Search Results for: little acorns

Shane Orion Wiechnik (pronounced “Wichnick” by some and “Vee-eck-nik” by others) first came to my notice through his posts on Instagram. I wasn’t sure whether he was Australian, or an American in Australia (he is both at this point, as an American who married an Australian citizen), but we cleared that up when he asked me to be a guest on “This Crafted World,” the podcast he runs with English furniture maker Harry T. Morris. From the first time we spoke, I was impressed by the breadth of his interest in artifacts and the activities of making, as well as restoration – possibly even more so than in the objects he produces — as well as the ambitious ways he has devised to further his skills and knowledge. “I’m very excited about processes and materials – how humans work and have worked,” he says, “how we experiment with materials around us to develop techniques, the innate material intelligence we develop as we work with things, and how objects and crafts tell us about history.”

In this age of “take a class, then teach it,” I was charmed by Shane’s modesty about his skills, training and pretty much everything else, especially in view of the high-caliber work he shares through Instagram. It took me a few years to feel worthy of identifying myself as a cabinetmaker, even after my first-year training in furniture making through the City & Guilds system in England, where I was living at the time, and a few years’ experience of work in others’ shops. So Shane’s humility resonated – though based on the work I’ve seen to date, he’s due for a recalibration of where he stands as a craftsman.

Shane is especially interested in how craft “enables” – how it empowers us to function more responsibly and fully – especially those of us who have grown up in cultures that take the making of things for granted, and have accustomed so many of us to call others for repair work we might otherwise do for ourselves. “It’s a grounding for me,” he says of this enabling. “When you’re a teenager, you’re being a hooligan and making a mess because the world already existed [and was there for you]. You’re not really a part of it. But learning historic craft and engaging with materials and seeing that the world came from something, through a variety of processes by people just like you, grounds me in a kind of reality and makes the world something I can care about more and understand.”

Early life

Shane was born in 1987 at Fort Wainwright, a military base in Alaska near where his father was posted. His dad recently retired after a career in the Army. His mother worked in administration at medical offices for much of the time he was growing up, though he adds that when he was in high school she took a position as an emergency medical technician, which he says was “probably her favorite-ever job.”

When Shane was a kid, his father repaired cars as had his own father, but he didn’t train Shane to do that kind of work. Shane’s introduction to tools came through his involvement in theater at high school, after which he studied film and television production at college. That introduced him to set building. “I found set building and prop work to be enthralling,” he says. “I mostly watched others work, and it seemed so creative and like there were no rules, but still you ended up with something beautiful. My interaction with tools was poor and without any respect and understanding for what they were doing. If it wasn’t working you just forced it more or blamed your strength. If I wasn’t able to screw something in, as a scrawny kid, I assumed it was because I was weak, even though I was using a power drill or driver. Always wanting to hide weakness,” he adds, in a bit of customary self-deprecation. “I was never smart enough to ask someone how to use the tool properly.”

“I was a very frustrating high school student,” he says, adding that when he asked a teacher for a letter of recommendation to submit with his college applications, she said she couldn’t. He was obviously very smart but did not apply himself. Determined to get a degree, he started at a community college in Lebanon, New Hampshire, then attended classes at Keane State in New Hampshire. His older brother, Damon, had moved to Sydney several years earlier, at the age of 18. While there on a visit, Shane met Andy, an Australian who would later become his spouse. He moved to Sydney at 21 and graduated from Edith Cowan University in Perth.  

When I asked what had inspired his interest in the history and culture of making – not to mention larger questions such as whether we are making too many things, instead of repairing those that still have decades of usefulness to offer – he credited his brother, who he says is quite well-read, especially in history and geography, and their father. “Through listening to them I hear a wide variety of perspectives,” Shane says. But “traveling to Australia had a huge impact” as well. “It’s one of those things, moving to another country, when you have to question everything. I’ve had a lot of those moments and dig down in them.” For example, he continues, it’s important to recognize that the world is made; it didn’t just spring into existence. “Growing up in the States, I had no connection to food or where it came from. My first girlfriend in high school lived on an old farm. They whipped cream – it didn’t come out of a can. It was a revelation to me.”

He also credits his academic education. Studying film and television entailed immersing himself in psychological and sociological theory, which introduced him to new ways of seeing.

Getting into Woodworking

After graduating with his bachelor’s degree, Shane moved to Boston in 2010 because his study visa expired. In many ways, he says, he had a strong friend group and connection in the States that he hadn’t felt while studying in Perth. He’d moved to Boston hoping that he could return to that life and build from it. “I had been thinking about returning to the States and reconnecting with friends and colleagues there,” he says. He took a job with an event décor company that handled props and sets for events. “The business was run by an art director and his wife who’d worked in Hollywood. If you were [in charge of] some sort of corporate event and wanted to have a Christmas party in Boston, they would do the décor.” They specialized in décor that was Boston-related, with lots of set-type props. “I mostly painted things then,” he laughs, referring to hours spent with a roller. What ignited his interest in woodworking was not the work alone, but two colleagues who became his friends. Ken Decost, he says, “was very particular, with high standards.” Sam Gabrielson “was very smart; he got very excited about solving problems.” Sam, who came from a furniture family with ties to the furniture industry in the States, was also very encouraging.

He worked on setting up a film business, “but the film business plans fell through. I struggled to find new work opportunities, and I barely saw the people I’d missed. I missed Andy a great deal and felt quite lost in what I was trying to do. Financial prospects also looked better in Australia, so Andy and I decided I should move back to Perth. I left the job to move to Western Australia and be with Andy. We got married in 2011 and brought me back on another visa until I could get permanent residency.”

Of the time after this, he says, “I wasted five years of my life.” He struggled to find any kind of creative work in Perth and ended up working at a company that programmed radios (walkie-talkies) for mine sites, a job he stuck with for two years, even though, he says, “I absolutely hated it.” Andy had bought a house that was in seriously compromised condition and required a lot of work, but Shane says, “I was not nearly as capable a person as I wanted to be. Andy and I are not those people you see on YouTube and Instagram who really ‘tackle’ the house. We just lived in a crappy house for years.”

By the age of 26 he’d had enough of the job he hated. In search of work that would engage his interests and capabilities, he moved to Sydney and volunteered at a nonprofit environmental charity dedicated to reducing landfill waste. One arm of the operation involved repairing furniture, to extend its useful life. “I had no training other than what I had learned from the two carpenters, Sam and Ken, at the event décor job.” The workforce included some old farmers, along with one guy, Mitch Lavender, who was a big fan of Lost Art Press; they would share what they knew with Shane. “Mitch was a fitter and turner/metalworker, who was…setting up his own forge in his backyard. He was a big influence in transferring the prop building knowledge into grounded craft knowledge.” Shane and his housemate, Robbie Karmel, “a wonderful artist,” regularly watched “The Woodwright’s Shop” in the evenings, then worked on projects in the backyard until their neighbors yelled at them for making noise.

