CCC workers in the 1930s with some nice pullover shirts. Killer trunk scaling calipers, too.
Editor’s note: Today we are launching our pullover work shirt, which is in the warehouse and ready for shipment. Because of massive delays in the country’s delivery systems, we cannot guarantee delivery before Christmas. You can read all the details about the shirt’s construction on the page in our store. It is, of course cut and stitched here in Cincinnati from high-quality materials. Below, you can read our clothing designer’s account of how he developed the shirt.
— Christopher Schwarz
When Chris and I talked about designing a work shirt, we knew we’d want to make a pullover style. That’s been a good choice for hundreds of years. No placket or buttons to interfere with planing, shaving or hewing at belly level. Simple in cut and detail, not festooned with living history museum ruffles. Sleeves that can be easily rolled up. Unstructured and comfortable, but presentable, too.
Havasupai man with a pitch-lined water basket and a very nice shirt, c. 1900
I found a rich mid-weight indigo cotton from Japan, and the team at Cincinnati’s own Sew Valley cut and sewed a batch of shirts. It took a lot of development. Like wood’s worst warping happening between felling the tree and drying the lumber to a reasonable moisture content, fabric’s big shrink happens at the first wash after weaving. During the first wash of this fabric shrank it by 3″. That was startling. So we calculated that big shrink into the pattern, sewed up some very odd-looking shirts, then laundered them all down to normalcy before sending them to the warehouse. The shirt you receive won’t shrink hardly at all, especially if you follow the instructions (wash cold, hang dry).
Another CCC group, from Maine in 1938. Nice shirts, fellas.
This is a real indigo – not a vegetable dye, but chemically identical. It will rub off if you grind your shirt on a white couch. In everyday life, it shouldn’t be noticeable, but do know that the dye can transfer. It’ll fade like that old pair of blue jeans – slowly and handsomely.
Look at that nice square bottom placket. This is what I based our placket on.
The cut was intended to have enough room for easy work while not feeling like a balloon or a costume. It’s long enough to tuck in, but not dress-like. The sleeves stay rolled up pretty well thanks to a shorter cuff placket than is typical on a dress shirt. The collar is unstructured. It’s as simple and steady as a shirt can be.
We’re not taking much of a margin on these. They’re made of good fabric, by a factory that pays its workers a living wage, and that ain’t cheap. But we think it’s the way to go.
Caleb Rogers lives in a spot that, while enviable at any time, seems especially so in the midst of a pandemic: a cabin of around 500 square feet, close to California’s Joshua Tree National Park. From his desert home he can see just three houses within a space of many miles, and of those three, two are abandoned.
He mentions his surroundings by way of illustrating why, beyond what he calls his addiction to the news, the pandemic has not affected him much. He sees his cat and does his work. Once or twice a week he drives to town to buy food, puts on a mask to go into the store and goes home. Once or twice a month, when making deliveries, he gets a glimpse of how the pandemic is affecting other people. He drives to Los Angeles to deliver a piece and sees the lines at the supermarket, “a line of 40 people waiting to get into Trader Joe’s, wearing their masks, and everyone’s on edge. We just don’t have that here [in Joshua Tree]. We have the wind. That’s the movement we have here. I feel like a tourist when I go into the city and have a peek at the way people are living. And all the shops that are closing! Rodeo Drive! I was in awe of all the boarded-up shop fronts. The city is really taking a hit. People seem to be so divided. Thank goodness I’m still working, I still have jobs. I’m really grateful.”
Born in 1974 on a small horse ranch near Albuquerque, New Mexico, Caleb grew up moving around a lot. His parents separated when he was 4. Because his mother, a writer, has always been “a bit of a gypsy,” Caleb and his sister often found themselves in a new school.
Sometimes they moved far afield. “What I remember about growing up,” he reflects, “was living in England. That was the first time I felt settled, the first time I recall seeing my mother happy where she was.” His mother had taken the family there for a holiday, then stayed four years, from the time Caleb was 10 to age 14. It was the longest time he’d spent living in a single place.
