Learn | Hedge Witchery

In our May issue we met modern hedge witch, Willow, in our ‘Know A Thing or Two’ feature about hedgerows. Here, she tells us a bit more about her craft.

How would you define hedge witchery or hedgecraft?

Hedge witchery or hedgecraft is generally a solitary, shamanistic practice in which the witch engages in spirit work and hedge riding, usually with some herbalism thrown in. Hedge riding is the act of using an altered state of consciousness to cross from our realm into the Otherworld to seek guidance from spirit guides, receive messages, and even practise magic.

How do you use hedgerows in your practice?

In hedgecraft, hedgerows act as a barrier between our world and the Otherworld, just as the hedge acts as the dividing line between civilization and the wild. It isn’t so much that the hedge is necessarily used literally in hedgecraft, but more metaphorically to explain the process of crossing between realms. However, there’s many a hedge witch that use hedgerows literally. Like all in-between places, hedgerows are liminal spaces, offering a thin place to easily travel to the Otherworld. Crossing under a bramble arch or other gap in the hedge, if done at the right location, can result in the witch being transported to the Otherworld where they can engage with the beings found there, including the Fae, ancestors, and other spirits.

Tell us about your craft and how these rituals relate to the Wheel of the Year? (What do you do to mark the year's chief solar events)?

A lot of my practice follows the Wheel of the Year, working with the ebb and flow of the Earth’s natural cycles instead of against it. At Imbolc or the Winter Thermstice I perform rituals to call back the light, while at the Summer Solstice I celebrate the Sun’s full return and the blessings the Earth provides us with. I also like to hedge ride during these solar events, especially during Beltane and Samhain when the veil is thinnest between our worlds, and to honour local spirits and give thanks. A lot of what I do centres on being present, thankful, and mindful, allowing the hussle and bustle of everyday life and worries to go. Witchcraft doesn’t have to be constant spells and rituals and shouldn’t. Practising mindfulness and building relationships with the spirits around you is key to being successful, happy and fulfilled. 

What connects your practice with the hedge witches of the past?

There is absolutely no way to fully revive the practices of the past. There is just too much we don’t know, too much that is speculation, and too little well documented from reliable sources, ie people not being tortured for a confession. However, what we do have gives us some ideas of what the cunning folk of the past did, especially things like herbalism and medicine, charm bags, and even cursing. Much of this is found in folklore, which I rely upon heavily and incorporate into my practice through correspondences, spells and simple rituals. I also use flying ointments, some of which are based on historical recipes, have joined the Witch’s Sabbath while hedge riding, and even cast spells documented in the old Grimoires. However, what really connects me with the hedge witches of the past are my ancestors. We all have magic in our family line, and even if they didn’t practise “witchcraft” in the traditional sense, they have knowledge and connection that cannot be found in books.

How can we bring hedgecraft into our everyday lives?

The easiest way to incorporate hedgecraft into your daily life is being aware of the world and spirits around you and the impact you have upon them. Live sustainably, see the magic in all that you do and be mindful and present in the moment.

 Find out more at flyingthehedge.com and read more about hedgerows from page 77 of the May issue.

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Miscellany | Jane Austen special

Today marks the bicentenary of Jane Austen's death (18 July 1817). In the July issue, The Simple Things presents Miscellany: a curious combination of the practical and the playful, circa 1817. Buy July here.

Learn how to make small talk at a ball, make us giggle with a caption for wet-shirted Colin Firth as Darcy, and learn an Austen word for a noble or young gentleman. 

Discover a fab gadget (Austen was reportedly a dab hand at this cup and ball game), cast aside your cocoa in favour of a much nicer nightcap, and take a household hint from Northanger Abbey. 

Shop three beautiful editions of Austen's classics, learn a classic 18th century card game as played in Emma and Pride and Prejudice, and discover how hard it can be to be an accomplished lady. 

Finally, get to grips with Austen's homes in our identifier and learn how to improve your garden, Austen style. 

Find out more about talks, walks, exhibitions and performances at janeausten200.co.uk. 

Get hold of your copy of this month's The Simple Things - buy, download or subscribe

View the sampler here

More from the July issue:

More Miscellany:

Shop of the month - Mason & Painter

Meet Michelle of Mason & Painter, our Shop of the Month in May's The Simple Things.

