Hello

My Story

My woodburning journey really began in 2019.

I was working in an intimate café within the handsome Grade II listed historic house, Nonsuch Mansion, located within the beautiful grounds of Nonsuch park. I worked here for a few years, as I settled into the UK (after moving from Australia - I know…that’s a story for another day!), and found myself grounded and comforted by the welcoming atmosphere of the café and abundance of nature on its doorstep. 

I used to trapse through the park to ‘commute’ to and from the café, and I was always humbled by its beauty and resilience in the changing British seasons. I was whimsically drawn to spending my days off amongst the trees and in this beautiful fresh air, and this led me to start volunteering with the wonderful group, the Nonsuch Voles. I helped with various tasks around the gardens for a little while, as they got to work with practical woodland management and gardening. They also used coppiced wood from the park to make items of wood-craft, which they sold to raise funds, enabling them to cover running-costs.

This is where I truly found my niche. Here the volunteers got to work in a cosy walled garden, carving spoons, stools, keyrings, chairs…My god, the clever and very original contraptions they came up with! Slightly intimidated but mostly intrigued, it was only when they got the pyrography tool out that I felt, ok, maybe I could give that a go! And the rest, is history!

Of course, like anything, practice makes perfect (or at least, better), but from the first moments of using the tool, I felt at ease, natural with it, and in a ‘flow’ (we will come to this idea in a separate post!). 

It brought to mind long-forgotten memories, one of which was in primary school, in a particular art class where we used pyrography pens to carefully burn simple designs into wood. I remember being slightly nervous but also thrilled that we were ‘allowed’ to do this, and I burned a Tinkerbell image. The teacher exclaimed that it was incredible and that I was a ‘natural’ at it, and he kept looking at the piece and then up at me… the look filled me with a joyful confidence. I then started to remember woodwork or ‘DT’ Design Technology in high school. A class of mostly boys, we created wooden boxes and wooden motorbikes under the instruction of an eccentric teacher. I absolutely loved these classes (perhaps more secretly, as it wasn’t a very ‘girly’ thing to like back then!). I loved the smell of the workshop, of the wood shavings flying everywhere, of the texture of smooth sanded wood, of creating something so beautiful with my own hands. 

After practicing on a few bits of scrap wood in the walled garden, experimenting with different strokes, nibs and pressures, I made a few floral coasters and then moved on quickly to a bigger design, a stag. Being shown the basics, but mostly self-taught, it came together slowly over the weeks, and to this day feels like one of the best works I’ve made considering how new it all was to me. The therapeutic space of the walled garden, the stories and laughter of the Voles, sounds and smells of woodwork, and nature bristling around us…it ignited a sort of spark within me, which I have worked to ‘keep alive’ since then.

Now, in 2025, pyrography is a bigger part of my life and identity, and I continue to enjoy ‘writing with fire’ my story, and the next chapter…