through the episode. I'm about halfway through. I have been going methodically from podcast number one all the way up, but you can just dip in and out of them. I think when he talks about Greek and Roman history and sculpture, it's good to do it in an order because it kind of makes it very, if you're interested in the differentiation between certain types of sculpture, that could appear quite similar. It's really good to start and do them methodically because he kind of tells you how to tell the difference visually and why those visual differences appeared. And, you know, some things you think might be very close together in age are actually hundreds and hundreds of years apart. And also I quite like, if you listen to the Greek and Roman ones and you discover how and why, and then you come hundreds of years in the future, thousands of years in the future, and people revisit, you know, classicism, it's really interesting to have that history in your head before you listen to the classicism or neoclassicism. I thought, you know, the whole, it gives you such a good understanding of the history of sculpture. Yeah, figurative sculpture. Yeah, figurative sculpture. But other thrown in amongst it are sessions on technical tips. There's a brilliant one on clay. I love the clay one. I love the plaster one. They're my two golden ones for me. I've listened to the clay one about three times and I've taught, I've used the information I've taken from the clay one and taught, which I'm sure I've mentioned before. So the Sculptor's Funeral, absolutely brilliant podcast. If you're not familiar with it, check it out. We highly recommend it. And another podcast that you listen to more regularly, again, Nina mostly listens to more podcasts than me and introduces me to all of these things, is the Great Women Artists podcast. Do you want to just talk a bit about that? Yeah, it's initiated from an Instagram page. I've spoken about this before. It doesn't matter who you are. People think that I promote it for women to listen to about women. It's not that at all. I had a conversation yesterday with somebody and I was like, and I could throw it out. I don't want you to answer me, Charlotte, because you will know the answer to this, but I'll throw this out to our listening colleagues. And it's like, name me a female stone carver other than Barbara Hepworth. And now I can name people of that level, people who would be not just in the carving community, but in the art world itself, name me. And I think what I love about it is the women's podcast is that there are women that I didn't know about. She introduced people who are alive and practicing today. She talks to historians who review historic female artists' work, and she puts them in social context. And she tells you why some people are well known and have told names. And she also tells you about people who totally disappeared, but were instrumental in moving the art world along. And I think it's our responsibility to write history. I don't think it should be left to academics to write history. I think we as practitioners have to champion and push forward and remember and acknowledge and respect people, women, especially working in this industry. And I think the podcast is great for doing that. So that was a long winded way of me saying, just listen to it. You're going to learn loads. Great women artists. We're going to put all the links in the show notes for all of these things. I'm going to ask the question, ask yourself, name a famous female carver, wood or stone, other than Barbara Hepworth, and see if you can name me three. And then say to yourself, name me three men, carvers, wood or stone, and then you'll feel the difference in your bones. So moving away from podcasts, our tip now is videos you can get online, and we're starting with Letter Exchange. So if you're not familiar with Letter Exchange, it's a brilliant organisation for anybody who's interested in letter forms, whether it's type, calligraphy, letter carving. And for many, many years, they've been holding lectures at the Art Workers Guild in London. And over the last number of years, they've begun to record them. So if you can't get there, you could watch them online. And they've slowly been putting their archive available to buy for a few pounds. You can go onto the website at Letter Exchange. You can download a video by some absolutely brilliant letter carvers, lettering artists, calligraphers, type designers. It's all there. It's a phenomenal resource if you're interested specifically in letters. And I often do it at lunchtime. I call it my lunchtime learning. And I sometimes bring Maya up to the computer, my apprentice, and we do a 40-minute lecture looking at somebody's work. And it's just a really nice way of accessing this information, hearing about people's work without travelling all the way to London. You can do it from anywhere in the world with a computer. So Letter Exchange video archive of lectures is absolutely brilliant and well worth a little peruse. Go and join Letter Exchange. They do an absolutely brilliant magazine called Forum. It's one of my favourite reads and mostly edited by John Neilson, who's a letter carver based in Wales. But he does the most amazing job with Forum magazine. I think it comes out, I can't remember, is it