Boatman Works & Woodcraft is a small multi-purpose business based in Cheshire creating unique and inspired items for the home, boat and garden. From our Workshop in Alsager, we offer an extensive range of services for Narrowboats, as well as creating a wide range of unique, often quirky and surprisingly useful Woodcraft products (for house, garden and boat) and also the manufacturing of bespoke, hand built Garden Buildings.

5 Star quality craftsmanship and lovely people 🙂

Fabian Williams – Fab-Rication (collaborating artisan)

Andrew’s partner, Sammi, joined him and took over the business in late 2018. Her many ideas, designs and eye for detail ensure that a fresh range of products are available. She specialises in finer woodworking details and is also a highly skilled Pyrography artist. Sammi loves the way that a piece of wood flows and likes to accentuate the unique grain pattern in many of her products, ensuring the design highlights the most beautiful within each piece.

Sammi works a lot with commissions and strives to bring her client’s thoughts to reality with her designs; providing either simple personalising guidance on existing designs to make them unique or to help create something completely new and individual to that person’s needs.

With the help and guidance of Sammi (owner), you can be assured that your needs and wishes will not get lost in a corporate maze…You will always be speaking to ‘Head Office’. Our attention to detail (and a little bit of OCD) means that the end result will match what you wanted, whether it be a shed, garden/home project or work on your boat. We can help bring your ideas to a reality.

This website concentrates on showcasing our woodcraft products and garden buildings. We still carry out a lot of work on Boats and the ‘Boat Work’ page details the services we are able to offer to our fellow Boaters.

---

Boatman Works & Woodcraft is the realisation of a long-held dream of its founder, Andrew Iveson, to use the skills and talents learnt over decades.  Having been given his first set of woodworking tools at the age of 7 and then using them to build his first toolbox with his father, now at the age of 53 (2019), Andrew has been using and honing in these skills ever since.

Along with woodworking skills, an in-depth knowledge of electrics and plumbing, this has made it inevitable that when a decision was made to buy and live on a canal boat, an empty shell (sail-away) was purchased, enabling him to build his own home. This in itself led for various requests for work to be carried out on other people’s boats.  The requests became greater, meaning that a recent redundancy at the time enabled Boatman Works & Woodcraft to be born; a huge silver lining to a small grey cloud.

Finding that the larger garden products created by the small business (sheds, log / bin stores, etc.) meant a large stock build up of off-cuts ‘too good to throw away or to burn in the boat stove’ led to various useful woodcraft items being created.

The wood crafting demand increased, leading to the inclusion of Sammi to the small company.  The additional artistic talent, fine woodworking and crafting skills that Sammi brought to the Boatman Team has allowed for the wood crafting element to grow and flourish and a wider range of possibilities are now available to all.

Sammi took over the business in late 2018. She has honed her woodworking skills so that bespoke, beautiful creations are no longer a dream but a reality for her customers. Her skills include the use of Pyrography to create beautiful wood burning designs onto her work and the inclusion of personalised messages for clients; this includes photographic likenesses of pets. A new skill to add to her repertoire is wood carving, using both hand and power tools, to increase her product range…watch this space!

Pyrography – Art within the woodworking community ranges from simply creating a beautiful cabinet, carving / sculpting amazing designs into wood, to using electricity and heat to manipulate the fibres within wood. Pyrography is the latter. Using electric currents to change the heat generated within a wire (or iron) nib, a pyrographer can manipulate how hot the fibres of the wood will become; the higher the heat, the hotter and more burnt the fibres get therefore they will be darker in appearance. This gives the pyrographer the ability to create a wide range of designs on the wood by using this method on the fibres at its’ surface.

Sustain, recycle, reuse.

We hate wasting wood; the only thing that comes out of our workshop that isn’t a finished product is sawdust and kindling…and even the sawdust gets used in the garden boarders…

Any new wood that we buy for products is all from sustainable sources and where relevant it is CITES approved.

Many of the smaller wood crafting items that we produce are made from the off-cuts that are left from when we make our larger items, Sheds, Bin Stores, Log Stores, Beds and the like.  We regularly use foraged wood; some of the wood is collected from the side of the canal after the Linesmen have been clearing overhead branches and removing trees that are threatening the integrity of the canal.  These are usually collected for firewood by other Boaters and we take great pleasure in using it for something more permanent and beautiful.  This also includes wood from naturally fallen trees, foraged from rapidly growing hedgerows and sometimes even driftwood from rivers, canals and lakes.  We also use a great deal of recycled and reclaimed wood, some of which comes from ‘one-trip’ or old Pallets, from building works where old Timbers are being replaced and also from old furniture which is beyond repair.

We also make bespoke items from wood brought to us by our customers, so if you have a special piece of wood (perhaps with sentimental value), please contact us and we can discuss ideas and designs to turn it into a unique heirloom – by way of illustration, Andrew himself created a bespoke piece for his daughter using pieces of the Ribbing of a late family friend’s decommissioned trawler, from which he had cast his Father’s ashes.

We extend our sustainability ethics approach to the wood finishing products that we use.  For nearly all projects, we try to use water-based finishes and products with low or no VOC’s (Volatile Organic Compounds – the nasty smelling harmful stuff).  We also avoid products that require artificial heat as part of the drying process to conserve and decrease our energy footprint.

---