Whaaat in the world, y’all!?? We woke up this morning to find that we’ve been getting messages all night from people desperate to sign up for the Apprenticeship winter term. And then the minute it opened at 8:00 a.m. somehow several people signed up. We hadn’t even sent the email campaign announcing it.
And as soon as we sent the email out, people have been lining up like crazy.
So, I don’t know what time you’ll be reading this blog post, but at this rate… I don’t know if there will be any openings left by tonight.
If there are slots available as you read this, sign up now!
– Joshua
Some conifers are content to grow as their neighbors, dutifully straight to the sky, branches creating an arrow profile as they march upwards in symmetrical ranks. Often, this predictable pattern of growth ends eventually in the death of the tree – it simply can’t innovate to reach farther than its limited pattern allows and soak in the sunlight needed to thrive within a crowded forest. These trees just put their heads down, stick to the rulebook, and soon die from a lack of captured solar energy. But the Eastern white pine (Pinus strobus) suffers no such compunctions. This tree takes risks, sometimes serious risks, in the effort to grab a patch of sunlight. It will send limbs out at often ridiculous angles...
There is always a little hubbub around the label “viking,” as many people think vikings were a people, which is not true. Viking is a verb, not a noun. The adventurers were Norse people, some of whom went raiding by sea, an activity referred to as viking. The Viking Age could more accurately be thought of as the Raiding Age of the Norse people. However, to call this a viking chest might not be entirely incorrect. There are theories that these chests were brought on longships to both serve as storage and seating for oarsmen and that the trapezoidal construction provided stability against both tipping and racking while traversing rough seas. As with most theories about the Viking Age, with...
This installment of the Setting Up Shop video series focuses on the big, beefy rip handsaw. Too many woodworkers are intimidated by the idea of ripping by hand, but there is no reason for it. Get yourself a properly set up tool and let ‘er rip. It’s good to get the blood pumping.
– Joshua
This morning, our students in the Apprenticeship program turned in the last of their assignments – they’ve posted pictures of their shellac and milk paint projects and shared their essays of reflection on the past eight weeks of dedicated craft work. We’ve watched these folks go from green and a little nervous on day one to steady growth in confidence and skill over two months. They’ve taken these challenges head on, working through freehand sharpening, stock prep with hand tools, mortise-and-tenon joinery, dovetails (through and half-blind), rabbets, dadoes, green woodworking, and shellac and milk paint finishing. It has been an exhilarating term. Mike and I spent countless days this year creating an online hand-tool woodworking educational program that offered personal...
The first term of the Mortise & Tenon Apprenticeship Program is wrapping up this week. We designed this eight-week course to offer students the opportunity to build structured handcraft practice into their lives, and to start to develop a pre-industrial way of thinking about woodworking. And it’s been an amazing ride. Joshua and I intended this course to be more relational than most online learning tends to be – we wanted to give regular feedback to our students and give them the chance to interact with one another. Handcraft has always carried a community aspect to it, and even in our compartmentalized lives today (and through a limited digital medium) our goal was to keep personal engagement at the center of...
In an 1888 issue of The Decorator and The Furnisher, N.S. Stowell asks his well-heeled American readers to imagine what’s inside their fine furnishings: “Has it ever occurred to you when you have been looking with conscious pride at your elegant rosewood piano and mahogany furniture that its beauty is, as a matter of fact, only skin deep? If not, just give this subject a few moment’s consideration, and learn how art and ingenuity cannot only add to the attractions of nature, but actually create charms where none exist.” As Stowell suggests, veneer – in its pre-industrial and early industrial production – interwove frugality with luxury. By flaying a log of expensive mahogany into 1/16" thick slices, sawyers took advantage...
Donald Williams is one of my heroes. As the senior furniture conservator at the Smithsonian Institute for many years (now retired), he has been instrumental in shaping the field of conservation and training many of our nation’s foremost practitioners. Despite the fact that his experience and acumen are far beyond most anyone I’ve ever met, he’s a down-to-earth guy, eager to converse with craftspeople at all levels. For many years Don’s graciously welcomed me into his life as a mentor. He’s advised me through my meager furniture conservation efforts, supported me through my research into the furniture making of Jonathan Fisher, and remained a friend over the years M&T has developed. We regularly exchange emails, but I hadn’t seen him...
Over the past week, my family has been immersed in the beauty of the natural world on a road trip west from our home in coastal Maine. We started out at a remote cabin on a lake in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, then visited friends at their farm in Orange County (central) Vermont, and hiked through the vistas and rock garden of World’s End State Park in Forksville, PA, before dropping into Highland County, Virginia to visit our good friends, Don and Carolyn Williams. There will be more to come about my time with Don in his shop, but for now, I want to share a few snapshots of the glory we’ve been basking in. Our mission at...
The numbers of tourists visiting Acadia National Park here in Maine are beginning to dwindle for the season, so those of us who live here are increasingly able to enjoy the park again. My family has a specific loop that we walk every autumn, in October as the foliage is peaking in color, and we continued that tradition last weekend. It was a good opportunity to reconsider the maple tree. Our most common maple is the red maple (Acer rubrum), which may take a backseat in prestige to the more widely known sugar maples (Acer saccharum) of New England, legendary for their maple syrup production. But the red maple has another trick up its sleeve. In the fall, when the...
