How can we begin to make sense of 18th-century ornament? To begin with, we must experience it. Yes, that sounds strange, but in order to gain real insight into these lines, figures, and shapes, we need to go beyond careful observation and recreate them through drawing. As soon as you put pencil to paper, a whole world of detail, previously unnoticed, reveals itself. Consequently, the same happens once you go from drawing to carving or to careful observation of original objects – the transition from two to three dimensions and from paper to wood is equally revealing. It’s not necessary to draw entire pieces from pattern books. In fact, it’s best not to at first. For more than a decade, I’ve been drawing isolated elements from pattern books, and nothing has taught me more about these historic design languages. Choosing small elements – a shell, bellflowers, or certain acanthus leaf configurations – keeps you focused on ornament in a more manageable fashion. Over time, as your understanding of particular elements and combinations increases, you can begin to draw them in a broader context to understand how they work to support an overall design.
–Bill Pavlak, excerpt from “Through a Wilderness of Ornament: Working with 18th-century Pattern Books” in The First Three Issues
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Solar activity does more than steer climate cycles on earth – it alters the very make-up of the atmosphere. Solar storms, and the resulting cosmic radiation that strikes our planet, changes the ratio of carbon isotopes in the atmosphere. These specific isotopes are absorbed and locked away within the growth ring formed the year that a major storm took place. These carbon “markers” exist in other organic materials as well, and early artifacts – basketry, papyrus – that demonstrate the presence of these isotopes can now be dated precisely, all because of the exacting timescale laid down in ancient tree rings.
Trees are the scribes of nature, “remembering” events in the physical sense: A tree takes again the effect of what has been – a warm rain, a glowing auroral display, even our own breath – and writes these things as “members” of its own tangible substance, cell by cell, ring by ring. If this sounds excessively metaphysical or farfetched, I invite you to contemplate the wood grain in the nearest piece of antique furniture. Maybe you’re fortunate enough to own a chair or chest that was made by hand in pre-industrial times, fashioned from boards cut from trees that never breathed polluted air or drank groundwater tainted with toxins. As you look across the years of growth, you are seeing everything that happened in that tree’s environment as it grew – encountering in tangible form the memories of centuries ago.
Michael Updegraff, excerpt from “Scribes of Nature: Dendrochronology & the Deeper Story of Wooden Objects” in Issue Nine
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Most modern paints are basically designed to encapsulate wood – to wrap it and seal it in a layer of petrochemical plastic. While giving the appearance of protection, like a leaky raincoat it creates more issues than it solves when things get damp. Now the moisture is trapped inside, in the wood, and rot is the inevitable result. Brouns has a distinguished background in historic building conservation, and he found himself aghast as he discovered, time and time again, newly-rotten sections of ancient buildings which had recently been painted with modern paint. These structures had somehow survived rot-free for many centuries before these modern paints had been slapped on. The evidence showed repeatedly that the ancient methods were far superior to the new ones. And what was the key? Linseed-oil paint.
Derived from flax seed and ground-up earth pigments, linseed paint has an ancient history and offers what has been described as “perfect” protection for wood. Rather than creating an impermeable layer atop wood, it soaks in and creates a protective but breathable layer that helps moisture to move in and out. Wood continues to “breathe,” absorbing and releasing moisture based on ambient conditions, and linseed paint works with this propensity while guarding wood from the degradation of sun and wind. It never flakes, doesn’t require primers or undercoatings, and can last an unbelievably long time. Some buildings in Europe have their original linseed paint intact, 500 years later.
Brouns has recently written a book about linseed paint– Linseed Paint and Oil: A Practical Guide to Traditional Production and Application – and we are thrilled to now offer it in our store. It’s a thorough look at the ins and outs of linseed-oil paint: using it, how it’s made, how it works. You can check it out here. He also has put out videos, essays, an excellent article in M&T, and travels extensively to spread the word about this revolutionary, ancient wood finish. Sometimes the old ways are the best ones.
-Mike
]]>I, too, have felt the need to question the direction that technology is taking us – to take a stand against the ever-increasing use of machines (especially of robotics) that are designed to remove humans from creative and productive work.