“I’d quit my job in Perth and been unemployed for two years. That was a genuinely awful life for me. When I came to Sydney I wasn’t certain that I was capable of working. Nine to five was something I wasn’t sure I could do for the rest of my life. But to pay rent I would wander around the alleys of Newtown [in New South Wales]. In Australia there’s a lot of furniture on the side of the road. So I would go around and find stuff that needed work.” Then he took it to the place where he volunteered and sold it through them. His rent was $250 (Australian dollars) a week; he lived off about $50 of groceries per week. With his income from fixing up old furniture, he just about broke even.

Eventually the manager of the nonprofit created a bona fide job for Shane – fixing stuff for resale. This position grew into something much bigger. They had started in a tiny shed attached to a building, then expanded into offering classes in carpentry and furniture repair “based on my extremely limited knowledge,” he interjects emphatically. The furniture program moved to another building with five benches and more space; they also invested in some basic machines. Over the course of five years it became a full-time job for Shane, managing the woodworking department of the charity. He taught an introduction to woodworking four nights a week, as well as on weekends. He was working six days a week – managing volunteers, fixing furniture and making furniture with no formal training.

“When I was first starting to make a job at [the nonprofit], we were looking at products I could make and sell. I was opposed to anything that wouldn’t last and wouldn’t be used. As an example, the manager wanted to make those wine bottle holders that lean and balance. I figured no one actually uses those for any period of time and they just get thrown away so what the hell is the point and why would we spend energy making them. Our first product ended up being a basic wooden crate, like an apple crate. It allowed us to use all kinds of discarded timbers. Around that time I went back to the States and visited a friend for dinner. She and her friends were going around the table talking about these amazing developments in their respective impressive careers. Then she turns to me and says ‘so… tell me more about these crates’ and I felt so dreadfully embarrassed.” Pretty ironic, when you consider that wooden crates can be handsome and practical ways to move and store things, not to mention last for many decades, if not centuries.

By the time Shane reached age 30, he decided it was time to learn the proper ways to do what he’d been doing with no training. He applied to West Dean College to study furniture restoration/conservation and gave his employer seven months’ notice. “It was in the week before finding out [whether I’d been accepted] that I started to panic. I was already training my replacement, Luke Mitchell, by that point.” Fortunately, he got in.

Shane made his way to England and arrived at West Dean. “I did not feel like I was allowed to be in that building,” he says of the school’s august history and surroundings. “I felt very uncomfortable there for about a week, but the students are all amazing.” He showed up “reluctantly” to the welcoming party but started talking shop immediately and soon felt right at home. “Edward James, the founder of the school, was friends with Salvador Dali and had a surrealist history; it stopped feeling intimidating very quickly. The school has very high standards. I loved it.”

He relished his time in a workshop where he worked alongside others who were equally interested in learning – not just developing new woodworking and finishing techniques, but cultivating such important skills as how to judge the age of an object, which entails understanding how finishes and other materials change over time. In Sydney, he’d become obsessed with furniture conservation but “didn’t know anyone else who was as interested as I was.”

At West Dean, he continues, “We got to work on actual objects. We went to Vienna and got to go behind the scenes at a couple of museums to their workshops, [as well as to see a couple of schools]. We went into the conservation labs of the MAK, where we saw a guy working on a Roentgen cabinet.” The conservator who was working on it was “super excited”; he showed them everything. “It was a very cool trip. Coming from America and going to Australia” – both of which he recognizes as “young [countries] in terms of furniture work as I know it – i.e. with respect to European tastes and woodworking,” despite their ancient indigenous cultures – “going to work on stuff in England and going across Europe to see the variety of high-end pieces really was mind blowing. But also weird, because I knew that I was probably going to come back to Sydney and work at my environmental charity.”

Shane was at West Dean for one year, as that was all he could afford. Echoing others who have had formal training, he adds, “As much as you put in, you’d get out of it.”

Another benefit of his time at West Dean is that he met fellow student Harry T. Morris, who was in the furniture making program. More on that later.

In 2019, Shane returned to Sydney. He picked up some work at the charity – “a very strange experience,” he notes, especially after his time at West Dean. He also started to work with a restorer who had studied at West Dean 40 years before. Shane tried to start his own business, but as has been the case for many of us, that didn’t work out.

Intent on further expanding his skills, as well as his appreciation for aspects of craft besides making things, he contacted International Conservation Services, Australia’s largest team of private conservators. The organization’s CEO had also been trained at West Dean. Shane visited the organization’s workshop; they had one furniture conservator, Oliver Hull, who is English and had worked there alone for the four years prior. They asked Shane if he’d like to join Oliver, and he started doing three or four days a week in the furniture conservation department. Since then he has added work for conservator John Gubbings, in addition to continuing his part-time work for what is now known as The Bower Reuse and Repair Centre, the nonprofit devoted to reducing waste. He worked there for 1-1/2 years and is looking into possibilities to help them further.

The Bigger Picture

As students at West Dean, Shane and Harry “clicked early on,” even though Harry is 12 years younger. They’d discuss their respective projects and soon found themselves “on the same wavelength about so many things.” Many nights they talked until 2 a.m., “often while playing cribbage.” Harry found a lot of value in the conversations and wanted to keep them up after graduation. Hence the idea of the podcast, “This Crafted World”. They have also kept up their friendship – in 2019 they traveled to Japan, where they took a course in Japanese carpentry that Shane considers foundational to his current outlook and practice. The course began with an entire week of sharpening. To make the trip affordable, the two shared a living space. “I was sleeping on the floor,” says Shane, “because it’s Japan, and it’s expensive there.”

Their podcasts vary broadly, depending on who’s involved. While topics range from how the two of them work in their own daily lives and what craft means to them, they also explore larger dimensions of making, such as how to deal with “making for making’s sake.” As Shane puts it, “There’s already too much stuff!” – a view too rarely heard amid the current celebration of all things making. In their podcast, they leave discussion of nuts and bolts to others and focus on ideas. “We thought if there was anything we could add to the conversation, it would be the thoughts we both had about the world. As we grow and develop, anything that pops into our heads we turn into a subject and make a podcast.” It may sound random, but it’s not; I was blown away by the caliber of questions they asked in the podcast we did together, weirdly and serendipitously based on Shane’s discovery of “Historic Preservation in Indiana: Essays from the Field,” a book I’d put together and edited for the Indiana University Press about a decade ago.

Next Steps

Intent on expanding and refining his skills, as well as his exposure to other cultures and their methods of making and restoring, Shane is working on a “journeyman trip” of his own design, “provided that the world opens up.” Once again, he has given a generous seven months’ notice to his present employers. “There’s so much I don’t know how to do. Because I’ve found this [work] so late, I feel I need to rapidly catch up.” Next year he hopes to spend three months in the eastern United States, then spend some time in Europe, working in conservation and craft workshops for a minimum of two weeks each. So far, he has arrangements with shops in Virginia, New York and Boston, and is trying to arrange for a month in Netherlands, then France and the United Kingdom, in addition to Italy (and ideally also elsewhere). Again, to make this investment in his education more affordable – especially as he’s aware that he may not be able to get paid for his work in other countries due to the financial constraints at many shops, not to mention certain countries’ prohibition against non-citizens being paid for work – he is planning the trip around friends and craftspeople who can put him up in their homes.

