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THE DOORS, FLOORS, AND STAIRCASE in your house – maybe even the walls and roof – they hold a secret, and it goes right to the top of the trees outside and back millennia in time. Deep in the fibers, bound up in the very molecules of the wood, is the hidden secret. It’s been there all along, a potential known only to the initiated. When the conditions are right, the grain aligned and hot mist rising, you can take each end of a plank and bend it, twist it, tie it in a knot – with just your hands.

This book is all about the ability of wood to soften and become malleable when heated to boiling point. In these pages you will find a wide variety of intriguing and fun projects that make use of this little-known but very useful aspect of the material. There are 18 new designs created to help people of all abilities discover this amazing process in different ways, most made for the first time in this book. I have tried to show the designs and prototypes in their simplest possible form so you can understand the essence of each work and then develop it in your own way.

I believe that as we move through this century it will become ever more vital in design to use appropriate materials as we try to meet our needs and maintain our level of lifestyle in the context of climate change, pollution, species loss, and our ever-increasing population. In many industries, such as engineering and medicine, highly processed materials such as plastic and metal will always be essential; however, in the spheres of “homewares” and “luxury goods” almost any material can be used as long as the end result is desirable. Given that these items only exist to make us happier and more comfortable, it is clearly counterintuitive to use materials that are energy intensive or polluting; the net benefit to the customer will be negative in the long-term. As you explore different techniques using wood and steam, I hope to give you options – simple and beautiful ways of meeting our needs directly using branches and simple, unseasoned wood. Crucially, by investing your time and skills into the work, the objects you make will be personal. They will be items to keep that will transcend the fickle fashions of the decades to become treasures for you and your family in the future.

We start this book in the forest, bending wood with fire, and we finish in a workshop steam bending wood for a boat that you can make in a weekend. Designing new work to be made by people I will never meet, and whose level of experience I don’t know, has been a delightful challenge. I have tried to make the projects as easy to achieve as possible, with plenty of opportunity to elaborate and improve the designs to make them your own. The different projects offer a variety of scenarios that you can recreate in your garden, kitchen, school, and home workshop, and will enable you to enjoy experimenting with this process in different ways. Many of the techniques, in particular methods of heating the wood, are interchangeable between some of the projects. Please feel free to make this work your own: chop, change, or invent your own new designs and ways of doing things as it pleases you.

Above all, experiment: make mistakes and learn. It is curiosity, innovation, and our collective creations in the world that set us apart from the other animals, and quick thinking and action, and an understanding of how to use our local environment in a sustainable way may be what helps us get through the next chapter in our history.