'Mason & Painter has been open on Columbia Road since October 2013 - just over 18 months. The location is famous for its Sunday Flower Market so, like most of the shops on the street, we only open Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Sunday is always our busiest day. Last Autumn we moved across the road to a premises double the size of the original shop, to number 67 Columbia Road, and now have more space to house the vintage furniture and homewares.

'The products we stock are inspired by the horticultural flavour of the market though not exclusively. We buy from antique fairs up and down the country as well as France so we stock a real eclectic mix, ranging from 1950s French cafe chairs, old trestle tables, vintage fabrics and the occasional piece of Victorian taxidermy. We also stock new homewares, books, toys and candles, and one of our most popular items is the pre-war Dolly wash tub; customers use them as planters for trees and shrubs. I'm currently interested in illustrations from old books of birds and butterflies, which we mount in lovely zinc and copper edged frames. I've also designed a couple of tea towels especially for the shop showing Columbia Road market and another one with Chelsea Flower Show, both of which sell incredibly well to locals and visitors alike.

'We try not to get too attached to things - our shop motto is everything's for sale. Even the counter! Vintage school wall charts of the botanical and biological variety are always popular and we sell a lot of handblown glassware - large, old preserve jars that make great vases and vessels. And I design mugs, wallpaper, rugs and fabric for cushions which means we have a comprehensive mix of old and new.

'Outside the shop, we work on takeovers such as the Festival Terrace shop at the Southbank Centre in March. We curated all the products around a floral theme and even built a potting shed in the window. Now, we're giving our shop a new coat of paint, adding some colour, and bringing in new products to get ready for summer.'

Mason & Painter,
67 Columbia Road,
London E2 7RG

The Collector: Girl group records

Music writer Jeanette Leech’s record player is always spinning – especially with girl groups of the sixties.

In this digital age, where a ‘record collection’ often exists solely as a list of titles on a phone or a playlist on Spotify, it is satisfying to get your hands on an actual, physical object, lift it up and declare that you love it. No one appreciates this more than music writer Jeanette Leech whose North London flat is lined with orderly collections of LPs and singles, particularly by girl groups from the 1960s and 70s. “You have to get up, find a record, put it on, put it away, look after it,” she explains, doing exactly that. “You can’t just key one up on iTunes. There’s something about the effort you go through with vinyl that reduces the distance between you and the music.” The difference between the sound quality of vinyl and other media, she says is, “the warmth – which doesn’t sound very technical and it’s not meant to be.” Listening to records is also sociable, she says as she slips ‘He Knows That I Love Him Too Much’ on to the turntable. “You want to share them. This single, sung by a British teenager, Glo Macari, was released in 1965 and wasn’t a hit at the time but it’s really good.”
Jeanette has been collecting 60s girl groups since she was a teen. Her interest was fired up when she discovered CD compilations ‘Dream Babes’ and ‘Here Come The Girls’. “They had a lot of the more obscure stuff on them,” she says, “and they opened up a whole new world to me. I bought the CDs, then I bought the original singles from record shops, fairs and off eBay.”

For more of Jeanette’s collection, turn to page 110 of November’s The Simple Things. Buy or download your copy now.

Want to hear the best of Jeanette’s sixties girl group collection? Have a listen to her Spotify playlist.

Bedtime story illustrator: Christine Rösch

Meet illustrator Christine Rösch, whose work illustrates May's Bedtime Story, Fireflies. Christine Rösch is a German illustrator based in Scotland. She has studied in both Germany and Israel. Her images often incorporate hand-drawn typography and have become more colourful over time which she attributes to her constant desire for summer and spring. In addition to her freelance work, she participates in a creative group called the Pencilcase Collective. See more of her work on her website and at the Pencilcase Collective.

Meet the original upcyclers: Mark and Sally Bailey

Mark and Sally Bailey, king and queen of up cycling, talk us through their stripped-back style  

In issue 21 of The Simple Things, Mark and Sally Bailey share their love of beautiful, functional and nostalgic objects.

Baileys has become a destination store: a place to spend an hour or so, basket in hand, wandering around the different spaces lost in a shopping reverie. Retail guru Mary Portas has praised the way "it encourages you to meander through its rooms of beautifully merchandised spaces". All manner of delightful household objects, from wooden dolly pegs to plump sofas, are heaped into crates and packed onto shelves without feeling either congested or unmanageable. This is largely down to the acres of space available (actually 20,000 feet), but it's also due to Mark's expert eye for display. "He's often in here until midnight arranging things," says Sally.

