Tuesday is Finds on the Three Things blog and today we thought we’d focus on some artefacts from our school days.

This P.E. bench or gym bench is such a design classic everyone who sees it is transported back to school. Usually to primary school where the benches were either laid on their sides and used as football goals or hung on the apparatus to climb up. Surely the most perilous to an infant class was when these benches were turned upside down and you balanced across the narrow part. We rescued ours from a skip in Newcastle and now use it as a shelf in front of our picture window, a great place for small curios.

Our desks in the studio are made from reclaimed lab benches from a school in Yorkshire. We could have sanded them down and re varnished them but it would be like taking away the history behind them and so the graffiti stays. Some of it is quite cheery like the playful star and cheeky face here and some of it is more ‘colourful’!

We also have a collection of old school wooden rulers including some warped metre sticks. Sue particularly likes the older rulers that only show inches because that is how her brain works.

It is great to have these familiar, friendly objects in the studio as they lend an informal air which we hope puts everyone at ease. In turn we hope that the atmosphere is conducive to making unselfconscious, serendipitous creative errors!