Silver Bear Yurts

Hello. My name is Nichole, and I started making Yurts about 25 years ago. I met my husband Mick in Canada in 1993, and moved to the UK about a year later. A couple of years on, we were married, and the first Yurt was begun, as a wedding present from Mick to me.

 

In the years between then and now, a whole lot of Yurts were made. Initially, there were just a few here and there; later there were many, and mostly it was Mick’s passion, a sort of extension of his love of green woodworking. I mostly pursued a career in Organic wholefood catering. He helped me sometimes, and I helped him sometimes, particularly with sewing canvas covers and things like sourcing materials and talking to customers.

 

By 2005, Mick was working as the Yurt frame maker for Hearthworks Tipis and Yurts and in 2007 I joined them, too, to run their office. I also made covers for Mick’s independent orders and would come to the wood workshop at the end of my office day to do things with him like steam-bending the Yurt Crown rings and hand-tying trellises together with knots. Over the years, I did all the things involved in making Yurts, but hadn’t made a complete frame all on my own.

 

Life rarely goes the way we plan. Shortly before Covid 19 drove the world into lockdown, Mick became suddenly & critically unwell. It was a baffling illness the doctors didn’t understand, and he passed away on the dark moon of 2 January 2020. It was a shock and an utterly surreal time. We were lucky, though, because the Lockdown hadn’t begun: and on Valentine’s Day 2020 we had a wake in our back garden to honour him, and people came from far and wide to say goodbye. Mick lay in a coffin made by his son, in a Yurt he’d made with his daughter, surrounded by his community, who also held myself and his children with tenderness and support. 

 

Not much made sense to me then, but the Yurts did. I finished the project Mick had been working on just before he died. Then, I repaired woodwork, and steam-bent new Crown rings. And I finally finished a complete Yurt frame on my own: a 20ft Yurt. In a way I can’t explain, the Yurts brought me home.

 

I kept the workshop open.

 

There is a peace and a continuity to the Yurts for me. I find things like notes in the drill boxes, as if Mick left them for me to find at just the right moment: this size of drill-bit for this thing, and this one for something else. It is a wonderful thing to carry on the work I do, knowing the joy it brought him, and respecting the skill and craftsmanship that comes as a part of it, and discovering my very own joy in the work.They really are the most magical structures, with a kind of poetry in the design that’s hard to explain.

 

I hope the Yurts will offer you a centering place of your own and that you will love them as much as I do.