Kiri and Steve.co.uk
Over the years, together we’ve dabbled in graphic design, photography + film work, illustration, and web design + code, trading first as sole traders with our own small businesses, then combining them to form a partnership under the name Lightbulb Head. Since having children we’ve folded the business so aren’t currently earning money from our creativity, but that hasn’t stopped us from creating.
In this section there’s a selection of some of the projects that we’ve worked on over the years – scroll down for the most recent, or use the categories on the left to see specific projects.
As Kiri has been coppicing hazel, she’s identified wood that would be good as thumbsticks (walking poles where you pop your thumb into the v shape at the top), trimmed off side-shoots, stripped off the bark from the top, smoothed it all back to a nice finish, then burnt intricate designs into the wood
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This is one of several knives that Steve whittled and then Kiri burned a design onto using a pyrography pen. Most are made of birch, which is food-safe, therefore could be used as a butter knife… but as some are made of other woods, we’ve been calling them letter openers or paper knives
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This was originally a sketch on paper on a ferry, but Kiri transferred this onto wood, burning the design on with a pyrography pen, then adding touches of colour with paint
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This was the first large piece of pyrography artwork that Kiri produced, taking around 12 hours to burn by hand onto the board once it had been sanded. The dark areas were created using a ballpoint pyrography nib – producing lots of small dots and a beautiful texture
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Kiri made these pendants from birch wood that she cleaved with a froe, then whittled down into a teardrop shape. Once sanded back, she burnt these designs by hand onto the wood with her pyrography pen, oiled the pendants then attached a leather cord
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Kiri is part of the Westonbirt Coppice Products group and one of their products is charcoal made from the wood harvested at Westonbirt. Kiri was asked to redesign the bag in which the charcoal is sold and produced this image and layout.
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Taking slices of of beautiful cherry wood, Kiri sanded them, then used pyrography to create a variety of designs as Christmas decorations. These were then finished off with red and green twine to allow them to hang on trees
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As a coppice worker, Kiri is also a member of the National Coppice Federation (NCFed) and at the end of 2024 took on the responsibility of designing the group’s publication; “Cleft Stick”, starting with the Winter 2024 / 2025 edition. These can be found at ncfed.org.uk/news along with the previous editions
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In 2024 Kiri started experimenting with pyrography (free hand burning of designs into wood). So far this has mainly been on hand-cleft birch wood
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In the process of setting up a community garden in our area, we wanted to create raised beds / planters so that the majority of the beds could be tended from a sitting position (to make it an accessible garden). A local business had donated some pallets they no longer wanted, so once we had dismantled them and removed the nails, we built some planters
