It’s Greenwood Week in the Mortise & Tenon Apprenticeship Program, and our students from around the world have been felling trees with axes, riving, hewing, and carving their woodworking projects! In our Apprenticeship Forums, there’s been a lot of discussion about different greenwood projects that we can do. One of my favorites is making balsam whisks. I use balsam fir for these because it’s the most prevalent conifer in our woods, and because it’s super easy to find nice, symmetrical whorls. Five or six branchlets is ideal, and hunting for just the right whorl is half the fun. After finding a few good whorls, I bring them home, peel them, and bind them to dry a bit. This step helps...
Courtesy of the Eric Sloane Estate Wandering abandoned farmsteads and rebuilding stone walls (a favorite hobby), Sloane made more discoveries: old tools, tucked away in the corner of a hayloft or hanging on some forgotten peg. He found a bog-iron gouge that had been long hidden in a stone fence and marveled at the durability of the tool to survive rust-free for centuries. In these tools, he found his deepest connection with the past. Courtesy of the Eric Sloane Estate “When we consider tools, we are dealing with human benefactors of the most primary sort. Tools increase and vary human power; they economize human time, and they convert raw substances into valuable and useful products. So when we muse on...
A little over a week ago, woodworker and YouTube hero Rex Krueger kindly welcomed us onto his Patreon channel for a “Workbench Sessions” shop tour and Q&A. Mike and I had a great time sharing in the ins and outs of our woodshop and typical working arrangements. I think we hit all the essential features of the space, including our sole woodworking machine. (Can you guess what it is?) I’m sure those of you who regularly haunt the YouTube woodworking scene already know how successful Rex has been at championing human-centered woodworking. He builds all kinds of furniture, investigates antique pieces, and has even ventured down the green woodworking rabbit hole. Rex markets his instruction to beginners, and he...
As the years have gone on, the M&T team has developed a few traditions to celebrate the completion of each issue. I have a few of my own personal customs, but the one I look forward to most is the triple-date dinner party in the shop. Mike and Megan Updegraff, Mike and Grace Cox, and Julia and I get sitters for our kids so that we can feast, laugh, and play games late into the night. We always seem to discover some new adult beverages and each couple brings a favorite game. Card and board games, mostly. Some have been strategic and level-headed, but most are… well… raucous. My kids always razz me the next day saying they could hear...
My grandparents had a couple volumes of the Foxfire series on their bookshelf, and I was captivated by them from a young age. I remember thumbing through Foxfire 2 again and again, amazed at the knowledge captured in those pages that seemed so outside of my own experience. Spinning wool into yarn, wild plants as food and medicine, and a spring-pole lathe, of all things! Who ever heard of that? And this knowledge seemed alive, because it was often conveyed through direct quotes from the skilled individuals who still practiced those arts. Rather than a dry historical treatise, this information had vitality. There was magic here, and I was entranced. Fast forward an odd number of decades, when I found...
You might have to take a seat for this one; chairmaking, as it turns out, is quite a controversial thing. The recent issue of M&T (#11) features several authors holding up different takes on this ancient craft. How does an artisan work efficiently to be able to compete in the chair market? How does the use of a lathe open a can of worms that has led some to an industrial mentality? What does 20th-century management theory have to do with the way we pick up tools in our own shops today? All these questions and more are explored in this episode. SHOW NOTES: Issue Eleven Fredrick Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management Jögge Sundqvist in Issue Six Amy Umbel...
Our tools are extensions of our hands, and we would do well to choose them carefully. Without a finely tuned standard to employ in developing our skills, we are destined to flounder and to fail – never discovering the quality of work that is possible. Every craftsperson needs quality tools. And in a world that seems more and more obsessed with saving a few bucks and finagling free shipping, it would do us well to meet the people behind our purchases. Craftspeople especially long to see the faces behind their tools. Saws, Planes, and Scorps: Exceptional Woodworking Tools and Their Makers by David Heim features many of the makers who we are blessed to say are our personal friends. We’ve...
My wife Julia and I always wanted to build our own home with our own hands. From the beginning of our marriage we talked about raising and homeschooling our kids in the midst of the construction so that they would have the most practical and rich education possible. We hadn’t settled on style or details, but we knew we wanted a handmade home. As our life and interests developed, our vision crystallized to restore an old house that had fallen into disrepair. By that point, we had already purchased wooded land that we had fallen in love with (with a small manufactured home already on it), so we were in the market for a house that needed to move from...
Besides providing wood for making things and keeping warm, forests offer food. But these resources typically go unnoticed by human visitors today. This was not the case in centuries past, when many people relied on the regular, seasonal varieties of wild foods for nutrition. In fact, indigenous populations in North America utilized some 300 different species for food (compared with the 20 to 30 that the typical modern American eats). One of the most recognizable is the acorn. This part of New England primarily features the Northern red oak (Quercus rubra) as we’re at or beyond the northern limit of the white oaks. Red oaks typically have especially bountiful mast production every other year. Last year was productive, even with...
For those of you who haven’t been spending your evenings flipping through the latest issue, we thought we’d share a brief look inside. Issue Eleven is full of rich and interesting spreads. Between all the chairmakers (and their drawknives) and the constant emphasis on the ‘folk’ in folk craft, we’ve got lots of humanized woodworking going on. This issue truly is a celebration of human creativity over against the sterility of mass manufacture. The premium ($$$) paper we use is currently in short supply (what isn’t these days?), and so we had to purchase it in advance of the printing. Yes, this up-front cost stings a bit, but we’re resolved to keep with this stock because the final quality...
