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.
I have little clue what Roy Underhill is doing in the picture above; it’s from 2012 when I was in North Carolina with Christopher Schwarz assisting on a tool chest class at The Woodwright’s School. My best guess, however, is that Roy is poking fun at Chris’ overhand ripping technique by demonstrating his own underhand (Underhill?) ripping technique…while dropping sawdust into his eyes.
Roy is always funny, and a joy to be around – and shenanigans aside, he knows more about hand-tool woodworking than just about anyone I’ve met. You can meet him, too (and possibly get dragooned into shenanigans). He’ll be at the Lost Art Press open house (837 Willard St., Covington, Ky.) on April 13 from 10-11:30 a.m. and from 1:30-5 p.m. Stop in at any time during those hours to say hello, pick up a signed copy of “Calvin Cobb: Radio Woodworker,” and simply to hang out with Roy – always a delight!
I wonder if Chris understood what he was unleashing when he
first wrote about the Dutch Tool Chest. It’s the perfect blank canvas for
woodworkers to exercise their ingenuity. Just a quick internet search will
spill pages of configurations, colors, and creativity.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about DTC design and
execution lately. This spring I’m co-teaching a class where students will build
a version of the chest — but with a twist. My partner in crime is Thomas Latanè, one of the best blacksmiths working today, so
the surprise spoiler is students will be both building the chest with me AND
forging the hardware with Tom.
My influence for the project is easy to see but Tom’s comes from the tool chests that were attached to the sides of Conestoga wagons (a form curiously similar to the DTC). On many surviving pieces the strap hinge swings on a clenched staple as opposed to a standard barrel and pin. The example chest in the photo wears Tom’s vision for the hardware but there is opportunity for students to create something as complex or as simple as their skill set and time allows.
I’m really excited to be a part of this, it’s a wonderful
handshake between two crafts that frankly ought to hang out together more
often. The class will be divided into two, spending the morning with one
instructor and trading to the other for the afternoon.
We’ve chosen to host the class at the picturesque Tunnel Mill Craft School just a few miles south of Rochester, Minn. Unlike many schools, they offer a dormitory bed and meals included in the price of tuition. After the official class time is over, it’s open campus where students can catch up in either area they feel they need to or just hang around the common room and enjoy the community.
Now the important stuff:
The class is May 2-5, and there are openings for only eight students this go around – so please don’t miss your chance. Dual skill classes are a rarity.
For pricing, booking, and questions email Carol Adams
at jc-adams@msn.com or call 507-289-4189.
Editor’s note: We’ve just sent Peter Follansbee’s book, “Joiner’s Work,” to the printer. It will be released in May. If you order a pre-publication copy from our store you will receive a free pdf of the book at checkout.
I’ve told most of my stories many times. When I first learned woodworking, it was from books. Books and one magazine. Ultimately that led me to taking a workshop/class with John (Jennie) Alexander and Drew Langsner. Some years later, Alexander and I started a correspondence in which we collaborated while 500 miles apart. This correspondence consisted of letters, 35mm slides, notes and photocopies of research/books/museum work. Back and forth these things sailed between Hingham, Mass., and Baltimore, Md. Maybe three or four times a year we’d physically work together. This went on for quite a while, until email came along and changed how we worked. (I lost all the email copies of our collaboration in a hard-drive crash. Let that be a lesson….)
What this means is I have been documenting my woodworking habits, ideas, foibles since about 1989, in words and pictures. I learned how to use a camera, tripod, cable release/self-timers etc. back in those days to shoot slides showing JA what I was doing – while s/he’d do the same down in Baltimore. We ate through a lot of Ektachrome. The good ones we kept, and used in slide lectures to woodworking groups, museum audiences and whoever would sit still for our dog and pony shows.
Interestingly, when I started museum work in 1994, that made my documentation more difficult. It was the audience – no one wanted to see all that gear set up in my shop, so I was limited in how often I could set up my camera stuff. Mostly, then, it was before or after hours during the season, but in the off-season/winter, I just left it in place.
Starting about 1992, JA and I would often talk about “the book,” as in, “we’ll have to put that in the book…” about joinery. That book percolated for 20 years until it became “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree.”
A couple years before that book was done, I had the idea for “my” book – much of the iconic joined and carved furniture of the 17th century: chests and boxes, cupboards, chairs, tables and more. And carving. And more carving. So I wrote and wrote, took pictures and filed things where, in theory, I could find them.
Like the joined stool book, this one got interrupted a few times, but I halved the time it took and then some. We ditched some of the repetition, but I think when you learn the mortise-and-tenon and frame-and-panel, then composing the piece of furniture is not all that complicated. A cupboard is not much different than a chest; the chair and table are like overgrown joint stools, Thus the focus of the new book is boxes and chests and carving. And more carving.
One standout visitor comment at my old job I remember clearly. One of the members of what I call my “craft genealogy,” Bill Coperthwaite, had just died. He was on my mind as I was working that busy November day. I forget what I was making, but it was oak for sure – and a woman watched me for quite a while, we chatted some, and in the end, she turned to her partner and said, “It makes me want to go home and make something!” I hope my new book, “Joiner’s Work,” gets the same reaction.