Caleb (right) with his sister and mother, probably at his grandmother’s country house in Chappaqua, New York, circa 1980.
His mother’s love of travel rubbed off on him, and his own love of travel has had a deep influence on his work. By the time Caleb took up woodworking in his early 30s, he’d left junior college and hiked 500 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, moved to Guadalajara and hitchhiked to Guatemala. There he met a young woman from England. Smitten, he followed her back to London and eventually on to the cathedral city of Winchester.
As a practicing Buddhist, Caleb’s girlfriend had a butsudan, or Buddhist altar, in their home. Butsudans come in a variety of forms, from simple raised platforms to elaborately decorated cabinets. Despite its significance to its owner, the cheaply made object puzzled Caleb, who “thought it needed to be replaced….”
“It was more of a personal aesthetic,” he says – an aesthetic informed by the conviction that a piece’s form should express the values or ideals it represents. Inside the altar is a scroll that symbolizes the soul; it’s a focal point for meditation. “But her butsudan was particleboard veneered with walnut!” he explains. “Sweetheart,” he told her, “I get the practice, but please let me build you something better.”
Butsudan in poplar with asanoha (hemp leaf) motif.
“I see it everywhere,” he continues, referring to how cheaply most things today are made. “Part of my drive, to this day, is to strike that balance, to remind people of the importance of living with something that’s beautiful, that’s handmade. That really does drive me to get here to work every morning. I find that the quality of one’s life goes up, the fewer things one has and the more personal those things are. Most people have a lot of stuff; that takes up a lot of space. For myself, I find living with a few things that have been made by hand enriches my life. It makes life easier in so many ways. I don’t seem to need as much, to go out and buy something new. I get so much satisfaction from the things that I do have.”
Inner and outer doors of a tall butsudan in poplar and western red cedar.
But back to that first butsudan. Caleb knew nothing about woodworking when he decided to build it. He simply thought he could make something better. At the time, he was working in a pub; one of his customers was a woodworker. “He saw my doodles for the altar,” Caleb says, “and showed up the next day with a box of hand tools, everything I needed to get going in our spare bedroom. I picked up a pallet – there were always pallets at the back of the pub – and in a few days I was able to finish the butsudan that I had drawn up.” He calls that first piece “relatively crude” but is glad to know it’s still in use.
After Caleb and his girlfriend broke up, he traveled some more. He taught English, music and art in China and wandered through Morocco, France and Spain. In 2012 he got married and moved to Peru with his wife, then back to China for another couple of years. “No matter where I was, however, I was always thinking about building my butsudans. Something about it seemed urgent to me.” So in 2014 Caleb and his wife returned to the United States and he decided to try making a living as a woodworker, specializing in butsudans. “It took a while before I got my first order,” he says, “but fortunately I’ve been working consistently ever since.”
He moved to Joshua Tree in 2017, when he and his wife separated. It was a way “to rehabilitate myself. [Being] somewhere where other people were not” made it a good place “to get my head straight.” He immersed himself in work. His shop is a rented garage about 20 minutes away from his home, also in the desert. The shop has no air conditioning. “It is hot,” he allows. “But I get very focused when I work, and whether it’s hot or cold, it all seems to blur together.”
Business, Wood, Joinery & Tools
Some commissions come through his website. Before the pandemic, he was doing a lot of work for clients in Europe. Now he works for clients in Los Angeles and closer to home, with most jobs coming by word of mouth. A few clients have become patrons, furnishing their homes with his work. Friends see it and place their own orders.
Tansu in pine and alder with chrysanthemum motif.
Every commission starts with a conversation, followed by numerous emails, and sometimes phone calls. He likes to see photos of the clients’ home, to get a feel for the space and their tastes; that helps with deciding on scale, lumber species and finishes. “My favorite commissions are the ones where my client feels they have a genuine problem which they want to solve,” he says. “I love the idea of organizing space, getting something tidied up.”