I am “off the grid” in my shop and could, with enough solar panels and batteries, have all the power tools that most grid-tied shops enjoy. However, I feel strongly that without a change from our present growth-above-all mandate, we cannot reach a sustainable balance on earth, no matter how many wind generators or photovoltaic cells are employed. As right as it seems to embrace “green energy,” a field of solar panels is not as beautiful as a field of daisies, and a horizon of wind generators can never rival that of maples and evergreens. To be truly sustainable, our switch to renewable energy must be accompanied by a reduction in the energy we use at the present time.
The intermediate technology employed in my shop is part of my search for techniques and technologies that reduce fossil fuel use, yet still allow me to turn out a product that is competitive in the marketplace. It will be better still if that technology also improves my work environment or enables me to have a closer bond with tools and materials.
–Harry Bryan, excerpt from “Intermediate Technology in the Shop: Inspiration from E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful” in Issue Eight
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As he explains, the phrase “workmanship of risk” refers to any operation that does not rely on controls such as fences or depth stops to prevent the very real possibility of spoiling the job from cutting too far or incorrectly. This can easily happen with unguided tools when the maker lacks skill, his or her attention drifts, or unanticipated variables (such as sudden grain change) arise. The “risk” Pye refers to, then, is not risk of physical injury from using dangerous tools – the risk is to the object itself.
This mode of work is contrasted with the workmanship of certainty, which is “always to be found in quantity production, and found in its pure state in full automation. In workmanship of this sort the quality of the result is exactly predetermined before a single salable thing is made.” These are work operations that rely on jigs, fences, or other means to control the result. The chief example presented is that of the printing press, which is compared to the riskiness of writing with a pen.
Of course, we’ve all experienced that mechanized production can go wrong, too – the tool can jam, the router bit slips in the collet, or stock can become skewed in the machine. (How many times have we had paper jam in our printers?) While it’s true that mechanized work can be ruined, this observation misses Pye’s point, because mechanical errors like these cannot be attributed to a worker’s lack of manual skill or dexterity. This can be seen more clearly in the example of the typewriter, which Pye calls an “intermediate form of workmanship.” He tells us that although “you can spoil the page in innumerable ways… the N’s will never look like U’s.” Don’t miss this: The heart of the distinction revolves around the degree to which an operation is jigged or guided.
–Joshua A. Klein, excerpt from “A Fresh and Unexpected Beauty: Understanding David Pye’s ‘Workmanship of Risk’” in Issue Seven
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Nearly all measurement systems (old and new) are rooted in the measurements of the body, known as anthropometric measures. The cause is obvious – when a craftsperson needed to carry a measurement from one piece to another, or remember a length for later use, comparison to a body part was the most accessible means of doing so. There are a few exceptions I know of to this fact. For one, the origins of the meter lie in the decimal-obsessed attempt to arrive at a measure based on the Earth’s dimensions. Cartographers and mathematicians arrived at the meter, which was roughly one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator, measured along the meridian that passed through Paris.
There are also systems that found their basis in abundant natural resources. As mentioned earlier, the length of three barleycorns, end to end, was used as a measure of the English inch for many centuries. In Japan, the kujirajaku or whale scale, was based on the length of a whale’s tooth, and is still used today by some traditional seamstresses. Whales have many teeth of very similar size, and barley corn is abundant in Europe – when you have a lot of a commodity that is roughly uniform in length, it is a good candidate for use as a base unit.
–Brendan Gaffney, excerpt from “Modern Revivalist Toolmaking: What Yesterday’s Tools Can Teach Us Today” in The First Three Issues
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In this new episode, the guys talk with woodworker and author Andy Glenn, whose new book Backwoods Chairmakers: In Search of the Appalachian Chairmaker was published by Lost Art Press. If you’re interested in handmade and vernacular furniture, this new title should be on the top of your list. Glenn covers, not only the nuts-and-bolts discussions about building these chairs, but also an intimate glimpse into the lives of these makers still actively selling chairs today.
Not everything in life needs to be “set it and forget it.” There are all sorts of things that we would do well to tend to – to care for – to pay attention to. In this episode, Joshua and Mike discuss the value of maintaining the stuff of our lives. Rather than consider it a burden that ought to be overcome, the guys argue that there is something inherently valuable in the practice of tending. Whether it’s seasonally adjusting shifting doors, maintaining old wooden windows, or repairing your own vehicles, the act of maintenance is an act of participation, rather than consumption. This podcast conversation is a call to challenge yourself to undertake things you’ve never done before, because in so doing, you may find that the more you faithfully pay attention to, the more you will grow – not to mention, the more you might learn to appreciate and enjoy the mundane details of life.
