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From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

There is a valuable lesson in this for today’s woodworkers: We need to be careful about where we derive our standards of “good” work and sense of appropriate tolerances. Sometimes this means separating truth from myth. We need to recognize that modern dogma about engineer-like precision and glass-smooth secondary surfaces is an anomaly in the history of craft. As these photographs reveal, tear-out, knots, and coarse plane tracks are normal characteristics of hand work throughout history. It’s not sloppy or slipshod. It’s normal – even for the Shakers who aimed for perfection in all their efforts. As Brother Arnold explained to us, dealers and curators have developed a mythology around Shaker furniture in order to market these objects at art...

From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

In this final episode of their tour through David Pye’s The Nature and Art of Workmanship, Joshua and Mike bring up several of their critiques of Pye’s thought. As helpful and insightful as he was, the guys both are left feeling like something was missing. See how this book comes up short of a full-orbed, holistic discussion of workmanship and it’s enduring value in a technological age. SHOW NOTES  Order your copy of the book here: The Nature and Art of Workmanship Joshua Klein’s article in Issue Seven: ”A Fresh & Unexpected Beauty: Understanding David Pye’s ‘Workmanship of Risk’”

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...

From the M&T Daily Dispatch