M&T: Tell us more about how art connects with the slöjd tradition, and why it’s such a vital part of it. JS: I would say it’s about form following function. The knowledge of how to make common, functional items was always a big part of everyday life. They knew, for example, how thick to make a table so that it would be strong, how big that sliding dovetail had to be to make a stable joint. That knowledge of proportions – dimensions, thicknesses, and joinery – is part of the tradition, and is very practical. But when they made things that were connected to certain traditions, like the love gift of a spinning wheel, they made it extraordinarily delicate, with...
The origins of the double iron are somewhat mysterious, but probably date to the mid-18th century. A double-iron smoothing plane discovered in London during an archaeological dig may have been made as early as 1750. The most interesting feature of this plane is that while the business end of the cap iron is typical, there is no mechanism for fastening the cap iron to the cutting iron. The two irons are loose, held together by the wedge, so the owner would have to set both irons by tapping them independently. This arrangement supports the theory that the earliest double iron was simply two cutting irons that some enterprising craftsman placed back-to-back. The first written reference to the double iron dates...
M&T: How is slöjd relevant to 21st-century society? JS: I think that people are probably just the same now as they used to be 200 years ago. We still want to try new things, to learn, to be more skilled, to express ourselves, and to show off. With slöjd, we can do all that by being producers and consumers at the same time. There was a philosopher in the 1800s, Friedrich Engels, who was one of the first to talk about that concept. He warned that the Industrial Revolution was going to cause social problems because the producers would be separate from the consumers and they would be alienated from one another. Instead of connection and unity, there would be...
“The pursuit of independence through making your own tools is a journey full of rewards. The broader a craftsperson’s competency, the more successfully he or she will be able to open whole new realms of creative possibility and manage hurdles that come along in the making process. This bitstock project brings together various skills that many furniture makers don’t get to exercise often enough: long accurate boring, turning, casting pewter, burning mortises, and utilizing naturally crooked branches. Even more, it is a joy to work with tools that reflect your own unique personality and individual aesthetic preferences, something we miss out on if our tool chest is filled with those identical to everyone else’s.” – Joshua Klein, excerpt from “The...
Dower Chest. ca.1780 Berks County, Pennsylvania. 23.16. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Painted furniture in the German-American tradition bears evidence of a deep craving for liveliness, mythology, and whimsy. As Fabian suggests, these chests “exhibit a full range of celestial and earthly subjects” with stars, flowers, hearts, horses, and peacocks right beside more fanciful creatures like unicorns, angels, and the elusive mermaid. Even the common house cat makes an occasional appearance. The decorators of these chests clearly wanted to incorporate the fullness of life in their work, though the intent of individual decorators in applying particular motifs is sometimes unclear. Fabian suggests that while there is much conjecture about these themes, “almost never are we given any clue...
“Slöjd makes my body strong, gives me a strong back and muscles – slöjd contains a rich diet for both body and mind. Also, I’m able to repair things when they break. That’s why I think of it as a survival kit – in a society where we’re trying to be sustainable and live more simply, craft can be a part of that restoration. When we make things, we want to take care of them – we’re not throwing them away after five years and buying a new one. This gives you a definition of what quality is. The urge for quality is also an urge for quality of life, where making and beauty give meaning to what a...
As a starting point in understanding Japanese tools, it’s probably best to examine how they are made. And even before looking at how they are made, it’s good to look at steel, and how steel works. In its simplest form, steel is a combination of iron and carbon. Pure iron consists of atoms of iron that arrange themselves naturally into a cubic structure. This cubic structure is not rigid, however. The cubic structure can move, which is why pure iron is malleable, and can be hammered and shaped into forms that are useful for us. Carbon happens to be just the right size so that if it is able to get into the gaps of the...
The importance of the relationship that humans share with trees cannot be overstated. Simply put, we owe our survival as a species almost entirely to these plants, and from our most ancient past we have held trees in the highest esteem. Consider the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden, or the great ash Yggdrasil in Norse mythology that holds the nine realms together, or the sacred fig (Ficus religiosa) that Buddha sat under. Trees provide us with our primary shelter-building material, giving poles for tipis, timbers for barns, and even peeled veneers for plywood. Every culture has produced household goods primarily out of wood and, until the Industrial Revolution, it was our primary...
Like so many Windsors, our chair is an anonymous work – a puzzle that spans nearly 250 years and perhaps two states. Thankfully, it has avoided catastrophe over the centuries and remains intact, untouched black paint and all, to serve as something as transcendent as it is enigmatic. There is beauty in that mystery – something captivating in its design and its origin. In late 2018, this chair was on the market for $30,000. While that might seem like an extraordinary sum – and it is – it remains only a fraction of the value of a similarly uncommon Queen Anne or Chippendale side chair from the same era. In many ways, “country furniture,” like our Windsor, is a bargain,...
Hayward’s writing is suffused with a poignant awareness that the 20th century was a time of inexorable decline in the use and manufacture of hand tools. All sorts of skills and techniques that were taken for granted in previous centuries disappeared, and the use of the double iron wasn’t immune from this trend. By the end of the 20th century it was common, as I noted earlier, to hear the claim that cap irons didn’t really stop tear-out. Some writers speculated that the real purpose of the cap iron was to stabilize or add heft to the cutting iron. One prominent author wrote that cap irons “do more harm than good in a handplane” – a statement that would have...