No day is typical at Baileys. "Increasingly, we discover great things at local fairs and smallholder shows," says Sally. "We've found bakers, weavers, bodges [hand-turned chair makers] and biscuit makers there." "it's exciting how many young people are taking up traditional crafts like cheese making rather than a traditional career path," says Mark. "if we can stock their stuff, we will."

Read the full interview on page 52 of The Simple Things issue 21. Buy now, or have a look through the digital sampler:

3 tips for small business success

You'll never guess number 3… Nick Cooper, the creative force behind successful small business Stamp Shoes, shares the top 3 things he's learned from setting up his own bespoke shoe workshop.

NICK COOPER, founder of Stamp Shoes, lives in Northampton and creates beautiful bespoke footwear from his own designs.

After my religious studies degree I tried admin at a charity in London but didn’t last long! I ended up moving back to my parents in Shropshire and shelf filling at a supermarket. At this point I asked myself, “What do I really want to do?” I arrived at ‘craft’. I ended up moving to the 'shoe capital' of Britain, Northampton, to learn about shoes. I wanted to create my own set-up as soon as I could, make the designs that I wanted to make and then work out how to generate money from it! Nothing happened for about a year, but then I found a workshop space at the Innovation Centre in Northampton University. I bought a little bit of machinery and some materials and started experimenting. It's all taken off from there.

3 THINGS SETTING UP STAMP SHOES HAS TAUGHT ME

1. Don’t give up your day job until you’re established. Go part-time if you can and develop your passion alongside your other work, or at the weekends. Start your business gradually and slowly scale back your hours of employment when you know you can.

2. I never set a goal of making even a single penny. It was daunting setting up a business so I set my goals fairly low. I just wanted to have a complete shoemaking workshop and create a collection of shoes I was happy with, with designs that I’d wear myself.

3. If you’ve never done it, go and stay in a monastery for at least a week, even if you’re sceptical of religious belief. Every summer I go and stay with some monks in the Burgundy countryside. It’s perhaps the only time when I feel completely safe and fully myself. The monks do ‘simple’ on a daily basis and in a way that enables people to experience a complete and lasting joy.

Read more about Nick in our regular series, Beyond The Nine-to-Five in issue 20 of The Simple Things.

www.stampshoes.com.

Those who can, do

IF YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF Do Lectures you're missing out on free talks on big ideas and clever thinking from very bright people. Think Tim Smit of the Eden project, the chief of the Sioux nation, the man who reinvented meditation for modern living and the woman who directed Pixar's Brave. For starters.

You can read our interview with the inspiring Hieatts (David and Clare) who began Do Lectures in issue 20 of The Simple Things. And when they are not doing Do they have got a town in Wales making jeans again.

Why sewing matters

We predict Father Christmas will be bringing a record number of sewing machines this year. If sewing is on your to-do list for 2014, be inspired by the beautiful fabrics and oh-so-simple patterns from Merchant and Mills. Enjoy this mini-film of their work by weareshuffle. Click here to view You can read the interview with seamstress Carolyn Denham in our Christmas holiday issue (no 18 - on sale now).

Here's a taste of what she has to say on the subject of sewing:

'What really gets Carolyn worked up is how little regarded sewing is as a craft. She believes that because women do it is seen as domestic, like housework. “Seamstresses were never looked up to like tailors, who were mainly men. But all 'haute couture' means is high sewing, there's no difference in terms of craftsmanship in these professions.” And don't even get her started when it comes to revered woodworking skills such as joinery and carpentry and cabinetmaking. “Think how much more difficult sewing is – wood stays still, while material wobbles, frays and slips but because everyone – every woman did it at home it was devalued.” Where cabinetmakers and blokes generally have got it right is that they are more happy to spend money on kit while women tend to be naturally thrifty. There's a certain pleasure in that but it is a false economy. My motto would always be, buy one and buy well.'

Letters to a beekeeper…

This is a love story about bees and flowers; about a beekeeper and a gardener; about all of us, and the natural world we love. Follow urban beekeeper Steve Benbow and gardener Alys Fowler as they explore each other's world.

JOIN THEM AS they swap tips for gardening, growing and helping out useful insects, whether they are bees or butterflies, predators or prey, pollinator or pest. The pair have now sucessfully crowdfunded their project on Unbound.

