The facade of the Florida School of Woodwork in Tampa, Florida (not that I’m biased, but I’m teaching there in 2022).
I’ve been getting a lot of requests for gift certificates for our Covington Mechanicals woodworking classes at the storefront. But as I’ve written before, we’re not really a school, and we have so few classes (and so few spaces available) compared to actual woodworking schools that it’s not practicable for us to offer gift certificates for them. (Gift Certificates are available for Lost Art Press/Crucible Tools, but they aren’t usable for classes because those aren’t really associated with LAP. Chris just lets me hold them at the storefront because he’s a prince among men.)
There are surely many more woodworking schools that offer gift certificates; please list them in the comments (ideally with a link to the GC page), so that your fellow woodworkers may get a gift they’ll love: a weekend or week or more of woodworking.
– Fitz
p.s. I’m teaching at The Florida School of Woodwork next October…so that would be my choice 😉
When I grew up, we had a red Lada 1200. It was a 1982 model, a compact four-door sedan, produced in the The Soviet Union. It was a primitive and humble car. Nothing fancy anywhere. No bling or stylish features. But it was affordable, reliable and easy to repair. And most importantly it was built for driving across Russia’s vast and frosty tundras. So it came with a hand crank. That way the car could be started if you were stranded with a flat battery in deep Siberia and the wolves were coming. Or in a modern Norwegian suburb.
The car fit us well. It was, of course, frowned upon by those who could afford the arrogance. We didn’t care. It had four wheels and could take a beating. My parents were working class. They had to get their priorities right. Meaning whenever there was anything left after paying the bills, they weren’t going to spend it on flashy stuff.
And just like the Lada, everything we owned soon lived up to the same principle. Whether it was our house, our furniture or our clothes – it was made to be used, repaired and then used again. This mindset seeped into everything, and I soon grew up appreciating modest and honest designs. I learned that beauty lies in simplicity, both in principle and form. And patina wasn’t even a word. It was just a consequence.
And while this might be a stretch: The first time I laid eyes on a Welsh stick chair, I instantly fell in love. Something very familiar pulled me in. Just like our Soviet car, the chair was honest and uncomplicated. No user manual needed. No fancy turnings or flamboyant design features. It was rugged, yet simple and elegant. It was the most beautiful and honest chair I had ever seen. Huge personality. No secrets. I trusted it.
I realised that these commonplace chairs reflect life. Like people, each and every one of them were unique. Made to meet a need, without plans, from materials available at hand, they were all direct manifestations of their makers and owners. They were postcards from the past. Like an old woman’s wrinkled face or a working man’s crooked back, they told stories I could believe in.
They were imperfectly perfect. Repairs, scars and bruises just blended into their personality. There was nothing to hide. If I ever found an old stick chair with a hand crank under the seat, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be very surprised.
In our 21st Chair Chat™ with Klaus Skrudland and Rudy Everts, we discuss a primitive stick chair that looks so uncomfortable it would best be used to interrogate spies. As usual, the language is on the salty side. Then again, a chair like this needs a rich vocabulary to be discussed properly. As always, if this kind of entertainment does not suit you, maybe you’ll like this endless horse better.
Art Deco inspiration. “I love Art Deco design,” writes JoJo Wood. “I have always had a great fondness for it — one of the many reasons I love visiting the States: such inspiring architecture. When Sean & I got married we made our own wedding rings out of old silver spoon handles, with Art Deco designs on them. My Art Deco spoons started with inspiration taken from our wedding rings, and have evolved from there… I take a lot of pictures of cool buildings, amongst other things, to translate into spoon designs.”
In the late 1990s, when JoJo Wood was just a few years old, her parents moved from the county of Essex, northeast of London, to Edale in the Peak District of Derbyshire, between the industrial cities of Sheffield and Manchester. A tiny village in a remote corner of north-central England, Edale attracted hikers, especially during late summer and fall, when its hills were cloaked in purple heather. Many of these visitors also turned out to be interested in another local offering: spoon carving courses taught by JoJo’s parents, Robin and Nicola. When JoJo was about 13, the family moved from a stone cottage “in the middle of nowhere – the last house on the Pennine Way” – to the village center, where they taught their craft in the village hall. “Rob would do all the axing and rough carving, and then Nic would finish them. She has a design background and eye for aesthetics.”
