Woodcraft Adventures: Priscilla’s Journey as an FNB Hobart Maker
A personal reflection by Priscilla, co-maker at Woodcraft Adventures Tasmania.
Where It Began — Not Knowing Anything
I did not come to woodwork knowing what I was doing. That is probably the most honest thing I can say about how this began. I had no background in it, no childhood memory of being shown how to hold a chisel or sand along the grain. I came to it slowly, sideways, in the way that most things worth doing seem to arrive — not as a plan, but as a possibility that gradually became real.
Christiaan had been making things with timber for a long time, and what drew me in was not a desire to become a woodworker. It was something quieter than that — watching something rough become smooth, something formless become a small animal with a character of its own. I started helping in small ways. Sanding, mostly. Then a little more sanding. And somewhere in that repetition, something began to shift.
Learning Through Shared Making
The learning happened through proximity and practice rather than instruction. We worked alongside each other, and I picked things up in the way you do when the environment is patient and the pace is not forced. There was no timeline. No checklist of skills I was expected to master by a certain week. I learned carving when I was ready to try it. I learned finishing — applying oils, bringing out the grain — when it made sense to. Each step built on the last, quietly.
This kind of shared making has its own texture. It is not a class, and it is not employment. It is more like being welcomed into a practice that two people gradually come to hold together. The things we made started to carry both of us in them, even when one of us had done more of the physical work on a particular piece.
A Pace Shaped Around Real Life
One of the things I want to be honest about is that my capacity has never been constant. There are days when I can make things, and days when I cannot. There are weeks that are full of energy and weeks shaped by health, by tiredness, by the ordinary weight of living. Building something sustainable for me has always meant building something that bends around that reality rather than insisting I bend around it.
What Woodcraft Adventures offered me was exactly that kind of flexibility. The side hustle — and I use that word loosely, because it was never really about hustle — grew at the pace my life allowed. If I could make five animals in a fortnight, that was the right number. If I could only manage to finish one, that was also the right number. The work did not punish me for being human.
The work did not punish me for being human. That sounds like a small thing, but it is not a small thing at all.
Priscilla, Woodcraft Adventures Tasmania
Confidence Growing Slowly, Like Grain
Confidence is a strange thing to describe. I did not wake up one morning and decide I was a maker. It crept in, the way warmth comes back into a room. The first animal I finished on my own — really finished, sanded and oiled and ready — I held it in my hand and thought: I made this. Not as a dramatic moment. Just as a quiet fact.
Then I started giving things away. Gifts to people I cared about. A wombat for a friend who was going through something hard. A small Tasmanian devil for a child who had been delighted by the real ones at a wildlife park. Watching someone receive a handmade thing and understand that it was made with care — that built something in me that no amount of reassurance could have built as well.
Local markets came next. Sitting behind a table with our animals laid out, talking to people about how they were made, watching someone pick one up and turn it over in their hands — that was a different kind of confidence again. Not the confidence of performing, but the confidence of knowing that the thing I had made was worth someone’s attention. Slowly, customer interest became something real.
Built Around Strengths, Not a Blueprint
Woodcraft Adventures was never designed to fit me into a business model. It was shaped around what I was actually good at, what I genuinely enjoyed, and what I could sustain. My strengths in finishing and detail work, my patience with the slower stages of making, my interest in the story behind each piece — these were not incidental to the work. They were the work.
The support I received — from Christiaan, and from broader frameworks around microenterprise and supported work — was practical rather than directive. It offered structure without hierarchy. Tools and encouragement rather than targets and pressure. I remained myself throughout. That is not a minor thing to say. A lot of support systems, even well-intentioned ones, have a way of gradually fitting a person into a shape that suits the system rather than the person. This one did not do that.
FNB Hobart Makers: Finding a Wider Community
Connecting with FNB Hobart Makers has been a natural next step rather than a leap. The values that have shaped Woodcraft Adventures — creativity, dignity, shared skills, community — are also the values that run through what FNB Hobart Makers is about. It is a space where local makers are supported rather than competed with, where accessible enterprise is taken seriously, and where the things people make are understood as expressions of care and craft rather than just products.
Being part of that community means that the work I do is not isolated. It connects outward — to other makers, to customers who choose local and handmade deliberately, to a broader conversation about what meaningful work can look like outside conventional employment. I am not just making wooden animals in a shed. I am part of something.
That matters to me more than I expected it to. There is something in shared community — in knowing that other people are also making things with their hands, also figuring out how to turn craft into something sustainable, also navigating the gap between passion and livelihood — that makes the solitary hours at the workbench feel less solitary.
Not Only About Products
I want to end with something that feels important to say plainly. Woodcraft Adventures is not only about wooden animals, or markets, or sales, or even craft in the narrow sense. It is about making room for a person — for me — to grow into meaningful work in my own way and at my own pace.
It is about the dignity of being a maker rather than a dependent. It is about the quiet satisfaction of finishing a piece and knowing it is good. It is about the relationships that form around handmade things — with customers who come back, with markets that welcome us, with a community of makers who understand what this kind of work actually costs and what it actually gives.
I did not know any of this when I first picked up a piece of sandpaper. I only knew that the work felt right in a way I could not easily explain. Years later, I still cannot fully explain it. But I no longer need to. The things we make speak well enough for themselves — and so, I think, does the life being built around making them.
Woodcraft Adventures Tasmania is a handcrafted timber art studio based in Claremont, Tasmania, run by Christiaan and Priscilla. Their work includes Tasmanian wooden animals, meaningful timber gifts, custom orders, and community workshops. They are proud members of the FNB Hobart Makers community.
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