When first starting out, he worked in domestic woods. Poplar was readily available; for a while he used it almost exclusively, occasionally substituting alder. Recently he has been using oak and sapele, among other species. When teaching classes he uses pine. “I love the knots, the squirrelly nature of it, the smell.”
Freestanding partition with bending kumiko in poplar, alder and washi.
A distinguishing feature of Caleb’s work is the absence of nails and screws. “I like the challenge of designing things knowing that all the connections have to be in wood,” he says. When he does use hardware, as he did for a recent shoe cabinet, he prefers it to be traditional Japanese stuff. (One source is Hida Tool of Berkeley.) And all of his pieces are knockdown, built with traditional joinery, which he finds endlessly rewarding. “You take the classic mortise and tenon,” he suggests by way of example. “There are so many variations. One joint I use a lot is the dovetail that’s locked into place with either a through-tenon or a blind tenon. It’s very easy to put together, very easy to take apart. It seems to be very strong.” Furniture that can be broken down to flat parts has helped him get commissions from clients beyond Southern California. “At first [clients are] daunted, but some email me saying ‘That was so enjoyable!’”
An example of how Caleb uses a tenoned member with a wide shoulder to lock a sliding dovetail in place for a knockdown piece. Once the tenon is fully home, its rail tied into a larger puzzle of interconnected parts, it prevents the dovetail from being pulled out.
Detail of kumiko.
Caleb is self-taught. Returning to the woodworker who was his customer at the pub in England, he says, “We never built anything together. He just gave me some tools and magazines. Everything I’ve learned is something I’ve figured out – looking at furniture and wondering how it’s put together, how it could work. The tansu, for me, was always such a source of mystery: ‘How do you get a corner to go together like that?’ My love of joinery is a love of problem solving. I like joinery to be hidden as much as possible, a mystery, so you don’t see how the cabinet’s put together. It’s a personal thing. I tend to revisit the same joints over and over, to build the same forms, mostly Japanese-style tansus and butsudans.”
Tall entryway cabinet in alder and birch.
Caleb still has the three Sheffield steel chisels he started out with, gifts from that customer at the pub. He has added a few power tools, such as a contractor-grade table saw for ripping; as a custom woodworker who lives primarily on commissions, he has to respect the time constraints imposed by sometimes-modest budgets. Select power tools help him find the balance between a client’s budget and the time he can afford to invest. Even so, he estimates about 80 percent of his work is done by hand, with Japanese handplanes (known as kannas), Japanese chisels and Japanese saws. “I love being able to cut on the pull stroke. All Japanese tools are designed to be used on the pull stroke, drawing the work in toward yourself, using your body as a clamp or a stop. It feels more intimate somehow,” he says. He appreciates the mobility granted by reliance on so few tools and attributes this preference for minimalism to his childhood – “a few tools in a box, get to a new place, unpack and get to work.”
In addition to commissioned work, Caleb teaches classes at his cabin. In his tansu-building class, students work outdoors, exclusively with hand tools, to build a complete cabinet in one week. “The idea behind it was to get people involved in woodworking,” he says. “People who have an interest in it but felt ‘I don’t have the space for it, I don’t have the tools.’” The class is designed to show them how much they can do with an improvised workshop, outdoors. Most students rent an Airbnb in Joshua Tree.
“One thing I enjoy about doing the classes when we’re outdoors and only using hand tools is moving with the rhythms of the day and the weather, and being quiet,” he says. “The name of my business is Esho Funi Butsudans. It’s the idea of the oneness of self and environment, of how inseparable the two are. When you’re working with your hands and building a piece of furniture, that line disappears. This thing I’m making is very much me. In building it, working with the wood, considering where the knots are, and how the wood may behave five years from now, it bleeds over into me. The two things are just the same. When the piece is finished, it has its own personality, its own character. To me that is…I can’t think of anything, short of having children. Sharing myself. Growing. It’s a therapeutic thing to do, to build something with your hands and return to it every day.”
Lighting
One of my favorite Caleb Rogers creations is not cabinet or an altar, but a light fixture. Floating in the dark, its undulating organic form calling a jellyfish to mind, it’s a delicate confection in tissue-covered reed.
