Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich, 1818. This is an admittedly heady title for a little blog post. And while I can’t possibly write anything remotely worthy of that title here (in a thousand words or less), the topic itself is one that will keep coming back. Our vision at M&T is “to cultivate reverence for the dignity of humanity and the natural world through the celebration of handcraft.” While there’s a lot to unpack in that statement, it basically means we’re going to talk about more than just how to make nice furniture by hand. So for example, when society starts down a slippery slope of creative self-immolation, Joshua or I might casually bring it up....
The fluting engine is a simple device. Pull on the lever, and the cutter – attached to a short arm at a right angle to the lever – moves in an arc and cuts a path through the wood. Rotate the turntable a bit and repeat – somewhere between 50 and 100 times to complete one pass around. Raise the table, and make another pass. Then repeat, perhaps carving 1/32" to 1/16" at a time until you’ve carved out a bowl. This is what happens, but the description completely misses the wonder of carving a bowl this way. The sound of a sharp cutter slicing through the wood is amazingly satisfying. The cuts come out glistening from the sharp edge...
When anxiety is running high, when the news cycle can’t get any louder, when it seems like the world is an irredeemable mess – then is a good time to crack open some Wendell Berry. Fortunately for us, Berry, who turned 88 this year, is a prolific writer, so there are many different volumes up for grabs. There isn’t really a wrong direction to go – his essays, his fiction, and his poetry all offer pithy diamonds of wisdom and joy. Berry has been gently but firmly pushing against the status quo for decades. Industrialization, education, politics – in all those areas where civilized debate is essentially nonexistent at the moment, he speaks like a breath of fresh air in a...
