My name is Jennie Alexander. Until 2007, my name was John Alexander. I thank all those who have been supportive and kind. Yes indeed, people change, times change, wood continues to be wonderful!
I am a chairmaker. I made my first post-and-rung chair in the late 1960s. My interest in chairs began much earlier when my mother, Dorothy Parker Lowe, gave me her two-slat post-and-rung chair. In 1978, I wrote “Make a Chair from a Tree: An Introduction to Working Green Wood,” a practical book about post-and-rung chairmaking to document what I had learned up to that time. I call this book MACFAT for short. In 1994, in a second edition I added an afterword showing some updated methods. The book has been a part of the growing interest in the practice of traditional crafts with hand tools and green wood. It led me to coin the word “greenwoodworking.”
By 1999, both editions of the book were out of print. With Anatol Polillo, a good friend and craftsman, I made a two-hour video of “Make a Chair from a Tree.” It is now available from Lost Art Press. The two books, the video, extensive teaching and research have led me to the wonderful world of kind and sharing traditional craftsmen and scholars. I have learned more than I have taught. Thanks to them I have grown both as a person and chairmaker. This third edition continues the process. The basic approach – working greenwood with simple hand tools, understanding how greenwood changes shape as it dries and taking advantage of those changes to construct a strong, long-lasting two-slat post-and-rung chair – remains the same.
Greenwoodworking is a traditional way of working a piece of wood that (initially) contains substantial moisture content by riving (splitting) and shaving. Saws are used only to cut across long fibers, not with them. In some greenwoodworking crafts not only is greenwood used in the initial stages, the shrinking and swelling characteristics of wood are employed and sometimes artfully avoided. That is true here. To make this chair, we need only hand tools. Tool expense is modest.
I use the phrase “post-and-rung chair” as a useful generic term for a crowded group of vernacular chairs: country, kitchen, ladderback, Shaker, Appalachian, Delaware Valley and so on. The basic post-and-rung two-slat chair described here has but four parts: four vertical posts, 12 horizontal rungs, two slats and fiber seating.
Where Did this Chair Come From? I became a greenwoodworker by accident. My mother was a single parent. I helped around the house. She told Jerry at Boulevard Hardware that she would pay for any tools or supplies I needed. Jerry – or his sidekick, Miss Erma – gave me a Stanley loose-leaf notebook full of descriptions on the use of Stanley hand tools. I attended the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, where excellent shop classes were mandatory. At mother’s suggestion I framed and finished my apartment in our basement. She then sent me to St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, where I repaired furniture in the abandoned woodshop. Through all this, first and last was the post-and-rung chair that Mother gave me! I grew up with it. It inherited me.
Before I made my first chair, I was a young lawyer reading books on woodworking and chairmaking and had collected some tools. My neighbor, Jack Goembel, let me use his shop. Later, another woodworking friend decided to stop woodworking to become a mail carrier and sold me his lathe, band saw and drill press. To buy them I had to take out our first-ever loan. It was at the insistence of my lovely wife, Joyce.
I joined the Early American Industries Association (EAIA) and met Charles Hummel, then curator of collections at the Winterthur Museum in Wilmington, Delaware. He brought out the best in me. Somehow, I wound up with a funny workbench, working seriously on furniture and visiting museum basements with Hummel to see broken pieces of furniture.
Hummel’s landmark book “With Hammer in Hand” (1968) catalogs an extensive collection of woodworking tools, equipment, account books and furnishings produced by three generations of the Dominy family of East Hampton, Long Island, circa. 1760-1840. Hummel once told me, “We have a Dominy chair that when the humidity is down you can disassemble.” We did so, and from this type of research I learned much of what I know about how old chairs were made. One example is a notch or groove turned in each tenon – the same notch I’ve seen in Southern chairs as well; hundreds of years and miles apart. I was fascinated and became an expert on busted chair parts.
Sabbathday Lake Shakers, 1984. Front row: Minnie Green, R. Mildred Barker, Marie Burgess, Frances A. Carr. Back row: Elsie McCool, Theodore E. Johnson, Wayne Smith, Arnold Hadd.
Joyce and I made several trips to the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community, where we met Sister Mildred. Our first visit was to see the chairs. Sister Mildred said, “You know, it’s interesting. People think we’re chairs.” We visited a couple more times to see the chairs and also learn about the Shakers. Soon, I decided that I wanted to build a Shaker one-slat dining chair and managed it with a few tools and a lathe.
What is a Jennie Chair? The chair in this book emerged from the study of the joinery in those busted chairs, Shaker chairs, Appalachian ladderbacks and the human body. The chair is especially comfortable because the back posts are bent and have a characteristic flat shaved on the front face, giving rise to the name “mule ear” for chairs like this. The rear posts also flare outward, enhancing the curve of the back slats for more comfort. The position of the lower slat supports the sitter’s lumbar spine.