“I’ve always loved lighting, playing around with light. My mother designed sets for the theater for a time. She was brilliant at creating a mood using light.” He describes the process of making these lights: “I start bending the reeds and hot gluing [them] here and there. And then I’ll take tissue paper and white glue and cover the whole thing with tissue paper and put a light in it, and gradually layer that tissue paper until the quality of that light coming through is just right.”
One light he made for a client in Los Angeles was so large that he had to cut it in half to get it in his Nissan Sentra for delivery. To get a feel for the space and the kind of light he wanted to design, he’d spent a night on the sofa at his client’s house, staring up at the space in the ceiling where the client had said he wanted the lamp to be. It took Caleb six hours to stitch the light back together so that it looked just right.
He tries to work quickly and prolifically, to keep his work affordable and the commissions coming in. “Before I start a piece, I build it in my head, maybe 100 times, before I pick up a tool, so that when I do start on a project, I know what I’m doing. I don’t take breaks; I don’t eat lunch.”
Asked how he prices his work, Caleb responds with a reflective question: “How do you price something? What are you willing to sacrifice in your life so you can do this [kind of work]? I keep my bills as low as possible. I don’t have any debt, I don’t have credit cards. I want to be able to do my work and keep my prices reasonable. I try not to think about what, on an hourly basis, I’m making. At first I was making butsudans for whatever someone could pay, just so I could keep working and put the photos on my website.” That generated more work. “I’ve been able to do this as my sole source of income for going on five years. So I’m very fortunate. I don’t have fixed prices. It has a lot to do with the client, what they can afford. I want to build the thing I have in my head and I don’t want to compromise just because I might have to work a little harder or a little longer for a little less money.”
He’s grateful to have a few clients he considers patrons, who commission dozens of pieces for their homes. “For somebody like me, it makes all the difference in the world. If you have money out there, there’s really nothing better you can do than supporting an artist you like.”
After graduation, [Jonathan] Fisher married Dolly Battle of Dedham, Mass., and accepted a call to minister to the frontier town of Blue Hill in the District of Maine. Situated about halfway up the Maine coast, Blue Hill is the subject of many idyllic landscape paintings. The jagged and rocky shoreline, salty ocean air and lush forests have long attracted tourists looking to get away from city life.
Fisher’s letters to family members are full of warmth and piety.
As welcome a vacation spot as midcoast Maine is today, in the first half of the 19th century it was inhospitable frontier wilderness. Between the notoriously recalcitrant populace and the lack of resources, the isolated frontier was a daunting mission. Kevin Murphy described Blue Hill in the 1790s as “a clutch of rude dwellings surrounded by some rickety tidal mills.” (2) The benefits of serving in a well-established town were not lost on Fisher. Before accepting the call to rural Blue Hill, he also considered a pastorate in Ashby, Mass., “in the heart of a well settled country,” which offered closer proximity to family, better compensation, assistance from fellow ministers and more “temporal conveniences.” For a Harvard-trained minister, the allure of urban ministry was real. Despite this temptation, Fisher felt a divine call to serve in this frontier setting – the “infant part of the country” – because “it [was] difficult for them to find a sufficient number of candidates, who [were] willing even to come and preach among them, and much less to settle.” (3) As one man said, “We are so as it wore out of the wourld that we don’t hardly know wether we do rite or rong but we mean to do as well as we can.” (4)
The Province of Maine from the best authorities, Samuel Lewis, 1794, W. Barker sculp., engraved for Mathew Carey’s American edition of Guthrie’s Geography Improved. – Courtesy, David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries, https://purl.stanford.edu/sr253bc9505.