Steve Benbow is an urban beekeeper and founder of The London Honey Company.

Read our interview with Steve Benbow in issue 17 of The Simple Things.

Liz Earle: The Simple Things interview

Sharon O’Connell meets beauty entrepreneur Liz Earle.

Beauty entrepreneur Liz Earle is her own poster girl – projecting an inner glow and revealing her secrets of living well.

Like most of us, Liz’s passion for natural beauty products began as a child. “The earliest memory I have of an interest in that world was making rose water from flowers in the garden,” the dewy-skinned 50-year-old entrepreneur reveals. “My father was an admiral and away at sea a lot, so when he was home, he would always head for the garden. That was his R&R, to reconnect with the land. He would grow a lot of fruit and vegetables; everything had to be practical for him – he would only grow what you could eat or use. On my 13th birthday, my grandmother gave me my first ever hard-back book, which was a copy of Vogue Body and Beauty by Bronwen Meredith – a real classic. It was full of pictures of incredibly glamorous women. That book had a lot of recipes for things like yoghurt and cucumber face packs, which I used to make.”

Later, as a beauty writer, she learned more about wellbeing; “I interviewed naturopaths and nutritionists and – a light-bulb moment – they began to talk about how important it was to look after what you eat, and how what goes on inside the body affects it externally. So I started to read a lot about essential fatty acids, I started taking evening primrose oil, I went dairy-free for a while… and it began to make a big difference to my skin. I was very excited about this and wanted to write more than I could in the magazine world, so I moved very quickly from writing magazine copy to writing books.”

Now as the founder of her botanicals based and responsibly sourced skincare range, the product she's most proud of is her Cleanse & Polish product. “I felt faint on seeing it ranked as a modern beauty icon – alongside Chanel No. 5 and Elnett hairspray – in Vogue’s millennium issue.

Unsurprisingly, Liz is emphatic about the need to regularly both cleanse (“the cornerstone of good skincare”) and moisturise, but is refreshingly non-dogmatic on dietary matters. “I eat chocolate,” she admits, “but I try to eat mostly dark, organic chocolate. I drink red wine… In my youth I was a teetotal, vegan macrobiotic and I think I was very antisocial. It was quite hard to go out. I felt very healthy, but I feel very healthy now and in my older years, I’ve learned that it’s about balance.

“For me,” she adds, with refreshing pragmatism, “good skincare was always about creating healthy, glowing skin – and then moving on to enjoy the rest of your life.”

www.lizearlewellbeing.com Liz's new venture is translating 25 years of knowledge and experience into good advice on eating well, looking good and feeling great.

Read the full interview in issue 17 of The Simple Things.

Alastair Sawday: the green travel pioneer

The Simple Things interview: Julian Owen chats to Alastair Sawday.

“I can’t stop people flying, but I can influence the way they behave – offer them the choice to stay with interesting people”

THIS IS THE KIND of morning that suggests all is right with the world. In Clifton, the steeply rising Bristol hilltop settled by the merchants who brought the city its wealth, a cloudless sky allows ranks of grand Georgian terraces to bask in the sun’s rays. A trilling nightingale is, surely, only just out of earshot.And yet, those merchants didn’t build here simply for the view. They came to escape the hovelled poverty and putrid stench of the industrial city below. Out of scent, out of mind. Even more so, the African lives they traded in, wrenched from homelands to work enslaved in Caribbean colonies.

As we’re warmly ushered into a spectacularly spacious abode and the owner speaks of our attitude to climate change, we’re put in mind of a contemporary parallel. “We’re like the people of Rome,” says Alastair Sawday. “Too busy enjoying their massages and wine to bother about the Barbarians coming. There should be a revolution. Why do we allow it? It’s the West that caused it, but we’ll find ways of adapting. In the meantime we’ll allow more refugees to leave hit countries, islands to sink, and food supplies to become more expensive, to the detriment of the poor.”

Today his name is synonymous with eco excursions – first as a tour operator and latterly for a vast range of travel guides, alongside tomes on food and broader green living. He’s been one of environmentalism’s most articulate voices for the best part of four decades, since his views saw him labelled “a complete crank. Barmy, hopeless, quixotic, useless, irrelevant.” When he founded the Avon branch of Friends of the Earth in 1978, nuclear power was the issue of the day. “I found it intellectually fascinating, arguing the irrelevance of a brilliant system.”