“The journeyman thing doesn’t exist in this field,” he notes, adding that he applied for a George Alexander Fellowship through the International Specialist Skills Institute, which he just learned he has been granted. “In Australia we get a lot of stuff from different places,” he said, referring especially to antiques for restoration. The journeyman trip will help familiarize him with international differences, as well as subtleties in period and style, and so help him become a better restorer. He’s also keen to see how different people work. Beyond his interest in building his own skills, he would like to help others. “Every little thing I pick up, or every little thing I get better at, is something I can share with others. If I get better at that work, it informs another engagement with the world, whether teaching or writing or an Instagram post or the podcast. That makes everything feel so much more worth it.”

You can find the podcast we did together, “Not Capital-I Important,” here.

— Nancy Hiller, author of “Kitchen Think” and “Making Things Work.” Read more of Nancy Hiller’s profiles, which we call “Little Acorns,” via this link.

Several weeks ago, John Scott, a woodworker friend and real-life brain surgeon, suggested that Betty Scarpino would make a good profile for this series. “Don’t know if you know Betty,” he wrote, “but I’ll place her for nomination in your series! She’s a fantastic woodturner in Indianapolis, with pieces in museums all over the country.”

As it happened, I did know of Betty; she’d been in my sights since the early ’90s, though we hadn’t met or even corresponded. Every so often I came across her name as a woodturner.

“Betty is super!” John wrote back, adding, “Susan and I have a couple of her pieces that we purchased from her when she had a small showing in her house many years ago, before she was represented in galleries. I almost choke when I see what her pieces sell for now!”

I was interested in Betty not only as a highly skilled woodworker, but also as a woman who has been practicing her craft for decades while raising two sons, for some of that time as a single mother. But what really got me hooked was her surprising statement that while she’s best known for turning, her great love is carving.

We spoke on a Saturday morning in March. Betty was in her garden in Indianapolis with Diesel, her son Dan’s chocolate Labrador, who’s under her care while Dan hikes the Arizona National Scenic Trail. With springtime birdsong in the background, she told me she was getting ready to deliver a work titled Gentle Impressions to the Indiana Artists Club exhibition at Newfields (formerly the Indianapolis Museum of Art) later in the day. The juried show had serious spatial limitations, which made it a challenge to decide which piece to submit. Betty’s small sculpture was awarded second place by the jury.  

Betty has shown her work in many galleries around the country. A quick look at her website reveals an eye-popping list of museums that hold her work in their permanent collections, among them the Renwick Gallery, the Yale University Art Museum, the Los Angeles County Art Museum, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Peabody Essex Museum and Philadelphia’s Center for Art in Wood – an impressive achievement for an artist. No wonder her work is valued more highly today than it was early in her career. Until the last 10 years, Betty was far better known at the national level than in her adopted state of Indiana.

Early Life

The second of four sisters, Betty was born in Wenatchee, Wash., in 1949. Her mother worked at home full-time; her father was an entrepreneur who ran a pawn brokerage and sold sporting goods through stores in southern Idaho and Kalispell, Mont. Because her family moved often, she describes where she grew up as no single location, but “all over the Pacific Northwest.” She attended five different schools in third grade alone; by the time her parents celebrated the 25th anniversary of their marriage, they had moved their family 25 times.

Betty married Phil Scarpino in 1971. Having spent two years in the army during the 1970s, Phil jumped at the opportunity to attend graduate school. They were living in Columbia, Missouri, where Betty worked full-time as a computer operator and was also training to program computers.

Phil’s evenings were always busy with school, so Betty decided to enroll in a night class. The only one available was woodworking; she signed up. Soon, she was so taken with the work that she quit her job to attend classes full-time. She graduated in 1982 with a degree in industrial arts, the curriculum for which included training in furniture making and the use of woodworking machinery. She had basic instruction on the lathe, turning a bowl and the pedestal for a table, but after that, she learned by doing.

During her time in college, Betty also took classes in the art department. She wanted to carve wood sculptures. After graduation, she considered renting a shop where she could build furniture, but soon discovered that renting a workspace would not be practical, especially after she had her first son, Sam, at the age of 34. So instead of investing in a shop, she bought a lathe. The American Association of Woodturners had started up in 1986, “a vibrant, active, inclusive organization that it was really easy to plug into,” she says. Betty edited their journal from 1990-1993, then started to make more of her own pieces, and quickly became known in the turning field.

Phil is a faculty member at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis in American history and historic preservation. His job brought them to Indianapolis in 1986; their second son, Dan, was born there.

After Betty and Phil divorced in 2000, Betty continued to piece together an income from a variety of sources. She sold her turnings; she wrote a regular column about turning for Woodworker’s Journal for three years; for six years she was editor of theAmerican Woodturner Journal. She also made money – good money – from turning demonstrations and teaching, and has taught at Arrowmont and Anderson Ranch, to name just a couple well-regarded schools.

What Does ‘Round’ Mean?

“I just made regular bowls to start with, like everybody else,” Betty says. But before long, she began to adorn her bowls with carving. Her sculpting instructor at the University of Missouri had had a lathe in the back room of the art department; she talked with him about using the lathe to make sculpture. “I was 25 when I first went to an art museum!” she says. “I knew nothing.” Her instructor had always said, “’Round objects turned on a lathe are not interesting,’” so in her curious, boundary-pushing way, Betty decided to explore “the vast potential of what resides within ‘round’ objects,” in part by “deconstructing lathe-turned objects.” She’d turn a disc, cut it apart, do a bit of carving and explore what lay beneath the surface. She also appreciates the metaphorical dimensions of this technique, comparing the process of exploration and refinement to that of what some might call soul work. “We’re always working on ourselves, our lives,” she says. “My sculpture’s like that. I turn a disc, then cut it apart, then reconstruct that in a way that’s lifelike and energizing and satisfying.”

Making a Living as an Artist

Collectors of art in wood were key to Betty’s livelihood and creative development in the 1990s and aughts. “As soon as I made something, it sold,” she says. Betty increasingly worked on sculptures that had nothing to do with turning. “That’s really where my interest has been all along,” she points out. “Until then, I never had the opportunity to explore that kind of work fully. When you have 20 people buying things because they’re turned… I just plugged into that and made money. I enjoyed it. That’s why I ended up becoming known as a woodturner when really that’s not my main interest.”

Considering that her main interest is carving, it comes as a surprise to hear she didn’t study it at university. Her knowledge about the field was far more basic: “I knew that you used a gouge and a mallet.” Betty leapt right in, learning along the way. Today she carves primarily with power tools and generally prefers reciprocating tools to rotary carvers, “because I can find the line better,” she says. Her favorite is an Automach reciprocating carver; she also uses Arbortech tools.

Betty has been through some real twists and turns as she has worked to support herself as a woodturner and sculptor. “Galleries used to exist,” she says bluntly, alluding to the devastating effects on brick-and-mortar-based businesses due to the Great Recession, and more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. She used to be associated with several galleries that sold artists’ work around the country, but many have closed. Today, exhibits such as the one at Newfields provide visibility. She uses her website to sell existing works and garner new commissions. She also appreciates the value of plain old word-of-mouth. “Along the way, I have had two very generous women patrons who have helped me,” she says. The broader woodworking field has benefited from the Windgate Foundation, which supports the teaching of craft and art in many ways, such as donations to the Center for Art in Wood, a new dorm at Arrowmont School for Arts and Crafts and support of woodturning at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis.