This post is part of a blog series revealing the table of contents of upcoming Issue Sixteen. As is our custom, we’ll be discussing one article per weekday in order to give you a taste of what is to come.
The subscription window that includes Issue Sixteen is open now.
To get Issue Sixteen when it ships in early April, you can sign up for a subscription here.
If you aren’t sure about your subscription status, you can reach out to Grace at info@mortiseandtenonmag.com. Keep in mind though, if you are set to auto-renew, you never have to worry about getting the next issue of Mortise & Tenon. Issue Sixteen is coming your way soon!
Trends in culture wax and wane, often ending in a hangover of ignominy as no one clearly remembers what the hype was all about. As fads come and go, many look for stability in traditions that have stood the test of time. These traditions transcend geographical restraints, growing slowly but steadily as the world moves on around them. Such is the case with Japanese woodworking, which has captured the collective imagination of Western furniture makers.
The Kezurou-kai movement is the organized outworking of that captivation. It began decades ago in Japan, as woodworkers gathered together to showcase their skills and tools and compete in a plane-shaving competition – the thinnest shaving wins, and competition was fierce. Now, “Kez” events take place all over the world, as hobbyists and professionals seek to incorporate the aesthetics and techniques of Japanese woodworking into their own shop practice.
In Issue Sixteen, author Michael Updegraff explores the traditional roots, unending enthusiasm, and long-term viability of the Kez movement. Taking in the sights and sounds of a Kez event in Maine, he describes the similarities and differences between West and East in terms of woodworking tools and practices, then delves into how Kezurou-kai plane-shaving competitors are able to make such inconceivably thin shavings with seemingly simple tools. Looking into the dark arts of blacksmithing and metallurgy, he shows how a perfect edge can be forged on an anvil and sharpened on waterstones to take a shaving 20 times thinner than a human hair.
Through interviews with Yann Giguère and Jason Fox, two of the prominent figures in the American Kez movement, Updegraff looks at the way many aspects of Japanese woodworking are made accessible through these events and shared, open-source, with the attendees – a clear divergence from traditional practice, to be sure, but perhaps the best pathway available for keeping the old ways alive.
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This post is part of a blog series revealing the table of contents of upcoming Issue Sixteen. As is our custom, we’ll be discussing one article per weekday in order to give you a taste of what is to come.
The subscription window that includes Issue Sixteen is open now.
To get Issue Sixteen when it ships in early April, you can sign up for a subscription here.
If you aren’t sure about your subscription status, you can reach out to Grace at info@mortiseandtenonmag.com. Keep in mind though, if you are set to auto-renew, you never have to worry about getting the next issue of Mortise & Tenon. Issue Sixteen is coming your way soon!
Joseph Brihiez – “Working With the Trees”
A scientific approach to the management and understanding of our woodlands has brought about a great number of advancements in commercial productivity, but reductionism only has so much value when it comes to truly knowing the forest. There is more going on there than can fit in a textbook.
In Issue Sixteen, author and carpenter Joseph Brihiez ventures into the woods with a group of traditional French carpenters. An ethnographic researcher as well as an axe hewer, Brihiez is passionate to learn about the ancient connection that a woodworker had with the trees he utilized in his craft. Under the tutelage of these experienced timber framers, he learns how to read the bark and “see inside the tree” to determine suitability for a given project – to recognize that a tree is not just a large piece of wood, but a dynamic living being.
“Their work is not so much with wood, but with trees,” he writes, “Through discussions with foresters, these carpenters recognize that they have access to new knowledge and a broader understanding of what forces act on and through a growing tree, forces that will affect their woodwork.” An understanding of these forces does not arrive through mastering scientific knowledge, but through regular engagement with the woodland: shouldering an axe or saw and venturing out under the canopy to see what is to be seen.
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This post is part of a blog series revealing the table of contents of upcoming Issue Sixteen. As is our custom, we’ll be discussing one article per weekday in order to give you a taste of what is to come.