Even before the partial nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island a year later, Cold War fears meant Alastair was pushing at a partly open door. The next venture was paper recycling – initially collecting in his own van, selling to wastepaper merchants, living off the “pittance”. This increased to three lorries, 100 employees, and city-wide collection. “Our managers were long-term unemployed, collecting staff were kids off the street. I don’t think of myself as a businessman, more as a social entrepreneur."

Green is good Born in Kashmir in 1945, moving to the UK in infancy, Alastair attributes his outlook to his parents and their friends. “Their narratives were of service, commitment, a certain amount of sacrifice. ‘Decency’ and ‘integrity’ were bandied around a lot.” He shares a telling anecdote: before reading law at Oxford, Alastair studied in the US, returning to announce plans for a pizza business “which would have been pioneering in Britain. I’d probably be a pizza billionaire by now. My parents were just appalled: what an incredibly vulgar, self-serving thing to be doing.”

Betterment of life for others was the thing. Eschewing law, he embarked upon “probably the most significant transformational experience,” with Voluntary Service Overseas in St Lucia. “I realised people were poor because the system was set against them. [Other] people wanted it to be like that.”

Ensuing years saw him travelling South America, running a VSO programme for Papua New Guinea from London, becoming a “semi-social worker” to Asian refugees thrown out of Uganda by Idi Amin, and teaching, first in inner-city London, then Bristol.

“I wanted to do something transformative,” says Alastair. Building on the recycling, he set up an organic food distribution project via local schools. “It was a total failure. Organics were in their early stages.” Nevertheless, the strategy was sound enough for the Soil Association to take on, and organic food remains a passion for Alastair. The suggestion that it’s too inefficient to meet the planet’s needs cuts little ice. “We’re not feeding the world properly with the system we have, are we? It’s to do with far more than growing – it’s delivery, logistics, markets. By putting more power into the hands of a few corporations, we’re depriving the world of any openness on the issue. We’ve got to build resilience.”

In 1984 he founded Alastair Sawday’s Tours. “Completely committed to showing people the real world, introducing them to human beings, getting them under the skin of places. I was trying to redefine the way we travel, but it rather fizzled out.”

Standing as Green candidate at the 1992 election, he finished fourth. “A pretty debilitating experience. I was told: ‘We think you’re dead right, but it’s a wasted vote’.” Kipling would doubtless approve that Alastair treats his disasters with the same frankness as his triumphs. Nevertheless, this passage is uniquely illuminating. “If the ship’s going down, and we’re all going to drown, it doesn’t stop you bailing. Winning the battle was less important than playing a part in possibly one day winning the war.”

In 1994 he launched Alastair Sawday Publishing. “I realised publishing books about places I loved was going to be a damn sight easier than trying to persuade people to enjoy every moment of the day I was organising for them.” Before the term ‘boutique holiday’ was coined, his guides offered a welter of green-leaning destinations, handpicked by trusted contacts across the continent. In an increasingly online world, and notwithstanding a 30% fall in book sales, business remains stable thanks to all guide entries paying a fee for inclusion. Isn’t it tempting to accept money from sub-standard providers? “Imagine looking on our website and finding some naff place, run by unpleasant people, overlooking a motorway. You’d start to disbelieve us.”

Environmentally aware On climate change, Alastair says: “The most upsetting aspect is the unfairness on those who’ve made no contribution to it. I can’t bear it. I’m tearful as I’m talking now.” And he is. Which makes asking the next question as difficult as it is unavoidable: how does such an environmentally aware man reconcile heading a travel-encouraging business? “I feel it very keenly. I can’t stop people flying, but I can influence the way they behave – offer them the choice to stay with interesting people, eating organic food from their gardens. It’s not an impressive answer because I have, presumably, contributed to the damage.” A beat. “I don’t know if I’ve reduced damage or increased it. We’ve actively avoided long haul, have turned down sponsorship from companies we disagree with. That’s another way we try to ease our consciences. If we can encourage B&B owners to put [solar] panels on their roofs, provide bicycles, little things add up.”

Family business In 2010, Alastair handed over management of the company to his son, Toby. The latter has presided over digital transition (“We’ve now got an app, for example, which I’d never heard of”), and taken on his father’s offshoot, Canopy & Stars, borne from a love of treehouses, offering genuinely esoteric accommodation. Alastair enthuses about a “farmer who’s built a wooden hut on a floating platform in a gravel pit – imaginative, beautiful.”

