A WOMAN who grew up in West End has returned to her childhood passion of being a professional woodworker after achieving success in a primetime TV contest.

Ashley Turner reached the semi-final of Handmade, Britain’s Best Woodworker on Channel 4 after joining from the second episode when one of the original contestants had to withdraw.

Ashley said she was given only a few hours’ notice to travel from her home in Chorley, Lancashire, to Wales, where filming took place.

“I didn’t even really get to tell my kids and had to kind of disappear,” she said.

“I had to drive for hours and got there in the early morning and then had to wake at 5am to do a Covid test.”

In each episode the judges, Sophie Sellu and Tom Dyckhoff, set the contestants the task of making a particular large object over two days and also set a skills challenge in which the contestants had to make something smaller and more intricate in 90 minutes.

At the end of each episode, one person was named woodworker of the week while another was eliminated from the competition. The winner of the skills challenge had immunity from eviction that week.

“It was really intense,” Ashley said.

“Because I was called in late, I wasn’t really that prepared, so while I was working on one project I was having to get ready for the next one. I was always a bit on the back foot with preparation.”

The big objects included a clock, a toy, a rocking chair and a desk.

In the third week she was on the show, Ashley was named woodworker of the week for a day bed that one of the judges said was worthy of William Morris, the ground-breaking Victorian designer.

The skills challenges included making roses from wood shavings, a Welsh love spoon, a pyrograph sketch and a vase for dried flowers.

Ashley won immunity in her fourth week for her spinning top.

“Because I do wood turning, I knew it was something I could possibly do well.

“I enjoyed the challenges because they were a nice break from the intensity of the workshop, but I knew I was going to be rubbish at most of them, so I didn’t have the pressure of feeling I had to get immunity.”

Being on the show has marked a return to woodwork for Ashley, who was inspired by her joiner father who died when she was five.

She grew up wanting to be like him and took up woodwork at The Winston Churchill School, in which she excelled having struggled with other subjects because she has dyslexia.

After school, Ashley took a joinery apprenticeship in Lightwater, with day releases to her father’s former college in Guildford.

After her apprenticeship, she worked as a joiner on large items in huge workshops and left for an office job when she married and planned to have children.

Last year, she watched the first series of Handmade, Britain’s Best Woodworker and thought it was something she could do even though she hadn’t done woodwork for 10 years.

The experience has led to Ashley setting up a workshop in her home and selling items she has made.

“I’ve had a commission from a famous person for 35 maple Christmas trees with 24 carat gold leaf,” she said.

Ashley is selling via Instagram 
(#ashley.nicole.woodwork) and is setting up a website.

She said her motivation for applying to be on the programme wasn’t to reach the final or win.

“It was the fact that I’d walked away from a childhood dream and couldn’t work out how I was ever going to get the time to get back into it.

“It was a really extreme way of rediscovering an absolute passion.

“I was the only girl at school doing woodwork and the only girl at college studying it.

“It’s a really male environment and can be quite hostile and you’ve really got to be brave to put yourself in that situation.

“If I’ve inspired a young girl to pick up woodwork tools, that’s a win for me,” Ashley said.