three times a year, four times a year? And it's got the most interesting articles about different aspects of lettering. It has historical, it has contemporary articles of lettering. It's just a fantastic organisation. So that's Letter Exchange. Again, we'll put all these links in the show notes. Just click on the notes for the show and you'll see everything will be in there. Going to talk now about the next tip is the Lettering Arts Trust. The Lettering Arts Trust is a charity and they are who's funding the apprentice that I have learning in my workshop at the moment, Maya Gaffney-Hyde. And they have recently done a brilliant day symposium for young and emerging carvers, letter carvers and people interested in lettering. And those videos are also available for sale on their website. They have got Richard Kindersley talking about his work. They've got somebody talking about the business side, the finance, looking after your work as a business, how to think about your work as a business in a commercial sense because everybody has to be able to make a living. They've got Pip Hall doing a brilliant talk, showing slides about the most amazing project she did with a poet. So that's a talk about collaborations. They've got a whole list of things you can go on and have a look. And again, the Lettering Arts Trust, a great organisation if you don't know them, if you're looking to learn. They have a list of all the different workshops you can go on. They have training grants that they're few and far between, but they do come up. And I think there might be more coming through in the pipeline. So go on their website, read through it, have a good look. Got a fantastic resource like Letter Exchange, but it's got a different, slightly more focus on letter carving, not so much type and calligraphy, but a really interesting organisation to get your head around if you're not familiar with them. And go and download some of those brilliant videos. Again, you have to pay for them, but it helps keep the charity afloat, takes time to put all this stuff out. So of course, they have to be, they have to charge a small amount of money just to cover their costs. So we're getting down towards the last few top tips. And in fact, this is one I always feel really strongly about. People think I go on about far too often, but I think people don't go on about it often enough. It's PPE, Personal Protection Equipment. It's a bit of a pet topic of mine. We see so many people on Instagram and Facebook showing themselves carving with no mask and sometimes with no goggles and very often in materials that you really do need to wear a mask for. And I find it really shocking. Some of the most famous people out there don't have masks on and they're carving slate or sandstones or just masks are such an important part of our everyday life. We should never underestimate how important they are. And just because you see other people not wearing them, it doesn't mean that's okay. There are some stones, it's not as important to wear them with, but if you don't know the difference between your stones and you don't understand the risk, you need to wear a mask. And we have a mask, a P3 with a P3 filter. That's what's important when you're stone carving and make sure it fits really well. And goggles, I never work without goggles. I have even seen people carving without goggles online and it truly astonishes me. Yeah, I think the thing that always scares me when I see stuff online, those people using electrical equipment without them, grinders, what have you. And literally these beautifully made, produced films of your typical stereotypical carver, a fella with a beard standing there in a kind of like authentic smock, grinding away, all the dust flying away from him. Maybe he'll have some ear protection on, no mask, no goggles. And of course, that's the romantic image, isn't it? And people are going to pick up on that and copy that and think this is the way it is. So get a grip, get some PPE. Yeah, PPE. It's your best friend. Save your life. It will save your life. Yeah. So now we've got a little money-saving tip coming up. Oh, you'll say. I'm surprised I didn't come close to the top. Go on. What is it? It's my homemade pencil extender. I've made a little video showing you how to make these. So, you know, as your pencil gets shorter, it becomes very difficult to draw with. But if you look at that length of your pencil, it's easily a third of your pencil is still left by the time it gets difficult to draw with. And if a pencil costs about two pounds now, a good 9H pencil, 30% is 60p, 60 to 70p of your pencil can become wasted. And out of an old biro, you can make an absolutely brilliant pencil extender. It takes minutes to change the end of the pencil to slot into the end of the biro. I've got a little video on YouTube showing you how to do this. Again, we'll put the link up. It will save you 30% of the cost of your pencils. And if you go through pencils at the rate we do, a 9H, you know, stone eats pencils. We all know this. It eats the 9H. And if you use the white Prismalo, it eats the white Prismalo. So you want to get the maximum usage out of your pencil. And with a pencil holder, you can get down and work it till there's just a centimetre of it left from the tip to the top. And such a simple, brilliant