Just don’t call it glamping. “I hate the term, loathe the pampering people love nowadays: the emphasis on power showers, fat towels, the self-conscious pursuit of hedonistic pleasures.” Nevertheless, isn’t traditional camping the simplest travel pleasure of all? “We’d never survive if we just offered camping.” And who wouldn’t “get a kick out of a slightly more upmarket camping weekend up a tree”?

Perhaps Sawday Jr’s biggest change concerns company HQ, sacrificing the totemic eco-friendly base in an outskirt village for a central office block. “Easier to get to, easier to recruit, easier to run,” avows his father. Nevertheless, “I’ve been through an awful lot of emotional turmoil; even thought of going to live there. But Toby’s right, business has to come first.” Though there may no longer be an office pond in which to take a dip, the fundamentals still apply. “I can’t stand the greed that tends to follow the successful. The salary range from bottom to top in the average FTSE 500 company is something like 250 to 1. Oxfam advocates a maximum of 10 to 1. In Sawday’s it’s 3.5 to 1.”

Projects keep coming. Alastair helped secure Bristol’s European Green Capital 2015 award; next year he’ll chair the city’s Big Green Week; there’s talk of a good food book for dinner ladies. Because ultimately, for all his misgivings about humanity, Alastair remains driven by a belief he didn’t so much learn as inherit: “Our potential for doing benign, intelligent things is enormous.”   

ALASTAIR’S CAREER PATH  www.sawdays.co.uk

1945 Born in Kashmir

1964-67 Studied law at Oxford

1968 VSO teacher in St Lucia

1969-78  School teacher

1976 Moved to Bristol

1978 Founded Avon Friends of the Earth

1984 Set up Alastair Sawday’s Tours

1994 Founded Alastair Sawday Publishing

2005-7 Vice-chair of Soil Association

2006-11  Founder-chair of Bristol’s Green Capital Momentum Group

2008-10 Awarded Environmental Publisher of the Year

2010 Founded Sawday’s Canopy & Stars

2014 Chair of Bristol’s Big Green Week

Read the full interview, including a fascinating scrapbook of images from Alastair's early days as a travel entrepreneur in issue 16 of The Simple Things.

Interview: Cassandra Ellis quiltmaker

CASSANDRA ELLIS doesn’t just wake up under a quilt, she spends her days making them, or teaching others how to. It’s not about art, it’s about memories…

Do you wake up under one of your own creations? Yes, I have too many. They’re the essence of what a home is (that and a roast chicken). We all have one on our beds, I made quilts for both my stepchildren, and they’re also on the sofas. It’s very cute when the kids are watching TV the quilt comes off the sofa and on the laps. We have a chocolate lab called Mr Darcy, because he’s so good looking, and Lily, an Australian terrier – they have their own too. In fact there’s a quilt that didn’t start off as a dog quilt but has become one because Mr Darcy lay on it all the time.

Is the rest of the house as cosy? We live in Peckham Rye in London. People might assume I’m going to be wearing velvet and jangly bells and have a purple streak in my hair and every wall’s going to be a different colour. It’s nothing like that. There’s no built-in furniture, everything is very simple, along the lines of Barbara Hepworth’s house in Cornwall. Clean, not fussy. The whole house is one colour, pale grey, with wooden floors. We had new friends round for dinner and they described our house as “soporific”, as in they didn’t want to leave!

What is it like, teaching workshops in your own home? I’m quite fanatical about having everything prepped. I get up at 5am and bake. It’s not just about learning to quilt but about creating a homely feel. I have a huge studio up in the roof. By the time they get to floor five people go “Oh my God!” You can see across the city of London. I really enjoy the whole community thing. People share fabric and tell stories. That’s where it all started – doing your day’s work, getting the children to bed, and doing craft was the only chance people got to sit and talk. It’s lovely.

Tell us about the memory quilts you make for people When I make a commission for someone, or teach someone, when they hand over their bags of children’s clothes and wedding dresses and husband’s shirts, in some way they all tie together because it’s their story. When it’s finished, they don’t see the quilt first – they see their lives. It’s incredibly emotional.

