Shrink Pot with Woodcut Patterns

Teacher: Meelis Kihulane

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Meelis Kihulane has been a furniture restorer for more than 20 years and a teacher of traditional carpentry in Olustvere School of Service and Rural Economics. He has spent the past 10 years promoting and teaching Estonian traditional carpentry. He is re-introducing the traditional way of learning crafts - from master to apprentice - teaching native woodwork and furniture making. Meelis has been a curator of several woodworking exhibitions. He is an author of the book ‘Containers, Boxes, Sieves. Making Bent-wood Items’. He practises and teaches traditional carpentry methods in which hand tools are mostly used, such as knives, chisels, saws, axes, etc. Most of the raw materials come from nature and are not pre-processed. Meelis is also working at the NGO Edev Eremiit.

A shrink pot is made of one whole piece of tree, hollowed out from the end of the trunk into a cylindrical shape. Usually, the main body of the shrink pot was made of raw wood and the bottom of dry wood, which, placed in grooves cut into the body, was fixed by drying the cylindrical body. In this way, it was even possible to make solid containers for liquids.

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The materials used for the shrink pot were usually black alder, linden, aspen and pine. They were made as small as 0,5 - 5 litres, but also very large, 100 - 300 litres. The main tool used in the making process, was a curved hollowing chisel with a long handle, a “tarutuur”.

In the 2-day workshop, we will prepare a 1-2 litre lidded shrink pot in the traditional way, which can later be used, for example, to store dry ingredients in the kitchen or to store kitchen utensils without a lid. We will also make a traditional chip cut pattern to decorate the shrink pot, for which we use a small, sharp cutting knife.

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The shrink pot will be made out of either black alder or linden tree. The workshop is suitable for beginners and intermediates, all participants are recommended to have good manual skills.

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