Although Betty’s work is held by prestigious museums, many sculptures spend much of their time in storage and are only brought out for exhibit in the occasional show. Betty’s work is labor-intensive, so her limited output constrains marketing through galleries.  

“If you’re a craftsperson you can market your work in a craft store or sell it online. There are also craft fairs, etsy, etc. But my work doesn’t sell well in those venues,” says Betty. Today, her work ranges in price from $3,000 to $12,000 – art-world prices that demand a specific marketing niche or connecting with just the right buyer.

Retirement is not on Betty’s radar. She intends to be carving a sculpture on the day she dies. Now that she has the time and resources to devote to carving, without having to worry about sales, she is excited to see her work evolving to in-the-round sculpture. Betty has come full circle to her first love: carving wood.

– Nancy Hiller, author of “Kitchen Think” and “Making Things Work”

When Wilbur Pan was doing his pediatric residency at Children’s Medical Center/University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, he and his colleagues developed a routine. Each Saturday, when they were on call, they’d go through their rounds as swiftly as possible so that the residents who were on call the previous night, and any patients who could be discharged, could go home – as Wilbur notes, no one sleeps well at the hospital, and that includes children.

They were usually done with rounds by lunchtime. Saturday afternoons were generally quiet – they got few kids in the Emergency Room. So Wilbur and his colleagues would “sit around in the residents’ lounge watching college football,” he says.

After the football Wilbur would grab the remote control and switch the TV to PBS “to watch Norm or Roy.” Because they watched “The New Yankee Workshop” or “The Woodwright’s Shop” every Saturday afternoon, they quickly figured out how the episodes typically progressed. At some point during any given episode of “The New Yankee Workshop,” Wilbur recalls, “one of us would say, ‘Hey, I bet Norm’s going to get the dado stack.’ And then Norm would say, ‘I’m going to get the dado stack!’ and we would all high-five each other.” Ironically, he goes on, “none of us did any woodworking.”

What a bunch of geeks.

Today, Wilbur does as much woodworking as he can. He started – or more precisely, started back up – around 2006, after he and his wife, Mary, bought a house in East Brunswick, N.J. After living in apartments for most of his life, it was the first time since high school, when he took a shop class that taught him to make a bellows (which his parents still use), that he had a place to do woodworking at home.

Wilbur was born in Lafayette, Ind., in 1964. His parents had emigrated from China to Taiwan in the late 1940s, and from Taiwan to the U.S. in the late 1950s. His father, Jaming, completed a master’s in physics, eventually completing a Ph.D. in electrical engineering as well; his mother, Clara, has a master’s in accounting. They met in Chicago, then made their home in Homewood-Flossmoor, a suburban area south of the city.  Dr. Pan senior taught at Purdue University-Calumet, in Hammond, Ind., just over the state border; it was less than a half-hour commute, which gave the family the best of both worlds: steady employment, while continuing to live close to the city they loved.

When Wilbur was a boy, his father built a set of bookcases for their home, a project that Wilbur found inspiring. You could turn some bit of creative imagination into practical, handsome objects for the family? Pretty amazing, when you think about it.

Wilbur attended Northwestern University, then graduated with an M.D./Ph.D. from the University of Illinois College of Medicine in 1994. After completing his pediatrics residency in Dallas, he did a fellowship in pediatric hematology/oncology at Children’s Memorial Hospital/Northwestern University Medical School back in Chicago. Bart Kamen, an attending physician he’d worked with in Dallas, happened to get in touch one day; he asked whether Wilbur might be interested in caring for children with brain tumors…in New Jersey. On a lark, says Wilbur, he flew to New Jersey for the interview; on the way back, he had a job offer – the hospital wanted him to build a pediatric brain tumor program from scratch.

By this time, Wilbur and Mary, a Chicago native, had married. They moved to New Jersey with a mutual understanding that they could always move back to Chicago if the East Coast didn’t feel like home. That was 21 years ago; they’re still in New Jersey.

His shop is in the basement of their house, which was built in the 1940s. On moving in, they learned that their neighbor Marc was an excellent woodworker who had built the kitchen in his family’s house, as well as most of their furniture. Wilbur credits Marc with showing him the difference between a finely sharpened tool (specifically, it was a handplane) and one that…well…is not.

Having lived next door for many years, Marc was able to share what he knew about the Pans’ new-to-them house. The father in the previous family had used part of the basement as a woodshop – one wall still had the painted outlines of tools he’d hung there. Marc recalled that after spate of noisy banging around, his former neighbor emerged from the basement with a boat.

In around 2006, Mary thought a gift certificate to a woodworking class would make a good present for her husband. Marc referred her to an adult education program run by their county’s community college. The teacher, Mike Zaslav, had trained at the College of the Redwoods. Wilbur signed up.

“I go to the first class and Mike spends the whole time teaching us how to sharpen a chisel,” Wilbur reports. Wilbur was hooked. He learned how to sharpen and picked up the basics of working with power tools. He made his first dovetail joint, edge-glued boards together and made his first mortise and tenon.

Beyond that course, his training as a woodworker has been less formal. “It was a lot of me messing around and reading, and trying to figure out how things work.”

When Wilbur was first getting started in his 10’ x 20’ basement shop, he understood that he’d be working with limited space. He had to choose between a table saw and a band saw – the shop was too small to accommodate both. He chose the bandsaw. Besides its small size, his shop’s location beneath the family living space led him to minimize the production of fine-particle dust, which the HVAC system would spread around the house; both of their kids were young, and Wilbut knew the kind of damage dust can do to children’s lungs. Hand tools would be better for everyone.

Then Wilbur learned about Japanese hand tools. So many woodworkers were crazy about them and considered them superior to Western tools. He couldn’t figure out why they had the cutting properties they did, so he starting researching the question through practice, as well as reading. He was intrigued, as a woodworker, as a scientist and as an American of Chinese descent. “Probably the whole Asian thing kicked in and it was easy for me to get interested in them,” he suggests (I imagine with a wink).

His father had taught him to look at things from the perspectives of science and reasoning, so Wilbur was not about to accept that Japanese tools were superior without some systematic investigation through reading, reasoning and hands-on research. “Japanese woodworkers have the same priorities as Western woodworkers,” Wilbur says. “They have sharp pieces of metal that they use to shape wood so they can build things, and they want to do things as efficiently as possible. If that was true, then the tools must be similar,” he inferred, adding “at least, in certain ways.”

He decided to focus on how the tools were similar instead of how they were different. Based on his research to date, he says, “If there is a divide, it’s not an East-West thing but a pre-industrial versus industrial thing,” He shared what he learned along the way through his blog, articles, an “End Grain” essay for Popular Woodworking Magazine and presentations at Woodworking in America. It was at Woodworking in America that Wilbur first came to my attention.

“It’s true that there are obvious differences between Japanese and modern Western hand tools,” Wilbur acknowledges. “But if one looks at pre-industrial Western hand tools, when blacksmiths were making chisels and plane blades, there are similarities that stand out. Chisels and plane blades were made by forge-welding a hard piece of steel to a softer piece of steel. And both chisels and plane blades were made in a way so that there was some concavity to the back, for ease of sharpening.

