“Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. I love to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my pleasing work. I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played about the stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver prophesied when I was plowing, they warmed me twice, once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden. The most well-known portion of the above quote, concerning the way firewood warms...
My shaving horse is never going to win any awards, but I love it and now can’t imagine my woodshop without it. I documented its construction in Issue Nine, but haven’t yet taken the opportunity to film its features. To remedy that, yesterday we published this brief introduction to my shaving horse. In just a few minutes, I go over the features that I think are most important in a shaving horse design: Continental “dumbhead” style Offset pin in the arm so that it automatically opens when the pedal is released V-notch in the head Some kind on stop at the back of the seat (protruding leg tenons work well). There are a lot of bells and whistles a person...
“Never say there is nothing beautiful in the world anymore. There is always something to make you wonder in the shape of a tree, the trembling of a leaf.”
– Albert Schweitzer
Each new run of M&T merchandise (shirts, stickers, etc.) is a unique design. At any given time, we’ve usually got a few ideas in the pipeline. In fact, I’m currently working on a new sticker which we hope to release in the next few weeks. This approach makes more work for us, but the tradeoff is that it keeps the merchandise fresh and interesting. We do our best to guess the level of interest so that anyone who wants one can get one. Every once in a while, though, we underestimate. Our “Incite Craft” sticker back in 2019 was one of those items. Because it went so quick, we recently decided to order another small run. You can stick these...
Spruce gum used to be big business in the North Woods. In fact, work as a “gummer” could pay more in a day than laboring as a lumberjack. These savvy folks would cruise through the forest with chisel-like tools on long poles, breaking off hardened chunks of spruce resin and gathering them in sacks. New, soft (i.e. sticky) resin is no good – it has to harden for several years before it becomes valuable for chewing. Unless you want to glue your lips together. We have a number of stands of red spruces (Picea rubens) we frequent to gather spruce gum. In one of those, a large tree several feet in diameter and about 80 feet tall was recently...
“For all the benefits we’ve gained from mechanization and automation, it is high time we take a step back to consider afresh if our shop work is actually any richer when our tools are Bluetooth-compatible. There is no doubt that “information technology is changing the nature of human work in industrial production. The machine operator has become the machine overseer. [But] whether this change is making work more humane is another question.” In Pye’s day, he saw his contemporaries’ appetite for antiques as a “sign of an unsatisfied hunger for diversity and spontaneity in the things of everyday use.” Our fenced tools and highly jigged operations give us precise, quality work. But they cannot give us technophiles what we so...
Wow. Thank you all so much for your encouraging feedback these last 24 hours. When we decided to leave social media, we assumed a few people would sympathize with us, but we also expected a generous slather of negativity (because that’s what these places are so good at). But it turns out we were not alone. Since that post yesterday, we’ve been buried in comments and emails from deeply appreciative readers who have long shared these concerns. (Please be patient – it’s going to take some time to respond to all the feedback.) Some of them told us they left social media awhile back, others said they might soon follow suit, and a good number of people told us that...
When I started Mortise & Tenon in 2015, I knew I needed to find a way to reach woodworkers beyond my local community. And so, after some research I decided I’d replace my “dumb” phone with a shiny new smartphone and learn how to use Instagram. This platform felt invaluable to me, because it was helping me to make connections with so many other people who have similar interests. I made new acquaintances and learned so much from their daily postings. As M&T’s reach grew over the next few years, my involvement in social media grew along with it. I spent more and more time posting and commenting on others’ photos. And even when I wasn’t on the app, I...
In this episode, we tackle the question of “how” one approaches studying a handmade object to learn from it. There aren’t too many tools (all of them are inexpensive), and there are a few basic categories of things you should be looking to. We talk about color consistency, inexplicable holes or notches, and how to find things no one ever saw before, even though it was right in front of their faces. This episode was recorded in honor of our good friend, the late Phil Lowe. We’ll miss you, Phil.
Mentioned in this Episode:
Neewer CN-160 Light
We’re excited to launch the Mortise & Tenon Research Grant! As we shared last month, the goal of this program is to create opportunities for new voices and passionate research to emerge in the realm of pre-industrial craft. We want to hear from you – If you or someone you know has a dream of diving into a particular area of study for deeper understanding; if you’re smitten by the work of some obscure pre-industrial maker; if you’ve been bitten by the bug of exploring the folk arts practiced by your ancestors but have hit a wall of financial limitation, we may be able to help. The M&T Research Grant is now accepting applications for two grant recipients for the...