Can you suggest a good project for beginners? The only thing you’ve got to learn is cutting fabric and sewing it back together again. It’s about building blocks – that piece of fabric can be sewn to that piece of fabric. Try a little memory piece. These came about from someone I know who, when someone died, cleared out all the clothes then realised, ‘Oh God, we should have kept those’. You can use any cottons, anything from shirts to kids’ clothes, mixing up with Liberty or Indian block prints. You can use wool but not very heavy wool – you’d struggle to put silk next to wool, they’d have a little fight and the wool would win. If you want to incorporate silk or lace, back it with something. Ties are perfect for binding edges.

In the November issue of The Simple Things we have an extract from Cassandra's latest book, Cloth (Kyle Books £25), which explores the history and significance of natural fabrics and contains more than 30 beautiful projects for wool, linen cotton, silk and hide.

Craig Sams: The Simple Things interview

Sharon O’Connell meets Green & Black’s co-founder and biochar champion Craig Sams.

Unlikely as it may seem, sweet-toothed foodies with a fondness for Green & Black’s organic chocolate have the US Navy’s inefficiency to thank for their fix. When company co-founder and Nebraska native Craig Sams was in his late teens, his life path seemed set. Kenneth Sams was a military man, so his son would serve two years in the Peace Corps and then – capitalising on the year he’d already spent in the US Navy Reserve while at the University of Pennsylvania – would become a pilot.

Fate, however, had a different plan. When he first went to Pensacola, Florida for training, the young Craig was unimpressed. “In the barracks where we were staying the heating had failed,” he remembers. “The aircraft carrier we were on had the wrong kind of oil in the training planes, so we couldn’t fly them and the plane we were flying back to Philadelphia in turned around and landed at Pensacola Air Station because the wing was falling off. I kind of wondered, ‘Do I want to be a pilot in an organisation like this?’”

The answer was clearly no. Instead, Craig stayed in Philly, where he completed his economics degree and became increasingly involved with the city’s nascent macrobiotic scene. His conversion was the result of the dysentery and hepatitis he contracted while travelling through India and Asia on his gap year in 1965. He cured the former by a simple diet of unleavened, whole wheat bread and unsweetened tea, but the hepatitis left him with frequent, terrible sugar cravings, which he satisfied with junk foods on his return home.

“I had macrobiotic friends,” Craig explains, “and one day they marched round to my house, gave me brown rice, sesame seeds, some carrots and a bottle of tamari and confiscated my syrup and my Aunt Jemima’s Pancake Mix. They said, ‘Just do it for two weeks, Craig.’ I did, and within two weeks I felt like a dead man who had been resurrected.” Craig has followed a macrobiotic diet (“happily, not strictly”) ever since.

It’s part of an alternative lifestyle choice that’s returned more than just health benefits for the upright and energetic 69-year-old, whose exercise regime includes Pilates, Prop Cycle workouts, gardening and daily walks in Hastings, where he lives with his wife (and Green & Black’s co-founder) Josephine Fairley, in a three-storey Georgian house. It’s also made him an extremely successful businessman, who sold his chocolate company to Cadbury in 2005 for a rumoured £20 million. “Supposedly,” Craig says wryly, “but nobody mentions the shareholders.”

A green journey

We’re talking over tea in his office on the third floor, which overlooks a large, brick-walled garden that features a bountiful kitchen plot and herb bed, plus an apple tree and an old mulberry stand that he says could well have originated from a tree in Shakespeare’s Stratford-On-Avon garden. Craig talks with deliberation – doubtless the result of his public speaking experience – and wanders enthusiastically off-piste. Our conversation breezes through his appreciation of both Wagner and the blues, Detroit’s move from manufacturing exclusively “pretty” cars in the 1950s to “jalopies and hotrods” in the 1960s, the conquistador Pizarro’s Amazonian exploits and the fact that it’s almost impossible to get a decent cup of tea in France.

Craig’s green journey stretches from the Whole Earth Foods company he founded in 1967 with his younger brother, Gregory, a year after moving to London and Seed, the Paddington restaurant he opened in 1968 (“we had a lot of fun, and it rocked,” Craig says of the place patronised by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Terence Stamp and members of the Stones), to Green & Black’s success and his latest enterprise, biochar manufacturing company Carbon Gold. Biochar is a soil-enriching alternative to peat and has enormous potential to cut carbon emissions and thus help reduce the effects of climate change. It’s made by burning organic waste without oxygen (a process called pyrolysis, which avoids the production of carbon dioxide) and locks carbon in the resultant charcoal-like lumps.