The subscription window that includes Issue Sixteen is open now.
To get Issue Sixteen when it ships in early April, you can sign up for a subscription here.
If you aren’t sure about your subscription status, you can reach out to Grace at info@mortiseandtenonmag.com. Keep in mind though, if you are set to auto-renew, you never have to worry about getting the next issue of Mortise & Tenon. Issue Sixteen is coming your way soon!
Joshua A. Klein – “An Introduction to Scribe-rule Timber Framing”
Almost all woodworkers today build from measurements, carefully incising layout lines for saw cuts and relying on the regular dimensions of lumber for predictable results. House carpenters work in much the same way, with a tape measure always at hand and very fixed framing-member spacings (16"-on-center) the rule. But it hasn’t always been this way.
In this issue, Joshua Klein introduces an ancient method for laying out timber joinery: Scribe rule. Rather than utilizing measurements or very regular, sawn stock, scribe rule was made for tying together rough-hewn, irregular, and curved timbers in joinery with crisp, airtight shoulders. Centuries ago, when all work was hand work and rough surfaces were perfectly acceptable, the structure of a building was defined around unchanging, perfect standards: level and plumb. Because these are derived from gravity, they are inerrant and reliable. A plumb line shows what vertical is, and square from that is level. All the work of the carpenter must obey these – at least, on average.
Klein demonstrates these principles at work as he scribes a mortise-and-tenon joint with two twisted and irregular timbers. Lying flat, a wall structure goes from plumb to level but the immovable center of the earth (harnessed with a plumb bob on a string) is able to clearly show how to account for all the unevenness. Using a pair of compasses, Klein shows how to “drop” the irregularities from one timber to another, allowing for the cutting of joinery that fits precisely and will stand plumb. It is a fascinating and mind-bending exercise that opens up new possibilities for creatively using wild wood.
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This post is part of a blog series revealing the table of contents of upcoming Issue Sixteen. As is our custom, we’ll be discussing one article per weekday in order to give you a taste of what is to come.
The subscription window that includes Issue Sixteen is open now.
To get Issue Sixteen when it ships in early April, you can sign up for a subscription here.
If you aren’t sure about your subscription status, you can reach out to Grace at info@mortiseandtenonmag.com. Keep in mind though, if you are set to auto-renew, you never have to worry about getting the next issue of Mortise & Tenon. Issue Sixteen is coming your way soon!
Thiago Silva – “Brazilian Craft Heritage”
Many places find themselves deeply tied to their local craft traditions – for example, the Windsor chair in the Chiltern Hills of Britain, or Shaker furniture from the villages of New England. These traditions can be traced neatly through history, and often have outsized permanent influence in their places of origin. But other times, the shuffling and erasing forces of industrialization and colonization can destroy this thread of history. What happens when handcraft traditions are wiped away?
In Issue Sixteen, woodworker and 2022 M&T Craft Grant Recipient Thiago Silva explores the handcraft history of his native Brazil. Through discordant centuries of influence and occupation, Brazil’s ancestral traditions were lost and replaced by a number of different cultural influences. From early Portuguese conquest to the massive tide of the African slave trade (Silva notes that “more than a third of the African enslaved people brought to the Americas ended up in Brazil”) to large-scale migrations from Japan and other places, finding a uniquely Brazilian handcraft heritage is difficult.
Silva takes a hard look at what makes a tradition – is it so rigidly locale-specific and built into the bedrock, or are all traditions a melting pot of sorts? And how does one pick up the pieces of a violent history and see in them the beauty of human creativity that continues to flourish everywhere despite destructive influences? His research and reflections here are worth contemplating.
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This post is part of a blog series revealing the table of contents of upcoming Issue Sixteen. As is our custom, we’ll be discussing one article per weekday in order to give you a taste of what is to come.
The subscription window that includes Issue Sixteen is open now.
To get Issue Sixteen when it ships in early April, you can sign up for a subscription here.
If you aren’t sure about your subscription status, you can reach out to Grace at info@mortiseandtenonmag.com. Keep in mind though, if you are set to auto-renew, you never have to worry about getting the next issue of Mortise & Tenon. Issue Sixteen is coming your way soon!
