It’s been really rewarding being able to spend a few days with the Peach State SAPFM crowd. These guys are highly skilled and very passionate about period furniture and have been doing it longer than I’ve been alive. This fact is obviously humbling to me and so I am grateful to be invited to come down here. The whole time these kind gentlemen have received me as one of their own. I’ve heard several times this weekend that seeing a younger generation taking interest in our woodworking heritage is an encouragement to them. They’re excited to see that Mortise & Tenon Magazine and all my rambling about period tolerances and hand tools has struck a chord with folks outside of the period furniture circles.
That is what it’s all about to me, though. I want Mortise & Tenon to show today’s woodworkers a radically different (read: traditional and old) way of working wood in the 21st century. I didn’t grow up with this stuff. I was not raised on anachronism. And … no, I’m not Amish. How then did a hardcore/metal-head musician and artist get swept up into fascination with foreplanes and half-blind dovetails, you ask? I got bit by the love of craft that so many of my generation have latched onto. Many of us have begun to learn that picking up a tool and working with our hands to create something that connects us to our past satisfies something in us that iPhones never can.
Mortise & Tenon exists to feed that conviction. I believe there are so many people that are tired of the mechanization and sanitization of our age. They want to dive into a craft tradition that feels liberatingly human. I don’t think that blind optimism: we’ve been getting a bunch of emails and messages from folks that can’t until Tuesday at 12:00 am to pre-order Issue Two. This also is humbling but encouraging at the same time. Maybe there is hope for his generation.