News & Features
Films of Harp Making Processes …
In March 2026 Mark Norris received an award from the Scottish Traditional Arts and Culture Fund, to create a series of short films showing the many processes involved in harp making, as both a useful teaching resource and also as a long-term record of harp making skills. Mark says “There are many skills which are difficult to describe in a book, but can be easily understood & learned by observation.” This filming project will be ongoing over the next year.
Beautiful Walnut Timber
On 15th January 2026 we received our first delivery of beautiful American Black Walnut timber which has a wonderful back-story.
Our 58 boards of timber originally came from three very special logs, cut by an Amish Logger in Southern Ohio who uses no machines, so the trees were felled by hand and pulled out of the forest by horses.
Two friendly wood suppliers helped us to facilitate this: Horizon Wood Products in the US and Whitmore’s Timber who are a very helpful timber importer & supplier in the UK.
Norris Professional Levers …
As it’s now quite rare to complete harps with hand-built Norris Professional Semitone Levers, we’ve created a little film of assembling an instrument with the Norris Pro Levers.
It will require another film to show the actual making of all those brass & stainless steel components!
Can’t Stand Making Stands …
Mark occasionally makes harp stands out of ‘High Pressure Laminate’, which is hard to machine and blunts even your tungsten-tipped cutters, so it’s not really a favourite job … so, this is a wee film of creating a batch of six stands, and it doesn’t look half so bad along with a bit of lively harp music!
