Woodcraft and metal work at the Lennoxville Scouts

The 1st Lennoxville Scouts participated in several workshops in the past few weeks. A metal forging session, instructed by bladesmith David Sylvester, offered our Scouts a chance to craft bottle openers and knives from scratch. Our members tried their hands at manipulating flat pieces of metal into the desired shapes through the application of heat, twisting, and hammering.

A different workshop was dedicated to the making of hatchets.

Both meetings were part of a larger project, spanning several weeks, in which older youth are invited to produce a survival kit comprising of a knife and an axe.

A wooden handle will be added to the knife during a woodcraft workshop, which will also provide the perfect opportunity to test our newly-created axes, by slicing and splitting blocks of woods.

Final touches, such as the tying of a paracord around the hatchet’s handle and the sewing of a leather sheath for the knife, will complete the kit.

While older children work on their survival kit, younger participants in our carpentry activities practice basic woodworking skills, including the planning, designing, measuring, cutting, and sanding of small wooden toys of their choice.

The 1st Lennoxville’s handicraft program aims to expose our Scouts to different forms of creative work.

The invaluable experience of transforming raw material into a finished product –beyond the satisfaction and fulfillment it brings– teaches our youth to appreciate both the labour involved in handiwork, as well as the uniqueness of the items they have just created.