Makers
Grace Horne
Scissor Maker · Cutler & Corsetiere
Sheffield, South Yorkshire
Scissor Maker · Cutler & Corsetiere
Sheffield, South Yorkshire
Thirty years ago she turned up uninvited on a legendary cutler’s doorstep and asked to be his apprentice. He said no. She learned anyway - and then worked out how to make scissors without the machines no one can buy any more.
Grace Horne told me to come to her workshop, then suggested we go to her house first, a few doors away, for coffee. That is where the morning started - at her kitchen table, flowers everywhere, the kettle on, before a single scissor. I have photographed a fair number of makers now, and I will say it plainly: this was the best session I have had. Grace is not so much a maker as a force - of creativity, of curiosity, of ideas that arrive faster than you can write them down. By the time we walked round to the workshop I already knew this page would struggle to hold her.
So this is the one page in the archive that runs in two registers. The colour is Grace at home, among the peonies and the books; the black and white is Grace at the bench. She is the same person in both - but the warmth and the work are different rooms, and she lives in both of them at once.
Her workshop is a Victorian public toilet. Not converted to look like one - an actual former gents’, small and round-walled, with a glazed roof and a window straight onto the street, so tight that everything is within arm’s reach and she can watch the road while she files a blade. It is, she would be the first to say, all she needs. Hand-forged scissors hang in rows along the brick; coils of steel and labelled notes are clipped to a board; the curved wall throws the light around.
Grace came to scissors the long way round, and it started with knives. Thirty years ago she wanted to work with her hands - really work, a proper craft - and what she wanted was to make knives. She came to Sheffield to learn, and found that almost nobody was taking apprentices. One name kept coming up: Stan Shaw, the last of the great Little Mester pocket-knife makers, a man who built knives entirely by hand. She wrote to him. No reply. She telephoned. No answer. So she packed up her things, travelled up from London, and turned up on his doorstep to ask, in person, to be his apprentice.
Stan was past seventy by then, with someone already at his bench, and he said no. Grace started teaching herself instead. That refusal, on the doorstep, is where all of it begins - and you can hear, in the way she tells it, that she is fond of the man who turned her down.
The turn from knives to scissors came out of a small failure. She wanted to build an all-purpose folding knife, a Swiss-army sort of thing, and one of the tools on it was to be a tiny pair of scissors. She made the scissors. They were not good. And instead of letting it go she did the thing that defines her: she stopped and asked why. What is a pair of scissors actually doing? Why is this one wrong? That question swallowed the next fifteen years.
She went looking for someone in Sheffield who could teach her, and around 2011 she found Ernest Wright, the hand-scissor makers on Broad Lane, then run by Nick Wright. Three older craftsmen there took her through the whole of it - not one stage, the whole thing, on the principle that you cannot make a pair of scissors until you understand every part of how it is made. Once she had it, there was no going back. Everything she had learned chasing knives had, it turned out, been walking her toward this.
Most makers stop at the bench. Grace kept going, into the library. She took a master’s in metalwork, and then - pushed by one of her tutors - a PhD, on patterned and decorative steels, and after that a post-doc. She is, with complete cheerfulness, a scissor geek: she owns more or less every book ever written on the subject, she is documenting the Sheffield Museums collection of scissors, and she has a research assistant who has worked alongside her for two years, helping pull it all together.
She has already published one book, Making Artisan Scissors. The second, on the anatomy and the exact dimensions of a pair of scissors, is being written now. Watching her measure a blade with calipers and then sketch its geometry on graph paper, you understand that for Grace the making and the research are not two activities. They are the same act, done with different tools.
Here is the part that may matter most. When Grace learned at Ernest Wright, she saw the machines that scissor factories once leaned on - the big grinders, the drop-stamps, and above all the grinding machines that put the subtle curve and twist on the inside of the blades that is fundamental to making scissors work. You cannot buy these machines now. They are not made any more, the surviving ones rarely come up, and when they do they are far beyond anyone starting out. For most people that is the end of the conversation: no specialist machine, no scissors.
Grace refused that too. Over years she worked out how to make a pair of scissors entirely by hand - forged on a small anvil, filed, shaped and fitted with hand tools, no industrial kit at all. It is slow, and it is hard, and it is the whole subject of the book she is writing, because it removes the one barrier that has kept scissor making closed: the kit. If she is right, she has quietly reopened a craft everyone assumed was dying with its machines - and I think she will pull a new generation of scissor makers in behind her.
Two things, before the record. The first is the scissor sword - a real sword whose blade splits into a working pair of giant scissors, an object of pure cutler’s bravado. Grace saw one come up at auction, bid on it, and lost it when her computer crashed at the wrong second. She spent the following year tracking down the person who had bought it, and bought it from them - for roughly three times what it had gone for. It hangs framed in her house now, and she showed it to me the way you show someone a relic.
The second is that Grace also makes corsets. It sounds like a different life, but it is the same one: steel and engineering and exact, patient, measured construction, in another material. Cutler and corsetiere, both at once.
This is the archive’s record of Grace Horne, made at her home and her workshop in Sheffield in June 2026: a maker who set out to forge knives and turned up uninvited on Stan Shaw’s doorstep; who learned scissor making at Ernest Wright - the firm the archive already holds, in the hands of Neil Wilson, Sam Aston-Clark and the rest of the Broad Lane bench - and then carried it into a doctorate; who works in a former public toilet with a view of the road; and who has worked out how to make scissors without the machines, and is writing it down so that other people can. Scissor making is on the Heritage Crafts Red List, and Grace may be the only woman making them in the country. On the strength of one morning, she is also the most likely person I have met to make sure the craft does not end.