Blog — Issue Nine RSS





The Memories of Centuries Ago

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...

Continue reading



I Make it Up as I Go Along

“I am not very good at visualizing the final outcome of my projects. Unless taking the time to make a detailed prototype is justifiable (almost never in my case), I often employ what programmers and software designers have come to call “iterative design” – a cyclical method of tweaking and refining the product as the user provides feedback. This is merely a fancy-pants way of saying that I make it up as I go along. So, seeing the bench at its final height, I decided to remove some of the bulk in the middle. I laid out a relief where my legs will be, and sawed several relief cuts, then chopped out the waste with a chisel. The top and...

Continue reading



Quite a Workout!

“I worked outside in the open air under the cover of a woodworking shed. The wood I was given was a trunk of greenwood, freshly cut from a tree. Unseasoned wood like this has a naturally high moisture content. I had no choice of wood during the television program, but usually when choosing the best wood for splitting you need to take great care to pick a vertically grown tree with no twists or knots along its surface. This ensures that once the wood is split it will be far less likely to bend or crack. It’s also important to make sure you have more wood than you might need. This ensures you have “spare parts” in the event of...

Continue reading



Profoundly Present in the Everyday

“The ultimate aim of every wooden icon panel is to carry a little vision of the world full of God’s presence. The final step in preparing the board is setting aside a special space for that revelation. Turning the icon over again, a shallow recess is carved out of the front of the board. This space in Slavonic is called a kovtcheg, and in Greek is called a kivotos, but both words have the same meaning in English: an ark. After marking the ark’s frame on the panel, the center of the board is hollowed out. While different iconographic schools vary on how deeply this is done, in the studio it is usually kept relatively shallow. Given the general flatness...

Continue reading



Hemmings’ Masterpiece

It was also in this 15-year period that Hemmings crafted several pieces of furniture for Jefferson and his family. Though there are several references to furniture produced by Hemmings’ hands, no known examples currently exist with the exception of a round-top rotating table that was mentioned in a letter from Jefferson to Edmund Bacon; that table is now on display at Monticello. Other furniture pieces attributed to Hemmings include a sewing worktable for Jefferson’s granddaughter, a Campeachy lounge chair for Poplar Forest, a couple of bedsteads, dressing tables, and his “masterpiece:” a writing desk for another of Jefferson’s granddaughters. The aforementioned furniture can only be credited to Hemmings through written accounts, including the writing desk that was tragically lost at...

Continue reading



Amazing Insight

Recently, dozens of coopered vessels from three museums in Austria were analyzed for their growth-ring secrets. Wooden vessels, ubiquitous items a century ago, were often fashioned from staves rived from a single tree. Even though each individual stave might be small, featuring just a few growth rings, researchers found that they could visualize a model of the original chunk of wood by virtually plotting out the growth rings – kind of like putting together a complex puzzle. About half of the vessels studied were successfully dated (ranging from 1612-1940), but even more information was gathered on the methods of early coopers. Especially notable was the lack of wasted material when the craftsman split out staves – even after shaping with...

Continue reading



The Most Prolific Planemaker of the 18th Century

Francis Nicholson is generally regarded as the most important figure in early American planemaking. He was the first documented planemaker in the Colonies, he was inventive and original, and he appears to have been highly prolific: An astonishingly large number of his planes survive. But I believe it’s time for a reconsideration of Chelor’s significance. An exhaustive survey by Ingraham found that over three quarters of the surviving planes with Francis’s mark were made after he moved to Wrentham. Further, the number of surviving planes with Chelor’s mark actually exceeds the number of Francis’s planes with the Wrentham stamp. Taken together, these facts suggest that Chelor may have been responsible for an explosion of productivity in Nicholson’s shop during the...

Continue reading



Both Practical and Personal

A genuine love of wood needs to be both practical and personal. It is necessary for the studio because of the kind of paint used to create the icons. Like so much of what is done here, the paint used is locally produced and looks to fulfill the land rather than extract from it. It is called egg tempera, a combination of pigments made from the rocks and plants around the studio and egg yolk from our little flock of chickens. When properly prepared and applied, it is a durable paint that does not yellow and gives luminosity to the color. However, once cured, it dries to an inflexible state that would quickly crack and flake off a flexible surface,...

Continue reading



Rightly Considered a Folk Tool

The shaving horse remained prevalent throughout the Western world, especially in rural contexts, well into the 20th century. This is not to say it was never used in industrial production, however. It is, for example, depicted amongst coopers’ tools in Diderot and d’Alembert’s mid-late 18th-century scientific publication, Encyclopédie, which was “the cornerstone of the Enlightenment, representing the most important collection of scientific and technological knowledge at the time.” Even though the shaving horse had a place in early industrialism, it could rightly be considered a folk tool because it did not originate from the academic or economic elite. It’s always been the workholding technology of the commoner. Peter Follansbee has put it, “Shaving horses are a folk tool, like a...

Continue reading



A Treasure Trove of Information

The key is found in linking growth curves together, using old living trees to make connections to sawn lumber, timbers in buildings, and old furniture. Going back to our example of that 200-year-old pine: Imagine that there is a 150-year-old house nearby, built of timbers cut onsite. Many of those timbers came from trees that were likely far older than our standing grandfather pine, with which they share 50 years of overlap in their growth curves. Once that overlap is confirmed, it becomes possible to count backwards in the rings of the old house timbers and create an extended chronology. Utilizing local structures and archaeological finds in this way, a regional “master chronology” can be built that extends many centuries...

Continue reading