They often roped their daughter into helping. JoJo can’t recall exactly when she started using a knife, but she knows it was when she was “definitely very young. I had quite a short attention span,” she continues, “so I never really made objects. It was mostly swords and spears to fight my brother with.” (That’s her younger brother, Ollie, now 24.) People would come for the courses and stay in the village, carving spoons during the day, then tack on a couple of days to go walking in the hills.
Start them young. Nicola showing JoJo how to work at a shavehorse.
A quick study. JoJo at the shavehorse, working on her own.
Robin’s teaching wasn’t limited to the village hall in Edale. He taught in other parts of England, as well as internationally, and always tried to take the family with him when he traveled. That’s how JoJo came to meet famed Swedish woodcarver Wille Sundqvist, whom many consider one of the fathers of green woodworking, when she was just 8 or 9. While she appreciates the honor of having met Wille in person, she admits that as a kid, “all the talk about knives got boring.” Still, when their hosts brought out knives as gifts for her and her brother, she accepted hers graciously and says “That was my first knife of my own.”
JoJo and Ollie with Wille Sundqvist.
Fast forward a few years. “Every teen-ager goes through a stage where everything their parents do is the least cool and they want nothing to do with it.” So she explored other things. JoJo took the GCSEs (General Certificate of Secondary Education) at 16, then went to what Brits call college – usually what’s known as technical or community college in the States – in Chesterfield to study art. “I struggled a lot with my mental health,” she says, acknowledging a challenge faced by many at the transition to adulthood. As a result, she didn’t get far before dropping out. The following year she tried A-level studies (roughly equivalent to junior and senior high in the States) but dropped out at the start of her second year due to depression and anxiety.
“I was later, in my early 20s, diagnosed as autistic,” she explains. “That probably has a lot to do with my struggling…. This undiagnosed autism made me not fit in very well. It helps me be kinder to myself about some things, because I really struggle in a lot of situations. I remind myself that it’s not my fault; it’s just the way my brain works.”
At 18 or 19 she dropped out the second time. “I spent time in my depression hole,” she continues. While JoJo was growing up, her mother attended graduate school, where she earned a doctorate designing multimedia resources for teaching craft skills. She always spoke about how great it was to go back to university as a mature student. Thanks to her mother’s perspective, JoJo understood that she could return to the world of formal education someday if she needed a qualification. “That was a different opinion,” she says, from the prevailing assumption that anyone who did not complete a degree straight after high school was something of a failure. “It’s kind of sad that that’s how everybody viewed me when I didn’t go to university.”
Weaving a chair seat at Mike Abbott’s, here with “Danish cord,” a paper-based material, in a wavy twill pattern adapted for chair seats from the world of weaving. “I spent a lot of time seat-weaving during my time at Mike’s, and adapted quite a few patterns,” writes JoJo. The chair is a Mike Abbott-designed “lath-back.”
She spent a summer assisting Mike Abbott, who teaches chairmaking in Herefordshire, southwest of Birmingham. “You’d spend a week living in the woods, cooking on wood fires, sitting around the campfire, and you’d make a chair. Assistants help with projects, make tea, and so on. There I spent more time doing woodworking and also my first big teaching, although informally.” After helping people to make chairs and understand how wood “works,” she showed them how to carve spoons in the evenings.
When her dad was organizing the first Spoonfest with his friend Barn, she found herself once again roped in to help. She’d carved a few spoons by that time but “nothing that seriously.” One of her jobs was to put together the festival T-shirt, which had to list the instructors. “They’re all men,” she noted. It struck her as odd – those who’d attended her parents’ courses were fairly evenly mixed by gender. But there didn’t seem to be any women carving spoons professionally at that time, she says. “So…in a fit of feminist stubbornness, [I] decided that by the following year I would be good enough to teach.”
