As on every second Saturday of the month the Lost Art Press storefront is open this Saturday, June 8, from 10 a.m.-5 p.m., for all your book-browsing and woodworking-question needs.
We have the entire line of books on display (as well as a few card scrapers), and they can be purchased with cash, check or credit card. We’re also available to answer questions, demonstrate woodworking techniques and even teach you a skill or two. Kids and pets are always welcome. And for cash or check only, we have available a couple of lump hammer and holdfast “blems” (they work just fine – they’re just not aesthetic perfection) and one or two “blem” books.
Plus, we’ve some quality used tools to sell as well, some of which are pictured in the gallery below. These are cash or check only, and must be inspected/paid for/picked up on site; no shipping, I’m afraid.
If you need some sweetener to get your family to come along, we have one word for you: brunch.
Saturday Brunch in Covington
We are surrounded by some of the best brunch places in the city. Here’s a quick list of our favorites.
Ottos’s. Getting in for brunch at Otto’s is tough on Sundays. Not so much on Saturdays. The lemon ricotta pancakes are amazing, as is the breakfast casserole.
Main Street Tavern. As we are furniture makers and writers, we love the bargain brunch at Main Street. Really, everything is great. The waffles are fantastic. The hash special is always good. My personal favorite is the biscuit sandwich with bacon.
Libby’s Southern Comfort. This place just opened. We tried it for lunch and we cannot wait to try brunch.
I struggle with the “women only” classes.. to exclude on the basis of being inclusive… is a difficult logic puzzle. While I recognize the issues of sexism and bias (overt and unconscious) I also don’t see how creating separate spaces, brings people together. It feels in a way a declaration of war that one group is “Bad” and rightfully excluded.. today because of the sins of the father in our culture, and an admission of defeat, deciding that women are incapable of working with men so need their space. The Boy Scouts evolved… this movement seems to go the wrong way.
Thank you, reader, for grappling with the subject at hand, which demands finer distinctions than are often made in contemporary discourse. I hope that what follows will shed some light on the matter.
For decades I, too, rebelled against the idea of woodworking classes limited to women. As a woman trained in the City & Guilds trades system in England beginning in 1979, I took for granted that my woodworking classes would include primarily be made up of men, so I wasn’t at all surprised that I was the only female in my cohort. In most of the shops where I’ve worked since 1980, I continued to be the only woman–a laudable exception being the shop of Wall-Goldfinger in Northfield, Vermont, during the late 1980s, where women made up between 25 and 30 percent of the shop-floor workforce. (Kudos to John Wall, Michael Goldfinger, and David Haber, and also to their wives.)
Over the past 20 years I’ve encountered the argument that women-only classes are necessary because some women learn better in a setting without men, where they’re freed from having to compete with men or be insulted by them.* Until recently, I resisted those arguments. “In the real world of professional woodworking, most women have to work side-by-side with men,” I told Megan Fitzpatrick when discussing this subject in 2017. “Women just need to get used to it.” She disagreed, and because I respect her (greatly), I tried to figure out why. As another commenter put it: “You have given [me] more to think about beyond the above. I’m comfortable in my positions and beliefs, and am not threatened by trying to see through different eyes.”
As I tried to see Sarah’s project at A Workshop of Our Own through different eyes, I remembered that I’d gone to a women’s high school. I didn’t choose the school; my mother and grandparents did. They chose it because they were convinced that my sister and I would be better able to focus on learning, instead of on socializing. Of course, children who go to mixed-gender schools are also learning about gender relations, in addition to their subjects of formal study. That can be valuable. But because of the circumstances that had culminated in our parents’ divorce, they thought we needed to spend less time thinking about boys than about algebra, the Periodic Table, the life cycle of Taenia solium and the question of whether all animals are equal or some are perhaps more equal than others.
It’s undeniable that one of the lessons girls and boys learn in mixed-gender schools concerns how they’re expected to behave if they want to be attractive to others. There’s nothing wrong with that, at least in principle–unless it discourages boys from taking sewing and cooking classes, or from cultivating their gentler side (I’m really grateful that my husband did not get that memo), and girls from applying themselves to their studies and publicly acknowledging what they know on the grounds that being smart or skilled might be is often considered threatening.
