Audra Loyal/The Vespiary: shedworker

Continuing our series looking at shedworkers and their shedworking, Audra Loyal talks Shedworking through her garden office life (lots of photos of the build are also at her Flickr page:

I'm a fairly recent transplant to Missoula, having lived previously in California, Oregon and Japan. I came to Montana as a resident of The Clay Studio of Missoula, and then moved my ceramic equipment into the small shed. It's probably as old as my house (about 105 years old - ancient for this part of the country), but probably owes its continued existence (without a significant foundation) to the extremely dry climate here. Most of the studs were rotted off at the bottom.

Now, though, my focus has shifted to bookbinding and conservation.Last year I started my private conservation business, The Vespiary Book Restoration & Bindery. I called my business The Vespiary because a) my shed was infested with wasps and b) wasps work with clay and paper, just like me! Up till now I used one of the rooms in my house as a workshop, but have rapidly outgrown it. I'm really looking forward to having an entire structure dedicated to this craft.

A friend of ours is the contractor and we've been trying to use mainly recycled or local materials. We have a great recycled building store called Home Resource where lately we managed to score a great skykight. Our floorboards are locally harvested circle-sawn fir. We'll be picking up wool insulation from Sugar Loaf Mill soon. We've yet to find siding, but have a few leads.I'm hoping the project will be completed by the end of May, and will be updating my blog through the whole process.

My Etsy shop is currently a little thin right now because of the work on the shed, but is typically stocked with blank journals and notebooks made from recycled maps and Japanese chiyogami paper.

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Monday's posts are sponsored by garden2office, the Swedish garden office specialists.Click here for more details.

The Vespiary: now up and running

We featured Audra Loyal's marvellous Vespiary from where she planned to run her bookbinding and bookmaking business and were delighted to hear from her that she is now up and running. Audra was featured in the local paper The Missoulian in a nice piece by Keila Szpaller which is well worth a browse. Here's a snippet:

The shop's footprint is 12 feet by 12 feet, and the interior space is 10 feet by 10 feet. Even though the "Garden Office" behind their Alder Street home is small, Loyal said it's a much better place to restore books than the dining room table had been. "I would lose an hour a day just setting up and cleaning up," said Loyal, technically a "conservation technician." "And I never felt really good about how I was storing things." Despite it's miniature look, The Vespiary is roomy enough. It holds Loyal's books, the personal ones and the ones she's fixing for clients, as well as her tools of the trade.

It's certainly a decent size and features a sofa for clients, a loft/guest room as well as Montana sheep's wool insulation.


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Wednesday posts are sponsored by The Garden Room Company®, the UK's premier supplier of garden offices and garden rooms. Click here.

The Vespiary tops out

We covered Audra Loyal's Vespiary garden office build earlier in the year and we're very pleased to see that she's now topped it out. "We didn’t hoist an evergreen bough or flag, as is traditional," says Audra, "but we have been inscribing our names and little drawings of protective spirits along the way, which is one of the less common practices of topping out." There are links to various impressive sets of photos of the build at The Vespiary.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Monday's posts are sponsored by garden2office, the Swedish garden office specialists.Click here for more details.