little way of being economical in your workshop. I love it. A little pencil holder. What's next? And then our last top tip is really what we started with. My favourite top tip is being nice to yourself. Yeah, this deserves a little bit of a recap, isn't it? And it's come to the front of our attention because of what's happening with you and your responsibilities outside the workshop. I had a bit of it this year, but actually, you've had a right old time of it this year, haven't you? So, and continues. Well, I help... How we want to kind of frame it, isn't it? Yeah, I help a little, I say a little, with the care of my mother who has dementia. And it can be extremely time consuming. Out of my working day, I've had a week last week where I've got very little work done. And I think one of the things we've talked about, me and Nina, before we started recording was that women in particular, and of course, it's not exclusively women, but the burden of caring, whether it's for your parents or children, mostly falls on women. And it has a big impact on our output, on our careers, on our ability to focus on our work. And it can feel quite difficult to manage that at times. And these are the reasons why we haven't every month been able to put out a podcast on time or occasionally, even at all. It's just because there's a lot going on in the background of our lives. And so we just have decided that when that happens, we are nice to ourselves. We don't try and kill ourselves. We don't make it a big deal. We just go, okay, we're doing as much as we can this month. We'll try again next month. And I think it's a recognition. It is a recognition, but also I am not particularly technically minded. It gives me hot sweats or cold sweats. And you've taken on the burden of the production side of the podcast. And, you know, that takes a day. It takes a day to do the editing, doesn't it? Or more? It's quite a long time. It's a long time, isn't it? So we initially... Well, there's so many swear words to cut out, Nina. Oh, there's quite a lot of effing and jeffing, isn't there? Take all of those out. I never understand why you take them out, because it's a podcast, and we say whatever the fuck we like. So I don't understand that shit. Anyway... When I publish it, I tick a box that says clean content. Oh, God, it's clean for children. If anybody out there has a child listening to that, I'd like... It's just like, you're being really sad, turn this shit off. I'd like to know about it. But you're right. It's not exclusively women. And I've known guys who have got primary childcare responsibilities. And in the stone carving world, most of those guys are self-employed because, you know, let's face it, the commercial carving and stonemasonry world would not tolerate, you know, part time or like flexible working hours. That's not something I've ever come across. You can correct me here, but it's very unusual to have those sort of flexible working. Most people who work in the commercial world have to have, if they've got childcare responsibilities, will have a supportive family behind them helping them do that. I know guys who've taken a career break to bring up their kids and then found it really difficult to get kind of back into the stone carving world because of the gap. And things move very fast, and people become more familiar to other people when they're commissioning. But women are doing that all the time. You know, you get to the end of your pregnancy, you have to have time out. I know people have worked up to the day before they've given birth. You know, women are very resilient that way. We have been doing that for millennia where we can, we are functioning individuals during those times in our lives. But it's incredibly difficult to come back because of the stop-start nature of caring. And I think people don't always acknowledge it's not only during the child's young life where you have to be available all the time. It's actually when you get into your 50s, which we are, and then you have parents, and that possibly responsibility comes down to you. And you are completely right. A lion's share of that will come down to daughters. And that's very common. And it's really hard to keep the momentum and you're still commissioning, you're still delivering things on time to deadlines to people who don't really care about what's going on in your life. I don't know. It's not professional. I mean, I do talk about it more now. Well, people might say, why is this going to take you six months? You know, anybody else is going to deliver it in three. And you have to tell them, don't you? What I hadn't really thought about until I was listening to Radio 4, they were talking about caring. You know, so when you're caring, your income is affected because you're not in the workshop as much, but that has a knock-on effect to your pension contributions because your income is smaller. So it has a much longer term effect than I'd really considered. So anyway, it's just about the top tip here is whatever's going on in your life is to be nice to yourself, not to beat yourself up. And that has really helped me, you know, because we haven't always met the deadline for the tent to publish art. We haven't always published the podcast. And so we don't beat each other up about it. We just