“My approach is that I want to present a straightforward explanation of how to use Japanese tools. I try to stay away from the Zen stuff. I go on the assumption that the audience’s workshop is your typical hobbyist workshop in the U.S.; I’m not expecting people to work on the floor. The things I teach are centered on your typical woodworking shop – I have a typical workbench, a band saw and a drill press.”

What about Chinese tools, I wonder? After all, they would be more directly related to Wilbur’s cultural heritage. “For woodworkers, China has a tradition that may be more interesting to woodworkers interested in furniture making,” he replies. “There’s tansu [in traditional Japanese woodworking], but people in Japan didn’t have chairs and tables for the most part. They sat on the floor.

“China had furniture you’d recognize, made with tropical hardwood species – lots of rosewood and ebony. The joinery is very intricate; decoration can be very elaborate. But not much is known about the tools that Chinese woodworkers used.”

He attributes the differences between what’s known about Japanese and Chinese tools partially to differences between the two cultures in how they think about objects. “I think there’s a case to be made that in Japan, objects seem to be fetishized. There seems to be this reverence for objects that doesn’t exist to the same extent in China.”

For example, in Japan, much attention has long been paid to samurai swords. China has a similar tradition with respect to swords, but in China, swords occupy a less-central position when it comes to symbolic appeal. “In a Chinese movie a warrior may have his sword that’s a family heirloom. And then he loses or breaks his sword in a battle,” Wilbur has noticed. “He picks up something else, like a chair, and fights with that.” In Japanese films, the warrior often seems lost without his sword.

In China, he says, tools were historically valued in instrumental terms: They got the job done. The Cultural Revolution resulted in the loss of much traditional knowledge; such information is still hard to come by, especially for those who are not based in China. “It’s coming back, though,” he says, mentioning a school that teaches traditional techniques for carving with hand tools. But today, he notes, this school also teaches students how to carve by CNC, because they recognize it’s a means to produce furniture that’s affordable to vastly more people.

Wilbur values woodworking as a counterpoint to his daily work. He still cares for patients, although now indirectly as a director of breast cancer clinical trials for the pharmaceutical company Merck; he left pediatric oncology after 18 years on faculty at the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey and Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. But when it comes to his medical work beyond basic physical exams, it’s very hands-off. He spends “a lot of time in front of a computer.” As a result, he says, “woodworking fills this urge to be able to create something physical and scratches an itch I think a lot of people have.”

That said, he notes that while “a lot of things in medicine are done with protocols and algorithms, there is a lot of creativity in medicine because there’s always the patient that comes along and doesn’t fit any protocol. So you have to figure out how to take care of that patient. Plus, the process of diagnosis is a creative act, because there’s a puzzle you’re solving.”

He ends with a nice metaphor. Several years ago he made a joined box (pictured above), “a completely American form going back to the late 1700s in the Philadelphia area.” The one he made “looks just like an old one.” But he made it entirely with Japanese tools.

“It doesn’t matter what part of the world your tradition comes from,” he concludes. “There are more similarities than differences than you might think.”

– Nancy Hiller, author of “Kitchen Think” and “Making Things Work”

Claudia Kinmonth is a woodworker and scholar who has focused her research and writing on the vernacular furnishings of rural Irish homes, primarily those belonging to people of little means. One ironic result is that much, though by no means all, of the work she studies is the kind that many a furniture maker would be embarrassed to have in his or her shop. Simple forms, cobbled together by people with no formal training, typically for their own use, these dressers, benches, tables and chairs often incorporate found and salvaged materials of the distinctly non-precious variety.

With a résumé that includes restoring antiques for dealers in London and training at such august institutions as the London College of Furniture and the Royal College of Art, in addition to employment as a researcher at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Claudia’s dedication to documenting the furnishings of impoverished people in rural Ireland makes her something of a maverick. So when Megan Fitzpatrick suggested I interview Claudia for this blog, I leapt at the chance.

Claudia began studying Irish vernacular furnishings in the 1980s, when she recognized the subject had been, in her words, totally neglected. “I knew it was interesting, because I’d spent a lot of my life coming [to Ireland] on holiday,” she says. Her father was Irish, and holidays meant visiting his parents and extended family who lived in County Cork. She turned the subject into her master’s thesis, “Irish Vernacular Furniture, 1840-1940: A Neglected Aspect of the History of Design,” on which she based her book “Irish Country Furniture 1700-1950,” which was published in 1993 by the Yale University Press. The book won several awards, among them the American Conference for Irish Studies Book Prize, the Katharine Briggs Award for Folklore and also the Royal College of Art’s Fleur Cowles Award for Excellence, which allowed her to return to Ireland for another year of field study.

Claudia was born in London. After completing high school and taking A-Level exams in geography, botany and art, she decided to take some time off from academic study to explore other interests. Early on, she took a job with an antiques dealer whose restorer taught her a lot about furniture restoration. She enjoyed the work and went on to work for another dealer, this time an Irishman. In part, she credits her English grandmother for her growing interest in art and decorative arts; in Claudia’s words, “her attention to really lovely things that she had in her house in England rubbed off on me.”

After making her living in furniture restoration for six years, she decided she wanted to learn more about furniture and applied to the London College of Furniture, where she did a two-year furniture conservation and restoration Higher National Diploma course. Both practical and academic, the training introduced her to the history of furniture, and beyond that, the history of design. It was, she says, “a fantastic course” with “very, very good craftsmanship being taught” by a multi-talented Scotsman named Leslie Charteris, and included such techniques as marquetry, as well as carving and gilding. As a student there, she made pieces that she would never otherwise have had an opportunity to make.

Next, she studied for an M.A. in Design History in a joint course through the Royal College of Art and Victoria & Albert Museum. Explaining what drew her to study vernacular furniture, she says that during her time at the Royal College of Art she “saw many good scholars revisiting and revising old subjects. For example, Charles Rennie Mackintosh – you could fill a room with books about that designer! I thought to myself, ‘there must be subjects that need to be addressed that haven’t been’ – I wanted to do original research in a field that needed research. Having family in Ireland, it was not that great a leap to spend time in Ireland doing field work.”

The field work involved “driving around looking for old houses that had not been modernized, then knocking on doors and asking people if they would let me look at their furniture. I soon learned that if I did not have a camera around my neck and a notebook in my hand, people wouldn’t let me in.”

Those who did open the door “were cautiously hospitable,” she says. Once she got to know them, they progressed from hospitable to helpful. Sometimes she knocked on eight doors in a day and only ended up with one that was useful to her research. She spent several months on the road, visiting every county. As it turns out, the homes of poor people are often better-preserved examples of how people used to live than those of people with money, because buying furniture and remodeling houses requires disposable income. Factor in the slow adoption of modern conveniences such as television (and later, computers with internet access to all sorts of products and services for sale) by more conservative, low-income residents of rural areas and you have a good recipe for turning up real gems of vernacular work. As Claudia puts it, “Sometimes we found the most amazing treasure troves in the most primitive houses. We looked for houses with elderly people who might never have changed anything.”