“Cornered Charm: An Examination of a 19th-Century Corner Cupboard”
While some furniture is meant to quietly blend into the background, other examples shout for attention. Still another category belongs to those pieces built to tie a room together, to take an almost architectural role in changing the feel of a space. Often these take shape as built-in cabinets, but not always – the corner cupboard is one example of such a standalone piece.
In Issue Sixteen, we will examine a lovely example of a mid-19th century New England corner cupboard. It features graceful wear and a few mysteries of its own. The paint was intentionally distressed at some point in the past, lending an age-worn look that has often been popular among antiques aficionados. The wavy glass and simple molding present a diversity of textures and shadows, highlighting the proportions of the piece.
As always, we’ll be looking close, inside and out, the back and underside – no surface will remain unturned. Uniquely, this cupboard rests on casters, as if intended to be regularly moved. But there are other riddles here, too. Some of the hardware tells a confusing story, and there are a few tool marks that seem to defy easy explanation. But such challenges can offer loads of new context to our understanding of the mindset of the early cabinetmaker.
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This post is part of a blog series revealing the table of contents of upcoming Issue Sixteen. As is our custom, we’ll be discussing one article per weekday in order to give you a taste of what is to come.
The subscription window that includes Issue Sixteen is open now.
To get Issue Sixteen when it ships in early April, you can sign up for a subscription here.
If you aren’t sure about your subscription status, you can reach out to Grace at info@mortiseandtenonmag.com. Keep in mind though, if you are set to auto-renew, you never have to worry about getting the next issue of Mortise & Tenon. Issue Sixteen is coming your way soon!
]]>
This post is part of a blog series revealing the table of contents of upcoming Issue Sixteen. As is our custom, we’ll be discussing one article per weekday in order to give you a taste of what is to come.
The subscription window that includes Issue Sixteen is open now.
To get Issue Sixteen when it ships in early April, you can sign up for a subscription here.
If you aren’t sure about your subscription status, you can reach out to Grace at info@mortiseandtenonmag.com. Keep in mind though, if you are set to auto-renew, you never have to worry about getting the next issue of Mortise & Tenon. Issue Sixteen is coming your way soon!
]]>
This post is part of a blog series revealing the table of contents of upcoming Issue Sixteen. As is our custom, we’ll be discussing one article per weekday in order to give you a taste of what is to come.
The subscription window that includes Issue Sixteen is open now.
To get Issue Sixteen when it ships in early April, you can sign up for a subscription here.
If you aren’t sure about your subscription status, you can reach out to Grace at info@mortiseandtenonmag.com. Keep in mind though, if you are set to auto-renew, you never have to worry about getting the next issue of Mortise & Tenon. Issue Sixteen is coming your way soon!
Ted Ingraham – “Sash-making in Early America”
The pre-industrial joiner had his work cut out for him. Nearly every home built in early America required trim, window sash, and molding – miles of it. One typical house of that period, the Whittier House of Danville, Vermont, needed over 7,100' of hand-planed white pine lumber for trimming out; for its window sashes, doors, and shutters, the joiner needed to cut more than 840 mortise-and-tenon joints – awe-inspiring numbers for us, but par for the course in those days.
In Issue Sixteen, author, teacher, and professional joiner Ted Ingraham takes a closer look at the practice of sash making as the joiner of the Whittier House would have done it over 200 years ago. Drawing from his examinations of the house during restoration, Ingraham shows us both the tools and the techniques of the period sash joiner as he reproduces an original window from the house. Determining how the house’s windows were constructed required a bit of archaeology as well as luck, as Ingraham notes: “The original sashes had been replaced at least once with seemingly no way to determine the initial construction methods or sash profile. That changed when a small fragment of one of the original attic nine-light frames was discovered during restoration. While the fragment was barely 5" in length, it revealed not only the profile of the sash but also the use of a seldom-seen mitering technique used to join the crossing muntins. With this find, there was enough information to recreate the original Whittier house sash windows.”
Bringing us through the process as informed by this find, Ingraham offers a fascinating look at a nearly lost trade. Keeping a broad view of historic context in mind, he works step-by-step through the methods of an 18th-century joiner. The sash plane, rabbet plane, layout sticks, and various jigs each find their place to quickly build a window sash fit for an early American homestead.
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