say, oh, never mind. We'll try again next month or we'll just do it late. And that's okay. I think it's really, really important. I often beat myself over the head going, you should be doing more. And actually, it's really good. It's also really good to have someone in your life who actually also says to you, don't be silly. This is absolutely fine. Yeah, that would be our message to the carving community. Whoever you are, whatever, you know, situation you're in, if things have to take a back step for whatever reason, just forgive yourself for it and just do what you can. Yeah, because stone isn't going to go off. It's not going off, is it? Not like your egg white paste. That, however, might be a bit smelly if you left it for a while. So that's the end of our top tips, a rundown with a couple of new ones. We have an exciting pre-announcement. We've got to save the date, haven't we, Nina? We do. And it's come around really fast. So we only do our residential course, it's not bi-annually. It's bi-annually. Bi-annually. Is it bi-annually? Bi-annually is not twice a year. Bi-annually is every two years. Okay. Yeah, every two years. And I jingo, it's coming up. It's coming up, Charlotte. I can already feel myself knick-waxing my walking boots in readiness. So we've got to save the date, which is the 2nd to the 5th of September. And we will be running our residential workshop set in the fabulous glamping site near West Acre, which is Bradmore Wood. Because we're being nice to ourselves, we haven't yet put anything up on the website. So it will come out soon. That's inefficiency. I'm not sure that's been covered yet. We do have people on the waiting list who are interested to come already. So we'll let you know when it's live and we're ready for bookings with all the details. But if you're interested, save the date, the 2nd to the 5th of September. It's a three-day, three-night residential carving course. And we have a fantastic person providing our catering, my friend of many years, Charlotte Chapman, who does the most amazing vegetarian food. And it's completely off-grid. It's a really amazing location. There's solar panels, so you can charge your mobile phone up. And everything else is as nature intended. There's compost toilets. Oh, no, they're not compost toilets. They're not. My God, that would put people off. Absolutely not a compost. They are water flushing, beautifully clean. Water, beautifully clean, hot showers. Beautifully clean hot showers that you don't have to go and... Hot showers, beautiful clean toilet. And we have evening, we have a lovely informal chats or lectures in the evening. So it's a full-on three days to mix with other people who are interested in carving, have a laugh, learn something new and eat some fantastic food as well. And I was thinking I probably will do an introduction to the pointing machine at the event. If there's enough interest, I'll bring a machine so people can handle them and have a look. So it will be, it's not just for beginners. That's basically what I'm saying. We are, it's tailored to the individual who comes to the course, isn't it? It's like majority of beginners, but we have had a good chunk of people who are practicing sculptors, sculptors and carvers, either delving into a discipline that they don't do very often. So a lot of letter cutters will do sculpture and a lot of sculptors want to do lettering. And in the evenings, like you say, we have professional, informal lectures around the fire, which is great, but we'll be covering some more kind of in-depth master stuff as well. So that's brilliant. Details to come shortly. Details to come shortly. All you need to do, bring a warm jumper for the evening and sunscreen because it's going to be hot, guaranteed. Hot tips and hot weather, basically. Yes, I think we've come to the end of everything there. We have. Apart from just to say thank you to all our fabulous guests, we're not going to list them in priority because that would be rude, but we've had some extraordinary, generous and wonderful conversations with people who have just been so, so open about giving advice and telling us about their journey. And that's what it's all about, isn't it? Listening to those voices. And different experiences. Wonderful. Wonderful. And hopefully many more to come. Yeah. Thank you to our listeners, people who listen and email us. Sort of a message, really. Yeah. I've had to write a small bio for somebody recently and basically the podcast is one of the things that I'm so proud of in a sense, you know, because it's community based. It's, you know, you guys out there. So we adore doing this and we're just really grateful that people tune in, especially to a podcast like this one, where it's just me and you shouting at each other. Not shouting, you know, like talking rubbish. We'll get some great guests back next time. And keep your ears out. We've got a good line up forming. We do. I'm going to go and put some layers on and get to the workshop. And Chip, what are you doing, Charlotte? I'm also carving. You're carving today? Brilliant. I'm doing lettering. Yeah. Oh, God, that sounds like a nightmare. Anyway, I love it. I've got my egg wash with the graphite paint. Whereas I've got a sandwich and a pint of milk. Be happy chipping. Happy chipping. Happy chipping. Fucker.