At first, my slat backs were too heavy with hickory and big parts. I asked, can we lighten it up? Can we make it like a kitchen chair? Because that is a masterpiece. The mule ear is important to get the roundness of the post out of the way, and it looks good. I also asked: How many rungs and where are they? The wonderful kitchen chair I own is missing one rung compared to mine. Many, or even most, traditional post-and-rung chairs have just two rear rungs: the seat rung and the bottom rung. I want every rung to share the shock. It’s like grass in the wind. I came up with this idea early in the process.
Detail of slats/post. The flat, or relief, shaved on the rear post makes it easier to bend and more comfortable for the sitter than a fully-round post.
The chair is attractive, strong and comfortable. It looks like a traditional post-and-rung chair. However, its construction differs. When put in service, a post-and-rung side chair suffers its greatest stress in the fore and aft direction when sat upon, and when it is leaned back upon. Disregarding custom, we anticipate and respect these powerful destructive racking forces. Unlike “traditional” chairs, the side frames are constructed first. Then their rung tenons are firmly interlocked in place by the front and rear rung tenons. I have never seen nor heard of another post-and-rung chair so constructed. A cautionary note to myself: In a vernacular craft of long history, such as stick-chair making, it is all too easy to claim invention. With time we learn that there is little new under the sun. I suggest you make your first chair “by the book” then go on from there. These features make a Jennie Chair.
Cautionary Words to the Experienced Craftsperson This book contains all that you need to know about making post-and-rung chairs from shaved greenwood. My goal is to provide enough information for woodworkers of all levels to be able to make a chair from a tree.
But in ways this text is a bit pedantic, cautionary and repetitive. I envision my reader as a married homemaker in Cincinnati, Ohio, who plans to learn chairmaking in one-half of the family’s two-car garage. I wrote this for her. So please bear with us.
Australian woodworker Carol Russell’s carvings of animals are a visual form of haiku. With a few judicious swipes of the knife, she transforms small chunks of wood into figures so evocative that it’s a challenge to avoid reading into them distinct personalities and tales of adventure. The curious cock to a dog’s ear, the satisfied curl of a cat’s tail – these and other details bring her animals to life. So when Christopher Schwarz asked whether I had any ideas for the dustjacket of “Shop Tails” (which we anticipate receiving from the printer in early October), an image of Carol’s animals was one of my three suggestions. As it turned out, Chris, Megan Fitzpatrick and Kara Gebhart Uhl are also fans of Carol’s work. So Lost Art Press commissioned her to carve a dog and a cat. She surprised us all by adding a second cat, this one orange; we instantly named him Tony.
Cat in tiger myrtle.
Huon pine boat.
Scattered among the animals in Carol’s Instagram feed you’ll also find the occasional rowboat. Carol grew up in Tasmania, a small island off the south coast of Australia known for its pristine wilderness and endemic timber species. Tasmania has one rare native species, Huon pine, that has been traditionally used in boatbuilding and high-quality furniture making; its high methyl eugenol content makes it resistant to marine borers. Carol says “it’s very rare now, and a protected species; there is definitely romance attached to it, partly due to its beauty and the fact that it stands as a monument to the amazing forests it grows in.” She finds a special charm in Huon pine boats – they evoke “that daydreaming aspect, that [English children’s book writer] Enid Blyton [thing] of [children] floating away for a day of adventure without their parents. And usually as a kid you’re accompanied by a scruffy dog that’s up for anything. That’s the dog I’m always trying to capture.”
Early Life
Carol at six, after she’d cut her own hair.
“We always had animals,” Carol says. In the 1960s, when she was a child, her family lived on the edge of Launceston, right next to open fields. The area where they lived was far from prosperous. Many people couldn’t afford to have their animals spayed or neutered, so there were always stray, injured and abandoned animals around. Her family took in most of those who showed up at their house. In addition to dogs and cats, her brothers occasionally found other animals to rescue. One time they brought a little kangaroo home, where it joined the other animals in the house and curled up by the fire. “At one stage we had 13 cats, three dogs, a kangaroo and a sheep,” though the sheep had to stay outside. “It was completely mad! We just had a little suburban house with a veggie garden.”
It was another time, she points out. “We’re not encouraged to keep wildlife now, and many groups work hard to re-house animals back into the wild. It was a lovely way to grow up, though.”
Carol’s father and four brothers, Norman, Peter, Kerry and Patrick, around 1958. She and her sister, Linda, had not yet been born.
Her father, Len, worked on telegraph lines for the postmaster general. One day, before Carol was born, he fell from a telegraph pole onto his back. The injury left him in terrible pain that became chronic. Although he was able to walk, he couldn’t walk far. Nor could he drive. In response to his dramatically changed condition, he planted a vegetable garden and grew most of the food for his family of eight – he and his wife had six kids, of whom Carol is the youngest. “He was enormously methodical,” Carol says. “The garden was the focus of his life. He couldn’t do a lot. A bit each day, though, mounted up. I grew up with the most amazing food.” All of his friends had served in the Second World War. He hadn’t gone because he’d had a double dose of the smallpox vaccination by mistake and had become so sick that he was repatriated home. Survivor’s guilt led him to drink heavily in the early years, though he eventually got that under control. “I never knew him to work [at a job], but he was a very wise, very gentle person, a lovely man. He adored my mother and would sing old love songs to her. It drove me mad, but now I can see how sweet it was.”
