Tom Wiggins, Letter Carver & Writer

Training to be a stonemason offers several lessons in disappointment.  I’ve kept telling myself that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially at this early stage.  There’s no way around it.  Mistakes must be made – it’s part of the process.  If it were easy, everyone would be chipping away at their perfect bit of stone and building lovely houses for themselves.  A stone mason’s skill is a slow learn.  But like all slow learns, the pay off will be all the sweeter for it. “Don’t you get bored just chipping away at one bit of stone?” my dad asked a few weeks ago. “No,” I replied.  The confidence in the immediate aftermath of my answer seemed to reverberate back through me.  I wonder whether dad caught a sense of that. It occurred to me in that instance that this is exactly what I wanted to do. I make it sound as if stone masonry has been some sort of divine calling.  The thought didn’t strike me like some thunderbolt.  I don’t want to...

I spent all of last night drawing an isometric projection (a three-dimensional drawing set at 30 degrees) for a column base as part of my stone masonry class.   Drawing and setting out the templates is easily as important as actually working a piece of stone, but it can be very time-consuming.  Before a hammer and chisel are even touched,  we're asked to draw the isometric plan,  the bed mould, the sections and reverses, as well as transferring them onto plastic and zinc.  Some of the other students have complained that too much emphasis is placed on the setting out, but I enjoy the process just as much as the work that follows.   I brought the isometric drawing home because I didn't want it to eat into my college time.  Anticipating that the isometric projection (arguably the most difficult drawing from the ones we're asked to do) would be more like a marathon rather than a sprint, I plugged into BBC 6Music.  Since I started listening to it ...