Only after I gave my high school experience some serious reflection did I begin to understand the rationale behind classes, or even an entire school, for women only. (For the record, I also kicked myself for having been tone-deaf to my own privilege as a beneficiary of single-gender high-schooling. One thing about privilege–it’s easy to take for granted.) It’s not about excluding men, but about creating an environment where students can simply focus on the subject at hand.
Some people excel at multitasking. They can dictate the draft of a doctoral dissertation into Notes on their i-Phone while jogging through traffic with their dog. However, most of us function best in relatively controlled conditions. One friend of mine swears she’s incapable of writing unless her desk is clear of clutter. Another says he writes his funniest stories at night, after the rest of his family’s in bed. Another “cannot function” without coffee first thing in the morning. All of these are examples in which we have no trouble acknowledging that controlling select aspects of our circumstances, whether social or physical, aids focus.
Again, the point is not to exclude men, nor to vilify them. Nor is anyone claiming that women are “incapable of working with men so need their space.” Beyond the doors of those classrooms is a world where the same women who sign up for the classes speak, work, ride the subway, eat, and in many cases, have children with men. But it’s also a world in which graduates of those classes may feel just a little more confident asserting themselves because they did not have to deal with fellow students who resented their presence in a woodworking class/golf club/voting booth/branch of government and expressed their resentment by calling them vulgar names under their breath, defacing their work in the dark of night, sending anonymous threatening letters or complaining to the instructor about their underarm hair (while finding their fellow men’s underarm hair completely normal and inoffensive).
This is just a tiny sampling of the stuff that still, amazingly, goes on in 2019. Some of us deal with such behavior by filing it under “desperate stuff some people do when they feel threatened or impotent”–i.e., compartmentalizing it with a degree of empathy–and moving on. Some of us report the behavior in the hope that those institutional cultures that (still?) silently overlook it will change. But can I now understand why some women respond by shaping their circumstances so that they don’t have to waste their time or emotional energy reacting to this kind of stuff? You bet.–Nancy Hiller, author of Making Things Work
*Please don’t read this as implying that all men insult women. Clearly they don’t. Nor am I denying that women sometimes compete with and insult each other.
Hang out with six (and in a couple cases a few more) of your new closest friends as you learn woodworking in our upcoming classes. Below are listed and linked those in which there are one or more bench spaces available, both at the Lost Art Press (LAP) storefront and at other locations in classes taught by LAP regulars.
As always, if you’ve questions about classes, please send them to me (Megan with no “h”) at covingtonmechanicals@gmail.com, not to Meghan with an “h” at the LAP Help Desk.
Geologists know the value of a good vest. No, Chris won’t be modeling ours sans shirt. Don’t get your hopes up.
Our Chore Coat has been popular so far, so Chris and I wanted to follow it up with another garment that would be useful, not just merchandise. His idea was a work vest that’d layer over a shirt or under a coat, with plenty of pockets and a low collar. Sounds good, I said, and we were off to the races.
Tatra Mountain guides wore leather vests.
We kept it simple, with three outside patch pockets, a low band collar for ease of layering and an inside divided pocket for a pencil, marking knife, 6″ ruler, Sharpie, lumber crayon, paintbrush, tire pressure gauge, Slim Jim, asparagus stalk, Timberlok, cigarillo, chopsticks and other workbench essentials.
Dick Proenneke made a cut-off vest to be layered under his overalls.
We’ll be producing a limited run of these vests – probably no more than 100 pieces – out of a beautiful English-woven moleskin fabric. More on moleskin later. (It’s not made out of dead moles. But it is awesome.) Later versions of the vest will be made using a cloth that is easier to get.
Furniture builders wear vests too.
We’re glad to be working with Sew Valley in Cincinnati again. They’re growing and improving every month and we’re delighted to support them as best we can.
Russian firewood haulers? Yep. Vests.
Expect to see our final prototype later this month.