New and improved instructor line-up.
She spent the year practicing, and sure enough, was teaching that following year, 2013. “I was hooked,” she says. “Couldn’t put it down.”
If it seems a stretch to go from a remote village in the countryside of northern England to teaching internationally, all without the benefit of conventional higher education, JoJo’s trajectory is a little easier to comprehend when you go beyond her parents’ example and how they immersed their daughter in craft from her earliest years to consider the passionate interest and ambition her father demonstrated in researching and reviving a branch of woodcraft that might otherwise have been lost to history. Google Robin Wood and you’ll find he has “MBE” (Member of the Order of the British Empire) appended to his name, a great public honor recognizing his contributions to the survival of traditional British craft. For much of his life, Robin has made a living by turning bowls. No ordinary bowls, these; Robin revived the craft of pole-lathe turning last practiced by George Lailey six decades earlier. After Lailey died in 1958, his workshop was moved to the Museum of English Rural Life. Robin studied Lailey’s lathe and tools and reverse-engineered them, in effect teaching himself from scratch. He took his foot-powered lathe with him to craft fairs to demonstrate the process. The power of such an example, as well as the opportunities Robin shared with his family, should not be underestimated.
Going farther afield
Forage your material, in this case birch bark for a canoe.
JoJo at work on the canoe.
Robin and JoJo enjoy the fruits of their labor.
JoJo stayed in Herefordshire during her early 20s. By that point she was teaching internationally; one year she taught courses in England, France, Germany and Sweden, in addition to the United States, where she was one of the instructors at the first Greenwood Fest in Plymouth, Mass. She’d visited the States a couple of years before with her dad; they spent a few weeks with Jarrod Dahl in Wisconsin, building a birch bark canoe, an experience she describes as “amazing! Really cool.” They also traveled to a spoon gathering in Milan, a tiny town “in the middle-of-nowhere Minnesota and to Northhouse, where Robin taught a course. Peter Follansbee took that course. “In the evenings we did spoon carving,” JoJo goes on. “Peter’s spoon carving background is from the Swedish bent-branch world; at Northhouse, he was carving from a straight piece of wood. “I probably said something fairly unflattering – I can show you a better way to do that.” Instead of being insulted, he was impressed, she says. “We got on great.” So when he was organizing Greenwood Fest, he invited her to teach spoon carving.
Faceted backs of spoons.
The spoon carving world is quite a small one, JoJo says, though it’s getting bigger. “Everybody seems to know everybody. We were all on Facebook and Instagram, posting about our various things.”
“I’ve been very lucky. I grew up around amazing craftspeople and have been lucky to get to know everybody. A lot of the woodworking community is dominated by old men. When people are looking to book some people to change the demographics a bit, I bring the age significantly down. And I don’t have a beard, which is a change,” she laughs – “ticking two boxes at once!”
JoJo in instructor mode with a student named Julie, before “Spoon Day” in 2019.
Pathcarvers: enhancing mental health through making
With her partner, Sean, she operates Pathcarvers in Birmingham, where she moved in 2017. Pathcarvers teaches woodcarving as a way to help people with mental and physical health challenges – “a tool for positive social change.” Through Pathcarvers, they set up events that give people access to craft. “The act of making is intrinsically human,” JoJo points out. “A lot of people don’t have creative outlets that can really help. Jobs are becoming more screen-oriented. People get home and put the telly on or Netflix because we’re so tired. Making is something that can be beneficial in so many ways.”
They work with groups as well as individuals, bringing together people from diverse backgrounds. “You sit down and do some carving. It helps you talk about things. You have to concentrate on that sharp thing in your hand because you don’t want to hurt yourself. It gives you space to quiet your brain down.”
