Five Traditional Handicrafts to Try This Season

Come October, the garden slows down and the evenings draw in, and there is a particular pleasure in having something to make at the kitchen table while the kettle ticks on the stove. The crafts below share a virtue: they need very little equipment, they can be learned in a weekend, and they improve with repetition. None of them demands a workshop, and all of them belong to the older cottages and farmhouses of these islands, where thrift and beauty were never seen as opposites.

Start with one, not five. A single basket or one hooked rug will teach you more than a shelf of unfinished projects.

Willow Basket Weaving

Brown buff willow is the kindest starting point. It has already been boiled and stripped of its bark, so it is supple and forgiving, and a 500g bundle will make a small gathering basket for eggs, kindling or hedgerow fruit. Soak it for at least twenty-four hours in a bucket of cold water — a full week if you are using freshly cut green willow from a neighbour's hedge.

You begin with a round base: six or eight rods crossed, bound together, then woven with a simple pairing weave until the circle is roughly the size of a dinner plate. From there you turn up the uprights and weave the sides. Work on your lap over a board, with a damp cloth over the unused rods so they stay pliable.

• Tools: sharp secateurs, a bodkin or an old blunt screwdriver for opening gaps, a bucket, an apron
• Time: a first small basket takes a long afternoon
• Honest warning: your first basket will look like a lampshade. Your second will look like a basket

Rag Rugging

Rag rugging is the most forgiving craft on this list, which is precisely why it survived in poor rural households for centuries. You need hessian for the backing — 10oz is a good weight, available from agricultural merchants who sell it for sack repair — plus a wooden prodder or a rug hook, and a pile of old clothes.

Wool is best: old blankets, tweed skirts, thick knitwear, corduroy. Cut the fabric into strips roughly 2cm wide and 10cm long, then push each one through the hessian. Proddy rugs leave the ends standing up like a sheepskin; hooked rugs pull loops through for a flatter, denser finish. Draw your design on the hessian first with a piece of charcoal, and do not fret about straight lines. Wonky rugs have more character than tidy ones.

Stretch the hessian across an old picture frame or a wooden quilting frame and work from the centre outwards. A cushion cover is a sensible first project; a hearth rug is a winter's work.

Green Wood Spoon Carving

Carving a spoon from a freshly felled branch is one of the great satisfactions of country living. Look for birch, sycamore, ash, lime or apple, and ask a tree surgeon or a farmer with a hedgerow to cut you a piece — the woodpile is a perfectly good source. Green wood cuts like cheese, which is why this craft is done in autumn and winter when the sap is down.

Three tools will see you through: a small axe, a straight carving knife, and a hook knife for hollowing the bowl. Rough out the shape with the axe, refine it with the knife, hollow the bowl with the hook, then leave the spoon to dry slowly in a paper bag of its own shavings for a week or two. Rushing the drying is what causes splits. Finish with flaxseed oil and buff it up with a cloth.

Cut away from your body, never towards your thumb, and keep your knives sharp. A sharp knife is a safe knife.

Dorset Button Making

Dorset buttons are the smallest and most portable craft here — a brass ring, some embroidery thread and a needle, and you can work in front of the fire. They were a genuine cottage industry in Dorset from the seventeenth century onwards, with whole families paid by the gross, before machine-made buttons put them out of work.

Take a ring of about 20 to 25mm and cover it with blanket stitch in a single colour, working right round until the ring is hidden. That is called the casting. Then lay spokes of thread across the centre and work a pattern over and under them — the classic crosswheel is the easiest to learn, and basketweave comes next.

Use them as brooches, on a cushion, or to finish a hand-knitted cardigan. They are also an excellent way to use up odds and ends of embroidery thread left over from other projects.

Botanical Dyeing

Autumn is the best dye season of the year. Onion skins give a warm gold without any mordant at all. Nettles, cut before they seed, give a soft sage green. Alder cones and bramble tips produce soft browns; windfall apple bark gives a gentle tan.

Use wool, silk or alpaca — protein fibres take dye far better than cotton. A mordant of alum, available from any good chemist, helps the colour fix and hold. Simmer gently rather than boil, particularly with wool, which will felt if you bully it, then leave the fibres steeping overnight as the pot cools. Keep a dedicated dye pot and never use the one you cook in.

For a lovely shift in colour, add a splash of iron water — rusty nails left in vinegar for a fortnight — to sadden golds into olive greens and greys. Unravelled charity-shop jumpers are ideal for practising on.

Where to Begin Without Spending Much

Every one of these crafts can be started for the price of a few tools and a bundle of materials, and most of those turn up secondhand at car boot sales, farm sales and village hall table-top events. County shows and rural life museums often run day courses, and the Women's Institute and local craft guilds are full of people who will happily spend an afternoon showing you how to hold a hook or turn a base.

Buy one good knife rather than three cheap ones. Keep a small notebook of what you made, what worked and what you would change. Give your first efforts away — a slightly lopsided spoon is a gift with real warmth in it, and the person who receives it will keep it far longer than anything shop-bought.

Above all, enjoy the slowness of it. These are crafts that reward patience rather than speed, and there is no better season for sitting still with your hands busy while the rain comes down outside.