Seeking information about the furniture from the people who lived with it was the best way to learn, even if it only started her on a sometimes-complex path to discovering more. “Vernacular furniture rarely comes with any documentation,” she explains. “But if someone can say ‘we can remember the name of the maker,’ you can look up the parish records” or consult other types of records to come close to a date.

In 1987 her work led her to Seamus Kirwan, the now-late owner of a property known as Mayglass. Kirwan lived as his parents had, with no electricity or running water.

“His kitchen had an earthen floor and an open fire.” Claudia says. “He’d never married, so he had never had a catalyst for change, so he stayed the way he’d always been since he inherited the house from his parents.” She photographed all sorts of details. “He was full of stories about the things in his house!” she exclaims. After he passed away, the place was restored, with a re-thatched roof – “sanitized, in a way,” she adds, though the restoration has only enhanced the value of her documentation of what was there before: “Those photographs, for me, are unrepeatably marvelous and [get] better with age.”

She completed her master’s thesis and graduated in 1988. She went on to work as a researcher in the Department of Furniture and Woodwork at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. By this point she was well-versed in furniture-making techniques, as well as restoration, in contrast to the majority of her colleagues in that department at the V&A, who came from academic perspectives, devoid of hands-on workshop experience. Although the museum had a conservation department, she sums up the closeness between it and her own department by noting that it took nearly 20 minutes to walk from one to the other. “They really were worlds apart.” On an academic roll, she followed with a doctorate in Irish vernacular furniture, which she pursued remotely through the Teesside University while teaching academic and practical subjects as a Senior Research Fellow at Buckinghamshire College of Higher Education (now Buckinghamshire New University). In 2018 she was inducted as a member of the Royal Irish Academy for her publications on Irish art and country furniture, together with the exhibitions; hence the letters after her name, “MRIA.”

Claudia’s studies of vernacular furniture are informed by research in Irish poetry, travel journals, paintings and engravings of interiors, probate inventories, terminology, etymology and sometimes-vague links with grand aristocratic houses, where furniture makers would have observed “high fashion” that trickled down to work produced in, and for, farmhouses. A set of mahogany dining chairs made for a grand house often inspired copies in painted pine.

At this point, what interests her most is the frugality and ingenuity of her Irish ancestors. “They were terribly poor,” she says, “and had hardly any timber – Ireland is one of the most deforested nations in Europe. Since the 18^th century, it has had hardly any trees. It was hard for poor people to get hold of enough wood, so they were ‘cleverly economical.’ They recycled a lot, as well. Now we can look back and say what they were doing then we now call environmental awareness and sustainability.” To them, however, making thorough use of every resource “was intuitive, out of necessity.”

One source of materials for Irish furniture was lumber from shipwrecks on the coast; a lot of flotsam, or wreckage, washed up on shore. A sure way to ascertain that material came from a shipwreck is by finding marine shipworm (or Teredo) bore holes – for example, in the backs of drawers. “No wood borers in Britain or Ireland make that distinctive kind of bore hole,” she points out. “People would try to disguise it, which is why you have to examine furniture really carefully for the holes.”

Inland, people repurposed everyday objects such as crates, one excellent example being butter boxes – simple crates with a distinct tapered shape that were originally made to transport butter. People made them into sewing boxes, or seats with hinged lids. She compares this to the use of flour bags in the U.S., which were often put to other uses. The same occurred in Ireland, where people of little means used flour bags in plenty of ingenious ways, sometimes to line kitchen ceilings under thatched roofs, often whitewashing them to make the kitchen bright and clean.

In addition to her scholarship in vernacular furnishings, Claudia is an art historian. “I’ve always tried to be interdisciplinary,” she says, explaining the diversity of her interests. Her second book, “Irish Rural Interiors in Art” (Yale University Press, 2006), concentrates on historic interiors, based on the work of artists who went into Irish farmhouses and painted what they saw. The common thread uniting the interiors is the artwork – paintings and illustrations done of farmhouse interiors. In conjunction with the publication of this book she organized three exhibitions of the paintings and furniture from these houses – one at the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery in Cork; one at the national gallery in Dublin; and one at Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art in 2012 called “Rural Ireland: The Inside Story.”

Claudia and her husband, Michael Duerden, moved from London to their present home in County Cork – comparatively “in the middle of nowhere” – in 1999, after the birth of their first son. Michael is a jeweler who also teaches jewelry making; his workshop is right next to her study. Their sons are 24 and 21; both are at universities in Ireland, one studying architecture, the other aircraft maintenance and airworthiness engineering, along with the more esoteric-sounding subject of aviation finance.

How does this scholar of rural Irish domestic life pay the bills? She pieces together a living from a variety of work. She teaches in Irish universities as a freelance lecturer, work she loves because “the most exciting part for me is to present my research to an audience.” She also curates exhibitions for museums. Thanks to her background in antique restoration and conservation, she works as a conservation consultant, advising museums on all sorts of practical matters; her main job, currently, is at the Ulster Folk Museum in Belfast, where she is the research curator for domestic life. The Ulster Folk Museum has a collection of Irish farmhouses; she goes into each and reauthenticates it, advising others as to whether a kitchen dresser is authentically “dressed,” the chairs are right for the house (not to mention sufficiently robust for visitors to use) and so on. The Ulster Folk Museum has been going since the 1960s. “They have the most incredible stores, with thousands and thousands of objects,” she says – a wealth of objects that, when appropriate, enables her to recommend swapping out one piece for another that might better reflect the history of the particular farm.

Claudia’s latest book, “Irish Country Furniture and Furnishings 1700-2000” (Cork University Press, 2020) sold out its initial printing of 3,000 copies in the three weeks before Christmas, 2020. It has 450 pictures, the majority photographed by the author, who provides measurements to help craftspeople. Furthermore, the book is as big as she wanted it to be, a detail that will not be lost on other authors – she didn’t want the book to be published in two volumes. Publishing such an extensive study during a pandemic has turned out to be a blessing in disguise; making the most of what you have on hand is a timely subject, which prompted one reviewer to call the volume “a handbook for woodworkers’ inspiration during lockdown.”

A few more examples of vernacular furniture follow.

— Nancy Hiller, author of “Making Things Work” and “Kitchen Think.”

Around 2012 I was building some cabinets into a sitting room off my clients’ kitchen when Paul, a member of the general contractor’s crew, struck up a conversation. “I just saw this amazing video about bog oak,” he said. “There’s this guy in England digging up 4,000-year-old trees and using them for furniture. I bet you know him.”

Know him? I had never even heard of bog oak and certainly had no idea who Paul might be talking about. That night I Googled “bog oak and furniture UK.” Up popped a link to an article by Derek Jones published in Furniture & Cabinetmaking magazine, on the website of Adamson & Low.

It was one of those small-world moments in which time and space collapse. Here I was, working in rural Indiana, suddenly transported back more than 30 years to the woodworking shop at the Isle of Ely College in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, where Hamish Low was a fellow student in a City & Guilds furniture making course. It was no surprise that Hamish had distinguished himself in the field – he’d been the most impressive student in our cohort. The culture of that classroom was brutal, with intense competition and merciless teasing; I used to swear that someday people would brag about their “low quality” furniture. I knew he’d gone on to train at West Dean, then worked for the Edward Barnsley Workshop. But beyond that, his adult life was a mystery to me. So I was interested to read that he had partnered with Nicola Adamson to build a business and a family, and was involved in pioneering work.

