Occasional Turnings – Handmade gifts with a touch of Magic

From Our Blog

Happy Christmas to all our lovely customers – good things to come from 2025 :)

December 22, 2024December 22, 2024 oturnings-adm

Seasons greetings to all of our lovely customers, with the new year approaching, we have successfully migrated our website to a new provider – so all our SSL woes are hopefully now behind us and email forwarding should now work 🙂 The contact email address for us is info@occasionalturnings.co.uk or via our contact form that can be found here Coming in the new year – the Etsy shop will finally get going again, stocked with Charlie’s lovely Gnomes, fairy houses, Tealight / Trinket Fairy houes and some Wands made from Rosewood, Ebony (yup – sustainably sourced from a local supplier) and

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Events, General Info and news, Hand Whittled Crafts, Other Crafts, Turned Crafts

Fairy Fair – 2024

May 28, 2024 Damian

Hi all, Firstly – apologies for the website not being up – due to an administrative issue now hopefully solved 🙂 And secondly – neglecting this site for so long. As we are sure everyone will understand the last few years have been quite turbulent and since Covid, juggling work, homeschooling and running the business, Charlie and I are now back into the throw of it. Would just like to take a moment to say a big thank you to everyone who stopped by the Stall over the weekend – it was awesome to meet new faces and of course

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Crafting, Hand Whittled Crafts, Other Crafts, Turned Crafts, Turning, Uncategorized

Always happy for custom orders

February 14, 2021 Damian

Hi all, Hope everyone is settling into 2021. Certainly been a busy start to 2021 for us and have been priviledged to complete several custom orders for customers. Sort of realised we could do this when we enabled the custom order functionality on our etsy shop 🙂 https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/OccasionalTurnings Be it a custom container for rare incense or a hand-made puppet, a custom wand in the size and material of your wanting, a custom fairy house for a little one or a special valentines gift for a loved one we have been able to complete on time and exceeded expectations in

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General Info and news, Turning

Elder and Hazel Branches have arrived :)

January 26, 2021 Damian

Hi everyone, Just received some Elder Wood and Hazel branches soon to be wands – super excited 🙂 The elder will have to be seasoned though as pretty green but should be turning out some Hazel wands in a couple of weeks. Managed to get the Elder from a convservation project based down in Surrey – they take a lot of care when managing their estate so the Elder Tree it was taken from was not harmed in any fashion – particuarly important for Elder wands that the wood is taken with respect 🙂 I’m

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General Info and news, New Items, Retail

New Shop page on the website

January 18, 2021 Damian

Hi everyone, Have been in the workshop over the weekend making some wands, building snowmen before it melted and being doing some admin on the website. Have finally got the Etsy Link sorted in the shops so that the products are listed on the website and takes the user through to Etsy to complete check out and review product details – yay! Etsy Shop Many thanks for looking and as we’ve just hit our 3rd custom order in 5 days – please remember – if you can’t find anything in the shop to exactly fit your needs – we will

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Uncategorized

Love a custom request :)

January 14, 2021 Damian

Hi all, Recently received a request for a very specific container, much smaller or shallower than I have ever turned before. Well after three attempts finally got there 🙂 The first one burned and died, but the second one got off the lathe but because of my reverse chuck it burned a perfect circle into the base of the dish. Not planned but really nice so either going to keep it or post it online 🙂 Either way this has come out really nicely and properly happy with it. Certainly the most challenging from a turning perspective because it was

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Turned Crafts, Turning

A happy mistake

December 27, 2020 Damian

Hi everyone, I hope you’ve had a good a christmas as you could have under the circumstances and looking forward to hopefully a more positive 2021 🙂 Got back in the workshop for a bit today and was turning some more incense holders out of Yew as they have been really popular running up to christmas. They are relatively small and so was finishing the top of them with wax as normal but idiot shiell had yanked up the speed to 3500 revs to get a nice buff. Anyway, smoke started appearing and ripped the cotton cloth that I was

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Crafting, Turned Crafts

First Custom Wand

December 17, 2020 Damian

Hi all, Just to write a little update – been busy in the workshop over the last couple of weekends and getting some wonderful reactions on Etsy where I’m pleased to say stuff is flying out of the door 🙂 I got a request earlier this week from a customer to produce an 18″ wand out of Ash, so was really disappointed at first to find i had no suitable lumber in the shop. I then remembered my brilliant go-to wood guy robin because of Covid and personal stuff at the top of the year I haven’t really been actively

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General Info and news

We’re back

November 29, 2020 Damian

Hi all, What a crazy year this has been for everyone; things quickly overtook us but we are back! Today marks the official relaunch of the website. We took a break from Occasional Turnings to centre on the family but are now rediscovering the joys (and sometimes the frustrations) of turning and whittling; many a bowl and toadstool have been repurposed during this time. Damian also had a whirl at turning some live edge bowls which he completlely fell in love with; it is amazing what you can do with firewood While the usual craft events have been put on

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