When she was teaching elsewhere, she says, she’d notice that there always came a point where “everybody goes silent because they’re so focused on what they’re doing. The world disappears. At the end of the course, they’ve got this thing in their hands that they’ve made. They can go away and use that in their kitchen and be reminded of this experience. So many people never get to experience that. They don’t even know it’s an option. Pathcarvers is about making this as accessible as we can, and making it affordable. With craft courses there are endless [opportunities] to go away in the woods, but there’s not that much in the cities. [Thanks to Pathcarvers], people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford to do it can do it.”
They are a social enterprise (known in the United States as a non-profit). Until now, they’ve been self-funded. Course fees have made it possible for them to subsidize training for those who can’t pay. After woodworker, author and lawyerKieran Binnie took his life in April 2021, Christopher Schwarz, Megan Fitzpatrick and Rachel Moss (Kieran’s spouse) wanted to do something to memorialize him and create a positive legacy. “He’d brought so much to so many people in his life,” JoJo comments, “and we wanted to continue that. Kieran lived in Birmingham, too. It seemed a good fit. He, too, thought about community.” Chris and Megan put her and Sean in touch with Rachel Moss, Kieran’s wife. “It’s been really amazing, the amount of support,” JoJo says of the contributions brought in following a post about Pathcarvers and the Kieran Binnie Memorial Fund for Craft. The fund will enable them to do more work free of charge, and to work with other organizations to help people with their mental health.
Lefty plow? This plow plane is a mirror image of a plow, and is different than what Moxon describes in his text. So we’ll have to show you some other plows.
The first book we published at Lost Art Press was “The Art of Joinery,” which was a reprint of the earliest English-language text on woodworking – plus some modern commentary from me. The book did well enough to buy us a few cases of good beer, so John and I decided to publish a second book. And now, 53 books later….
“The Art of Joinery” by Joseph Moxon has always been fascinating reading for me. When I first got my hands on a copy, I thought: Now I will learn the secrets of 17th-century joinery. But after reading Moxon a dozen times, I was shocked by how little had changed between the 17th century and the 21st. The tools, processes and mindset were very familiar (after I got past some unusual spellings).
So why even read the book? It represents one of the foundations of our craft, and it is written by an observer – not a practitioner – of the craft. And so it crackles with excitement as Moxon (a printer by trade) learns about an allied skill. And it is a window to an earlier world that we can easily relate to as Moxon documents sharpening, making boards flat and cutting a mortise-and-tenon joint.
The book was eventually followed up by Peter Nicholson’s “Mechanic’s Companion,” which is still as useful today as it was in 1812 for hand-tool woodworkers. Together, these two books are the foundation of our hand-tool knowledge in English.
“The Art of Joinery” is also unique in our catalog for the way it is printed. The pages have a rough outer edge – called a “deckle” edge – that mimics the look of early books. And the undyed paper was selected because it looks like early rag paper. All-in-all, it’s a fun book to read and contemplate.
S. 8. The use of the plow. The plow marked B 6. is a narrow rabbet plane with some additions to it, including two square staves, marked a a {yet some of them have the upper edges of the staves rounded off for the better compliance [fit] with the hand}. These staves are let through two square mortises in the stock, marked “b b.” The staves are about seven or eight inches long and stand straight and square on the far side of the stock. These two staves have shoulders on the closer side of the stock that reach down to the wooden sole of the plane {for there is also an iron sole belonging to the plow}. To the bottom of these two shoulders is riveted with iron rivets a fence {as workmen call it}, which comes close under the wooden sole, and its depth reaches below the iron sole about half an inch. Because the iron of the plow is very narrow and the sides of it towards the bottom are not to be enclosed in the stock {for the same reason that was given in the rabbet plane}, therefore upon the stock is let in, and strongly nailed, an iron plate that is the thickness of the plow iron. [That is because] wood [alone] of that breadth will not be strong enough to endure the force the lower end of the plow iron is put to. This iron plate is almost of the same thickness that the breadth of a plow iron is. Joiners have several plows for several widths of grooves.