Craig agrees that climate change is the biggest threat faced by humankind – and that time is running out. So what of his own carbon footprint, which includes an annual trip to Dubai, where he stays in a luxury resort? “I don’t eat meat,” he reasons, “so that knocks tons off my carbon footprint. I eat predominantly organic food – at home, always – and I have a car that I drive 2,000 miles a year. At that rate, it will last me the rest of my life.

“I don’t spend much on clothes, I download MP3s, so I’m not buying plastic and through the Carbon Gold business, I’m putting biochar in the ground. That more than offsets my own footprint, and it probably also offsets the footprints of the other seven people in the business.”

Cocoa and carbon gold

Given the critical state of our endangered planet, it might seem that “think global, act local” is no longer a sensible directive, that dutifully digging charred organic waste into our allotments and gardens is nothing more than a drop in the (polluted and over‑fished) ocean. Craig disagrees. He’d like Carbon Gold to play a significant part in global carbon sequestration, but he believes that direct action at local level is key to environmental rescue, and cites the big move to plantation cacao farming in the 1980s to make his point.

“It failed, really badly,” he says. “Now, chocolate manufacturers are all pushing smallholding cacao, because they’ve realised that it’s far better to have a cocoa supply chain that relies on, say, one million farmers, each of whom has five hectares of land, than to have massive, state-of-the-art plantations where disease can wipe them all out. It’s about resilience, and resilience doesn’t happen on that sort of scale.”

Craig also supports local-level initiative GIY (Grow It Yourself), an emerging global network of community food growers whose members share skills and provide mutual encouragement for those wanting to produce their own food. Carbon Gold sponsored this year’s inaugural UK gathering, at which Craig gave a talk on “the slippage of power away from big to small. Big, out-of-town supermarkets aren’t working so well any more,” he reckons, “and smaller versions are steadily moving back into the town centres they eviscerated 20 years ago. People are realising that going shopping once a week and buying food you’re going to throw away isn’t a very intelligent way to waste your money. If you’re going to do that,” he laughs, “then spend it on drugs or booze or holidays, not on pizza and lettuces!”

Broach the subject of biotech crops with Craig and his blood pressure clearly rises a degree or two. Of the recent statement by Owen Paterson, UK Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, that Britain has a moral obligation to help developing countries adopt GM technology, because it could solve the problems of starvation and agricultural poverty, he says: “His is attitude is condescending. The idea that Africans are too stupid to know what’s good for them, when they’ve been farming for thousands of years, and without subsidies.”

Going with the flow

So, if Craig had the chance to make a single recommendation to the UK government, with the guarantee that it would be made law, what might that be? After some deliberation, he decides, “My one request to all world governments, including the British, would be that they stop subsiding farmers completely. It’s immoral to take money from people who don’t even have a garden and give it to people who have 2,000 acres in Gloucestershire that they can pass onto their children, inheritance tax‑free. The big guys get vast amounts of money for being rich, and that’s wrong. They could spend the money on something useful – like educating kids about nutrition.”

Looking back on the past 45-odd years, is there anything he would have done differently? “I very rarely have regrets. ‘Going with the flow’ I suppose describes how I do things.” How about selling Green & Black’s to a confectionery giant like Cadbury? The move drew plenty of criticism at the time. “We still love the brand, and the brand still loves us,” Craig says, evenly. “I have a very close relationship with the team running it, in that I meet with the business leader once a month and they keep me updated on new product developments and the like. I’m about to sign a new contract, which will make me brand ambassador for Green & Black’s.”

“Changing the world, one bar at a time” was his former company’s slogan. Craig’s measurement unit may now be a block of biochar, rather than organic chocolate, but green evolution is still very much his business.

Craig’s list From prospective pilot to outspoken organic pioneer: the Sams CV

1944 – Born in Nebraska, USA.

1966 – Moved to London.

1967 – Co-founded Whole Earth Foods, with his brother Gregory.

1968 – Opened macrobiotic restaurant, Seed, in west London.

1991 – Launched Green & Black’s organic chocolate, with his wife Josephine Fairley.

2001-2007 – Chairman of Soil Association.

2007 – Founded Carbon Gold

2007-09 – Chairman of Soil Association Certification Ltd.

Currently – Director of Soil Association Certification Ltd.

Interview and archive photographs from Craig's fascinating CV in issue 13 of The Simple Things magazine.