Nicola Adamson and Hamish Low met in 1989 when she was a student in the two-year residential program at the John Makepeace School of Craftsmanship in Wood at Parnham House. Hamish was employed in Makepeace’s workshops as one of the craftsmen who turned the renowned designer’s drawings into three-dimensional furniture.

Makepeace wasn’t keen on having students mix with his cabinetmakers – students who were being trained in business and design might try to make off with an experienced cabinetmaker, robbing Makepeace of an invaluable member of his workforce. “Every student wanted a cabinetmaker to make their designs,” says Hamish, adding, “I was just head-hunted [by Nicola] for my cabinetmaking skills. Plus, Nicola had a whole load of machinery, so that was obviously part of her dowry! So it was basically a marriage of convenience.” Same old humor, even after three decades.

“I had started setting up a workshop in Kent,” Nicola adds. She planned to use the shop herself following her time at Parnham. For a couple of years, while she and Hamish had a long-distance relationship, she rented bench space to another student, until the couple started working together in 1992. “Business and I are just hopeless,” Hamish says. “Nicola has always run the business. Nicola is also more of a designer, so I was really shackled to the bench.” Another bit of hyperbole. They worked together until the birth of their first child, Hazel, in 1996. 

Nicola has always lived in Kent, southeast of London. Her father was a motor engineer. Her mother was a housewife who also worked from home making lampshades and curtains commercially. In other words, “both [parents were] quite practical.” She went to the local comprehensive school, then to art college for two years before leaving for Parnham.

Initially, their work came by word of mouth. They did whatever clients wanted – furniture, as well as a few kitchens. One kitchen stands out – the cabinets were in burr oak, and the job was for an oast house. Oast houses are a traditional Kentish architectural form, built to dry hops for brewing beer. In recent decades, they’ve become popular for conversion to residential use. Circular in form, their roofs rise to a point, so anything built-in must be custom-designed. After Hamish and Nicola did that kitchen, the oast house clients called them back for a new commission each year. Gradually those clients’ friends began to hire them, as well. When clients had children, they wanted beds and desks “and stuff to go on uneven floors of Kentish barn houses,” Nicola adds. So while their clients were few in number, they had multiple commissions from each one.

“You only need one customer, one client, and if you’re successful they recommend you,” says Hamish. “It just seemed to snowball. We’ve always had a year’s work booked up ahead of us. When you work to commission, everything is always a compromise because [the clients are] paying the bill. You can’t really progress from that unless you make what you want and exhibit it. But it’s in your clients’ interest [for you to move on to your own work]. People are speculating on you more. You try to break into the art market.”

Early on, kitchens paid for everything. “It was a lot of work for two people,” Nicola says. “We designed it, made it, installed it, did all the plumbing and electrical; it was all-consuming.”

“People would spend a fortune on their kitchens,” notes Hamish, “and yet something that would become a family heirloom and become collectible, they didn’t seem to value it in the same way.”

Although the income from kitchens was good, they switched to freestanding furniture when their children were young – their son, Archie, was born in 2001. “The last [kitchen] we did, Archie was born in the middle of Hamish installing it,” says Nicola. Both children were born at home. “I had to call the client to say ‘I think Hamish ought to come home.’”

“It was just easier,” Hamish says, prompting Nicola to add, “I could just get down from the drawing board!”

Since the beginning of their partnership, they’ve focused on using native hardwoods that would otherwise be wasted. Some of the timber came from their clients’ own trees. “We were quite unusual in that we would do everything, from tree to chair,” Hamish says. The client would be engaged in the entire process. “That was quite interesting to them; a lot of it is very old, established country tradition, and yet a lot of it was sophisticated technology.”

For example, he explains, air drying of oak has been done the same way for centuries. “It’s a very direct process.” But the “technology” would come from the new mills, such as Wood-Mizers. “We would use technology alongside established traditional approaches to drying timber. You start with a huge, sopping-wet liability and you turn it into a plank of wood. Everything we make starts with a plank of wood. It becomes the most usable, fantastic thing. And there’s a lot of technology involved in drying it in the kiln. The client was involved in all of that.”

So much of the beauty of wood can depend on how you cut the tree, he points out. “Amazing grain and visual impact can be created from pretty shit trees. If you’re a little bit savvy and a little bit arty about how you apply yourself to using very defective trees, you can produce some very beautiful things.”

This appreciation for the design potential of timber considered low grade or defective is what led Nicola and Hamish to their work with bog oak.

Bog Oak

Hamish grew up near Cambridge and attended the Isle of Ely College in Wisbech, a town built on the banks of the River Nene. Wisbech and its environs lie close to sea level in a marshy region known as the fens. At the end of the last Ice Age, some 10,000 years ago, the area was densely forested with gigantic oaks, yews and pines. As the Earth warmed, sea levels rose and the area between England’s south and eastern borders was cut off from the European mainland by what we now call the English Channel. In low-lying areas of the east coast, such as the fens, the forests were flooded. Trees fell into the silt, where the absence of oxygen led to their preservation.

In the 1600s, wealthy landowners hired Dutch engineers to drain the fens and build dams in hopes of increasing their agricultural acreage. Newly exposed to oxygen, the peat began to oxidize, shrink and slowly blow away. Drainage work began anew in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries; the entire region is crisscrossed by drainage ditches today.

Hamish had known about bog oak for years, because he often visited an uncle who lived in Wisbech to go fishing in the fens. He’d see bog oaks just lying in the fields. Farmers hit the logs with expensive modern farming machinery, which causes damage, so they typically want to get rid of them. His friend Frank, whose father was the vicar in the nearby village of Methwold, was into photography and had shown him photos of bog oaks coming out of the fields. “They were very arty photographs,” Hamish remembers. He asked what happened to the trees. “They’re going on the fire,” Frank told him. Hamish decided he’d be interested in trying to process them. As he soon learned, “That is notoriously difficult.”

“Other, very famous makers were using [bog oak], he says – Makepeace, Alan Peters, Wendell Castle. But no one knew how to dry it, so they were using it as details and accents, such as inlays or handles.” He was convinced there must be some way to process the wood for structural use in furniture. “It’s such amazing material. We’re doing it with all the other native hardwoods,” he remembers thinking. “This is the mother of waste! It’s the holy grail of trying to use material that would otherwise be wasted. They burn it, for God’s sake!”

Air-drying is too aggressive, he learned. Bog oaks must be dried under the most carefully controlled conditions. While most woodworkers kiln-dry for speed, Hamish dries bog oak in a kiln because it’s a far more precise way to manage the process. “You can take a thimble of water over a year, or ten gallons in a day.” His kilns never go above 35° Celsius (95° F). It’s a technique in which he has invested 30 years of trial and error – “mostly error!” he adds.

“It’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen,” he continues, describing the kind of scene where bog oaks tend to appear. “The soil is jet black. Flat. You turn up and there’s the most enormous lump of black mud sitting there and you think ‘Where the hell does this come from?’ He has watched bog oaks get unearthed with huge machinery; a machine operator puts the bucket into the ground, “and you can see the peat moving 20 meters away. It’s an extraordinary sight. They are so straight – such perfect specimen oak trees.”