Late 19th-century Blue Hill historian, R.G.F. Candage, recalled: “In personal appearance Father Fisher was below medium height; he dressed in ancient style, with small clothes, knee buckles and shoes, and a long waisted coat, his head bald and thrown slightly forward, with his whole demeanor and appearance clerical and grave; no one could see him and doubt his profession.” This image of the publicly austere reverend concurs with other contemporary descriptions of him, but reading his journals and personal correspondence one can’t help but be impressed with his warmth and piety. Kevin Murphy’s assessment of Fisher’s demeanor concurs with my own: “Fisher’s public persona – serious, and probably overbearing and too exacting for his parishioners – overshadowed the private Fisher, who emerges from his letters and diaries and from the words of his family as sensitive, intelligent, and inspiring.” (5) Or as Mary Ellen Chase put it: “He mingled authority with love.” (6)
As temporary structures, log cabins were quick to build and allowed frontier families to prepare the land for settlement. – Missouri History Museum, St. Louis.
Jonathan Fisher’s life was far from easy. He regularly dealt with migraine headaches, stomach pains, diarrhea and serious injuries from manual labor. Despite these trials, Fisher resigned himself under the hand of Providence. Accounts such as that of August 28th, 1818, are common: “Came on for Bluehill exercised with pain in my side, back and bowels and with diarrhoea. Called at Phin. Osgood’s, Jr. Reached home 10 P.M. Took sop pills and mullein tea. Found the family well, except Josiah, wounded by an ax. Have reason to bless God that we are all yet spared in life, that we have so many comforts indulged us.” Even in the midst of debilitating physical pain, Fisher carried on with the work at hand. On March 17, 1826, his journal reads, “High N.W. scattering clouds, cold. From 9 A.M. ‘till about 5 P.M. exercised with earache, some of the time severely. Tried first camphor on wool, then hot tobacco smoke, then had several drops of West Indian Rum dropped in. This in the first trial gave a little relief; in the second removed the severity of the pain. At intervals through the day planed out stuff for a common ruler, a pair of parallel rulers and modern dividers, finished the latter, A part of the time walked the room in great pain. It is easy to bear pain when we do not feel it, but when it is acute, then to bear it with patience is something.” He was a resilient man. Not owning a horse until late in his life, he was known to regularly travel long distances on foot, even as far as Bangor, 40 miles away.
This 1802 overmantel from a Paris, Maine, house illustrates well the stages of settlement: Clearing forest, building a house frame and the establishing of a village center. “View from Paris Hill” in the Lazarus Hathaway House. – “The Clearing of Paris Hill.” Oil on pine board, 30″ x 48″, artist unknown. Overmantel from the Lazarus Hathaway house, Paris Hill, 1802. Courtesy of the Hamlin Memorial Library and Museum. Photograph by Brandan Roberts.
Fisher’s most active furniture-making years were between 1796 (when he settled in Blue Hill) and 1820 (when he paid off all his home- and farm-building debt). The years between the Revolutionary War and 1820 (when Maine achieved statehood) were formative years for the new nation. This was especially true for the “easternmost countries” of Massachusetts, which were then called the District of Maine. Maine’s struggle for independence during these years can be seen as a “microcosm of the larger quest for national identity.” (7) Politically, demographically and socially, the District of Maine had been an “outpost” of Massachusetts since the late 17th century.
Maine derived most of its cultural influence from Boston in the same way that Bostonians looked to London for the latest fashions. Despite this deep-rooted “Boston prestige” during Fisher’s life, Maine was developing an identity apart from Massachusetts. It is not surprising, then, that Maine’s art during the Federal era often reflects this emerging sense of identity, blending vernacular/folk traditions with the sophistication of academic training.
(2) Murphy, Kevin D., Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, Maine: Commerce, Culture, and Community on the Eastern Frontier, University of Massachusetts Press, 2010, p 3. (3) Letter to Ashby from Fisher, October 26, 1795. (4) Harding, Samuel B., The Contest over the Ratification of the Federal Constitution in the State of Massachusetts, New York: Longmans-Green, 1896, p 8, quoted in Banks, Ronald F., Maine Becomes a State: The Movement to Separate Maine from Massachusetts, 1785-1820, New Hampshire Publishing Co.; Wesleyan/Maine Historical Society, 1973, 4, p 9. (5) Murphy, Kevin D., Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, Maine: Commerce, Culture, and Community on the Eastern Frontier, University of Massachusetts Press, 2010, p 13. (6) Chase, Mary Ellen Jonathan Fisher, Maine Parson 1768-1847, The MacMillan Co., 1948, p 279. (7) Clarke, Charles E.; Leamon, James S. and Bowden, Karen, Maine in the Early Republic, Maine Historical Society and Maine Humanities Council, 1988, p 12.