The office of the plow is to plow a narrow, square groove on the edge of a board. The board is set on edge with one end in the bench-screw, and its other edge upon a pin or pins that are put into a hole or holes in the leg or legs of the bench. Such a hole or holes [are chosen that] will most conveniently for height, fit the breadth of the board. Then the fence of the plow is set to that distance off the iron plate of the plow that you intend the groove shall lie off the edge of the board. If you would have the groove lie half an inch off the [edge of the] board, then the two staves must with the mallet be knocked through the mortises in the stock until the fence stands half an inch off the iron plate. And if the staves are fitted stiff enough in the mortises of the stock, it will keep at that distance while you plow the groove. For the fence {lying lower than the iron of the plane}: When you set the iron of the plow upon the edge of the board, [it] will lie flat against the farther edge of the board, and so [it will] keep the iron of the plow all the length of the board at the same distance from the edge of the board that the iron of the plow has [been set by the user] from the fence. Therefore [with] your plow being thus fitted, [you can] plow the groove as you work with other planes; only as you hold on the stock of other planes when you use them, now you must lay hold of the two staves and their shoulders and so thrust your plow forwards until your groove be made to your depth.
If the staves are not stiff enough in the mortises in the stock, you must stiffen them by knocking a little wooden wedge between the staves and their mortises.
Familiar plows. These plows are more typical in English and North American shops. On metal plows, the fence moves on fixed posts (which Moxon calls staves). In Moxon’s description, the staves move through the body of the plow to adjust the fence, as shown in this screw-arm plow.
Analysis Moxon’s plow is widely reported as a mirror image of the same tool in Félibien’s work. And that is why this picture of this plow is like a Gucci bag for sale on an urban street corner. It looks OK from about 10 feet. But on closer inspection, this is not the plow you’re looking for.
Unlike many tools in Moxon, the plow has evolved quite a bit since his description. And you’d be unlikely to find a plow as he describes. Let’s look at the differences between the Moxon plow and some ultra-contemporary (19th-century) ones.
1 The posts or staves. Moxon states that the staves move through the body of the tool to adjust the fence. The fence is fixed to the staves. This kind of wooden plow was common in England and North America but not Europe. In typical European plows (which is what is shown in the accompanying plate) the staves are fixed to the body and the fence slides on them.
2 From many plows, one. Moxon states that the mechanic would have a different plow for every size groove. Modern plows have interchangeable irons in a range of sizes.
3 How the fence is set. In Moxon’s book, the staves and fence are friction-fit into mortises. So you tap the fence and staves to move the fence closer to or farther away from the cutter (with wedges to help). Modern plows use something mechanical to secure the fence, from thumbscrews to screws to far, far more clever mechanisms.
4 No depth stop. All but the most primitive plow planes have a depth stop that stops the plane’s cutting action when you reach your final depth. No mention of a depth stop is made in Moxon.
Begin at the end. The first strokes with a plow are typically taken at the far end of the board, and the work progresses with longer and longer strokes. This helps keep the groove as straight as possible by reducing the chance that the iron will wander in a long cut.
As to actually using the plow, Moxon merely states that you set the fence and thrust it forward like the other planes. This would imply that you start planing at one end and take a shaving to the other end. This can work. However, many craftsmen use a different technique.
Many start near the far end of the board and take a short stroke with the plow to start cutting a groove just a few inches long. Then each following stroke is a little bit longer as the woodworker backs up along the length of the board.
You can indeed do exactly what Moxon suggests, but the chances of your iron wandering by following the grain of the board are greater.
By taking short, advancing strokes, you can keep the plow’s fence against the work during the part of the cut that is new, then the cutter drops into the already-made groove and the tool won’t jump out. Plus, if your plow plane does wander, it will be for a shorter distance, and you’ll get an opportunity to make a correction before the tool wanders so far that your work is ruined. Here’s another tip on use: Give each of your hands only one job to do when working with the plow. Use one hand to thrust the plane forward. Use the other hand to press the fence against the work. Don’t try to make both hands do both jobs.