“You’ve found it,” he continues. “Then you have to decide whether it’s worth investing in. You can dry bog oak and it can be soft and full of splits; or it can be super dense, as dense as ebony – 1,166 kilos per cubic meter.” (That’s roughly 72 pounds per cubic foot.) “And it’s figured, so it’s like a figured ebony if it’s quartersawn. It has a particularly fat medullary vessel.”

“A log can be rubbish or black gold. You have to identify whether it’s any good. They all look the same and weigh the same.” So, how do you tell? “You get a very sharp hand axe and chip away at it. If it’s any good, you’ll meet resistance; it will sound like it’s going to be good. It vibrates.” It’s a subtle way of knowing material, he explains. “What you don’t want: It’s soft and mushy and you can keep going; it doesn’t reverberate. You can feel it and hear it.”

You have to test the whole length of the log, because there are pretty much always pockets of rot. The really big logs were typically immersed unevenly in the peat, with parts exposed to the elements and subject to insect attack, splitting and fungal disease. Color is another good indicator, once you cut into the log, as is how far below sea level the log has been buried. Hamish looks for logs from 3′-4′ below sea level as a guide.

Generally speaking, he cuts logs with a chainsaw, in the field, into 12′ lengths; anything over 6′ is usable. He looks for those that look like a half moon, a segment of an orange – no heart, no pith, and so, no heart shake. Nicola explains: “The logs are often dug up half-moon-shaped, as one half has already rotted away.” They mill them to produce quartersawn planks for optimal figure and stability.

At times he has brought trees back in the round, planked them and put them in the kiln. Even boards close to each other in the log can vary dramatically – one will have splits all over; the next won’t, even though both have been processed in exactly the same way. This variation in quality is often due to part of the tree having been exposed to the elements, which causes it to split along its medullary vessels. To illustrate this, Hamish once put a tree back together after it was dried. While the “top” half of the log was all split, the bottom was perfect, because the bottom half had originally fallen into the silt. The part that had been exposed to oxygen “split like mad” before falling into the silt, whereupon the splits filled up to absolute fiber saturation, only to split again when dried.

The Fenland Black Oak Project

In 2012, Hamish and his colleagues found the best bog oak they had ever encountered. The log was perfectly preserved, with not so much as a single pocket of rot or insect fly hole. And it was massive, at 43′. “You couldn’t even tell which end was which; it was so parallel,” he recalls. “It was only part of a much, much bigger tree.”

“I don’t think we should cut this,” Hamish decided on the spot. “We should keep it full-length.” He and his crew returned home empty-handed. The whole way back, Bob, a friend, neighbor and experienced woodworker who often travels with Hamish to the fens when collecting trunks, was saying, “You’re bloody mad. How are you going to lift it and dry it?” Hamish simply replied: “Imagine jet-black planks that are 13.2 meters long.” They subsequently named it the Jubilee Oak.

Nicola recounts how they put together the people and resources required to turn this prized find into a piece of furniture – a table – worthy of its history and rareness. “After finding the Jubilee oak, Hamish contacted The Worshipful Company of Carpenters and subsequently The Building Crafts College (The Worshipful Company of Carpenters run this college) to help further this endeavor. Steve Cook and Mauro Dell’Orco were both students there at the time and have now become part of the long-term project. Steve became artist-in-residence at The Building Crafts College for a year after he completed his course and was also funded for a year by the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust to assist Hamish in the drying of the boards. Mauro, who previously had a career in architecture, has become the lead designer for The Fenland Black Oak Project.

They milled the tree in 2012 and dried it in a purpose-built kiln at The Building Crafts College. The drying took nine months. In 2019, with help from more than 20 students who gave up part of their summer holidays for the privilege of contributing to the project, Hamish painstakingly constructed the table’s top from four of the boards in the spacious and well-equipped workshop at the Building Crafts College.

In the intervening years, they had set up a charitable trust to manage and protect the boards. The trustees come from varying backgrounds – farming, accounting, film making, legal work and administration. Hamish was appointed chairman in 2020, after the previous chair stood down.

The tabletop is currently in a climate-controlled kiln while the group raises funds to complete the base, which will be fabricated in bronze, in recognition of the era during which the trees were standing. “There’s a whole team of people who have worked on the design,” Hamish says. “It’s the most important thing I’ve ever done, and the most amazing.” When I ask, in view of how integral Nicola is to their business, whether Hamish really means to use the first-person singular in that quote – “It’s the most important thing I’ve ever done” – Nicola replies: “I in theory am not involved in The Fenland Black Oak Project. It is very much Hamish’s other woman! That said, there does seem to be quite a big workload that comes my way!”

For the first 18 months after its completion, the Jubilee Oak table will be on display at Ely Cathedral, a spectacular Gothic structure on high ground overlooking the fields where the ancient oaks were buried. “By displaying this table at Ely Cathedral we are hoping to raise awareness amongst local land owners of the urgent need to preserve as much black oak as we can,” says Hamish. “It’s going to run out. We just want to save this best-ever example so people can see it when it’s all gone.”

Other Work

Nicola and Hamish are no longer working to commission. After 30 years of that, they’re ready to switch to spec work and are currently developing some innovative construction techniques. “In order to make something amazing, you’ve got to go back to the basics,” Hamish says. His motivation: “Let’s develop some construction techniques that will allow us to do something visually amazing! You can’t just decorate something in a different way. Who cares? You need to start again.” For now, this is all I can reveal, as they’re keeping the particulars of these techniques under wraps.

They make their home on a smallholding in Kent, where they live with cats, chickens and Paisley, their dog, and finished building their own workshop in 2020.

At this point we return to Hamish’s youth. His father worked as an underwriter for Lloyds of London. His mother was a school teacher who eventually became a headmistress. Hamish went to a Quaker school, Sibford Ferris, that had a good woodworking department.

“I was severely dyslexic,” he says. “Still am. Basically I was hopeless at school until we were allowed in the woodwork shop. The woodwork teacher said, ‘You’re good at this!’ This useless pupil was good at something.”

“Don’t ever underestimate a craftsman,” he emphasizes, “because they’re highly disciplined, highly trained, very determined individuals. I’m a real advocate of traditional apprenticeships. I don’t think you could be good at this job other than by doing it as an apprenticeship. Doing it as an apprenticeship teaches you humility. One of the people I worked with said, ‘Somebody who never made a mistake never made anything.’ Processing bog oak went so wrong, so often; you could take the view that it’s a waste of time. Or you can say, ‘I’ve applied myself to this in the wrong way, so what can I do to do it right?’ A craftsman accepts that they’ve made a mistake. Then, rather than saying, ‘That’s a stupid idea,’ or ‘This is impossible,’ they say ‘What did I do wrong and what have I got to do to make it work?’”

With bog oak, Hamish applied himself to this question for 30 years and now says, “You only have to get it right a couple of times for it to show you that this is worth it.”

If you’d like to contribute to The Fenland Black Oak project, you can do so here. All contributors donating £1,000 or more will have their names carved into the underside of The Jubilee Oak top as a reminder to future generations of this shared vision.

— Nancy Hiller, author of “Making Things Work” and “Kitchen Think”