The back of this single-bay Dutch tool chest is “car siding” (sold at some big box stores as tongue-and-groove boards). It’s a simple and economicalway to build the back of a chest.
I’ve been home all week scraping stair corners and running a floor edger, so I haven’t gotten a lot done on my Dutch tool chest book (I would much rather be working on the Dutch tool chest book…). But that doesn’t mean I’ve not made progress! I’m on track to turn it in to my editor (that would be Christopher Schwarz) by the end of March 2021, and will work on the book’s design while he’s reading. With luck – and no floor renovation disasters – it will be out this summer.
One single-bay chest (aka the small version) is done and currently serving as window decoration (it still needs a good paint job); I’m mulling over options for a couple different mobile bases for it. A double-bay chest (aka the large version) is partially done and sitting atop my Anarchist’s tool chest, awaiting my return to the shop. I’ll build at least one more chest – size to be determined – so I can show three different options for the back and lids. And possibly a fourth.
I’ve a folder full of research notes on vintage slant-lid tool chests (and other slant-lid storage), and I’m collecting images from readers for the gallery (If you have high-resolution images you’d like to share, please send me an email!). I think that will be an important inspirational section – I can only outfit so many interiors, after all. And I’m working with Orion Henderson at Horton Brasses to offer a forged hardware kit (I’ll be recommending some low-budget-friendly options as well).
So what am I’m going to do with all these chests and bases? After I finish up the “beauty shots” (for chapter openers and possibly for the cover), they’ll be for sale. If anyone wants to put in a preemptive order, send me an email. Prices start at $850, and vary depending on size and hardware. And you can choose your paint color…as long as it’s not too crazy. Or be crazy. I can always paint crazy atop not-crazy.
A Dutch tool chest is an excellent beginner project – so there will be detailed instruction and options for just about every operation, as well as commentary about why. Above is part of the explanation of laying out dovetails with dividers – my favorite method.
— Fitz
P.S. To bring it back to my lead: Has anyone reading this used PoloPlaz Primero 275 VOC Finish on their floors? If so, thoughts?
The north wall of the bench room at The Krenov School. The school’s mascot is an elephant, after an early habit of meeting after school to drink Carlsberg Elephant malt liquor. The walls of the school are covered in elephant mementos and decades of memories, jokes and relics. Photo by David Welter.
When I talk with other woodworkers about my own trajectory, nearly everyone asks about what it was like to be a student at the College of the Redwoods Fine Woodworking program (now aptly renamed The Krenov School), so I now have a spiel about my time there. It was an incredible space and monastic in focus on the craft, and I was surrounded by capable instructors, enthusiastic peers and beautiful Northern California.
When I was writing “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints,” I posed the same questions I have so often fielded to other alumni, in particular to those students who studied while Krenov was still in residence: from the school’s 1981 inception to his 2002 retirement. There were common experiences from everyone: camaraderie, self-improvement and personal development, and an excitement at prospects of continuing a creative practice. While the book concerns itself with Krenov, nearly 100 of its 300 or so pages are about his time establishing and working at the school. Integral to that research were those interviews with alumni; they not only illuminated their experiences with the school, but also opened a window into its founding and to Krenov’s intentions as a teacher.
I won’t venture to summarize a hundred pages of writing in a few paragraphs; I’ll also avoid my tendency toward voluminous blog posts. Instead, I’ll share a short excerpt from the afterword. In it, I included my own experience – something that I avoided to that point. But the afterword was a good place to help the reader – now versed in Krenov’s life and work – understand how James Krenov, his school and the process of writing the book has shaped my own life as a craftsperson.
From page 245 of “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints”:
Like so many students who attend the College of the Redwoods Fine Woodworking Program, I was in my 20s when I upended my life to move to Fort Bragg, California. My father, Robert Gaffney, was an amateur cabinetmaker, and after my stint in academia, I was hoping to explore and train the curiosity in wood that my father had instilled in me. I was also, perhaps, looking for a different path and pursuit than the one I was on.
My classmates in 2014, during a drawing class led by Laura Mays, the school’s director since Michael Burns’ retirement in 2011. Photo by David Welter.
A year or so earlier, when I was home to visit during graduate school, my father and I had talked about my prospects of a formal woodworking education. I had been working with him in his shop for years, but with a harrowing prognosis for his pancreatic cancer, we both wondered if I might be able to work with him when I returned East. Like so many other hobbyists, I had spent years poring over the projects in the “Reader’s Gallery” of Fine Woodworking, and noted that a large number of these projects seemed to come from a small town in Northern California. When my father opened the family computer and saw that I was looking at the admission requirements for the woodworking program at College of the Redwoods, he was thrilled at the prospect. He even helped put the few amateurish woodworking projects I had to show into a portfolio for my application to the school. By the time I was there, he wasn’t around to wish me well, but I had arrived with some of his tools and a knowledge that he had been excited for my next chapter.
Krenov died several years prior to my arrival, but as so many others in the years after his retirement have attested, his presence in the curriculum and the pedagogy of his successors was undeniable. I had picked out my father’s copy of “The Fine Art of Cabinetmaking” from his books and read it the week prior to arriving. The tool list handed to new students noted it as a requirement. I didn’t read “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook” until I was a month or two into my schooling, and by then I already found its philosophy and approach a familiar take.
My first piece at the school, the “Madrone Stender,” a flagrant abuse of the guidelines for first projects in complexity and size. Photo by David Welter.
The height/tilt adjustment mechanism inside the “Madrone Stender.” I was thrilled with how it works; I’m not sure I was always thinking about how it looked. Photo by David Welter.
I shudder to think what Krenov might have thought about my first project, a desk that is undoubtedly “engineer art” with a brass and wood mechanism that allows for an adjustable-height worksurface. Or what he’d say about my Tage Frid stool and the odd zither I built later in the year. But just as so many students emerged from the school with differing aesthetics and shared roots, the school and Krenov’s words had shown me what I could make when I held myself to the highest standards and shunned the prospects of efficiency or limitations. It took me years to find a workshop and situation that might allow me to work again with wide shop-sawn veneers (and I still don’t have a proper horizontal mortiser) but I never looked back. Woodworking, more specifically this quiet and mindful flavor, was a new path.
The school I attended was nearly that which Krenov had departed a decade earlier. In the years since Krenov’s retirement, it has seen only a few changes in its staff. When Michael Burns retired in 2011, after 30 years at the school, he was replaced by Laura Mays, who helmed the school during my time there, and still does. A few years after my time, David Welter retired after 30 years; he was replaced by Todd Sorenson, a graduate of the classes of ’01 and ’02. Jim Budlong is still a core member of the faculty and a fundamental presence since joining it in the fall of 1989. Ejler Hjorth-Westh and Greg Smith are there, having taken Krenov’s position in 2002, and they bring their own skills and perspectives to the curriculum. Under Mays’ directorship the school hasn’t missed a beat. A wave of passion, ever-refreshed with new perspectives, meets returning alumni and visitors alike at the door.
Perhaps the most amazing thing I saw in my time at the school was the strength of its community. During my cohort’s midwinter show (a show that has been held every year since the early 1980s), a hundred or so alumni came to see the work on display, some flying from distant cities for the chance to reconnect with old friends and check in on the school. Britta Krenov, then in her 90s, came to visit; she made sure to commune with the student work and encourage the makers. By the year of my attendance, there were more than 500 graduates of the program. I don’t know many schools that can bring back a fifth of its alumni for a yearly gathering.