Although her dad received a disability pension, it was modest. “Which is why my mother was always coming up with schemes to make more money. She would send us door to door, selling cakes. We’d have big trays of lamingtons (a sponge cake rolled in chocolate and coconut) and highly decorated cupcakes and slices. They looked amazing; no one would refuse when confronted with these delicious goodies.” At Christmastime her mother sold dozens of her Christmas cakes and puddings; people would order them months ahead, and storing them took all the available cupboard space.
Carol’s mother, Valerie, had been born in Dublin. As a young woman, her grandmother had fallen in love and married an Irishman, who was “quite a devilish man.” The family emigrated to Tasmania, where Carol’s grandfather left them and went to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) to grow tea. He never contacted them again. Valerie was largely raised by her grandparents and was a voracious reader, as she remains today at the age of 92. Carol’s father was born in Tasmania of Welsh ancestry. He and her mother met in Launceston around 1950; each brought children to the marriage, and they had three more together.
“My mother was enormously resourceful and enthusiastic about everything,” says Carol. “Always making and growing things.” None of this was unusual where they lived during the ’60s and early ’70s, she points out. Lots of people made what they could and bartered their work for that of others. “The lady who made clothes made clothes to swap for homegrown vegetables or preserves. That was just what people had to do to get by.” Her mother, to this day, sometimes says, “’I think I should go and get a job.’ She hates idleness.”
Valerie, Carol’s mother.
Early Career
Given her love of animals, Carol wanted to be a veterinarian. Throughout high school she had a weekend job working with a local vet, a Scotsman “who distilled whiskey in the tearoom out the back of the consultation room” because his wife wouldn’t let him do it in the house. “I’d sit next to it drinking my tea and hear it gurgling away. I learned so much from him; he was so generous to people and animals and was never too busy to teach me what he could.” When they delivered puppies by caesarian section, the vet would hand them to her and she’d rub them to get them warmed up. “I loved it,” she says of this work. “It was just a delight, but it could be sad, too.”
As a child, Carol had been a huge reader and one of those kids who could pick up almost anything. She was particularly interested in drama, English and art and adds, “I had a healthy opinion of myself as well!” When she was 17, the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) offered her a cadetship as a journalist, a type of internship that involved research and writing articles. All was going well until the day she was flicking through a newspaper and happened on an ad for a crew to sail a 35′ trimaran to New Guinea. She applied to be a crew member, forwent the cadetship and left Tasmania “on a little red yacht sailing off into the sunset in winter.” She quickly adds: “If my son tried to do [the same thing] now, I’d lock him in a room!”
She and her crewmates had a wonderful time. The Bass Strait between Tasmania and Australia has beautiful islands with bird rookeries and seal colonies; they saw “a lot of amazing things over the course of two months while sailing around photographing wildlife.” It was July, the middle of winter in the southern hemisphere. Unlike the other crew members, Carol had no previous sailing experience and found even the most mundane aspects of the trip rewarding. One of her jobs was to cook for the crew. There was also a routine in which each crew member spent two hours at the tiller while the others rested. They were on the water in what felt like “the middle of nowhere. I’ve never forgotten it, that solitary sense,” she recalls today. “You could see the phosphorescence in the water, and sometimes, dolphins would whiz past leaving a silver trail behind them. I think that’s why the boat thing is strongly ingrained in me. I’ve never forgotten that feeling of freedom.”
But it wasn’t all idyllic. The man who owned the boat was insufferable. If he lost at chess, he’d go to his bunk and sulk for days. “After four months or so I got really fed up with it.” By the time they arrived at Mooloolaba Beach in Queensland, she’d been in a quarrel with the captain. She got her backpack of clothes and said she was done, so he rowed her to shore and left her there. It was nearly 40 years ago, long before the widespread availability of cell phones. She had only just turned 18. “I watched the boat sail off and thought ‘What am I going to do now?’”
Her sense of pride kicked in. She couldn’t go home just four months after leaving, so she made up her mind to head for Brisbane, the nearest big town. She met some people on the beach who offered her a ride. “I didn’t choose Brisbane,” she says of the city where she’s spent most of the intervening 30-plus years. “It just happened. At that stage I was a blank slate with a little bag of clothes and no money, but lots of enthusiasm and self-confidence. It’s amazing how you can rebuild a life. I often think back to that little bag of clothes…” – quite a contrast with the many possessions and responsibilities that she, like many of us, has collected over the years.
Carol, far left, working as a model “with too much makeup, at an open-air fashion show.”
Carol (far right) with her father and a bridesmaid at her sister’s wedding.She thinks her expression reflects her displeasure at having to wear the dress.
For income in Brisbane she worked at Aroma’s Café, one of the first places there to roast and blend its own coffee. Sometimes she worked as a model – it was a great time for emerging clothing and jewelry designers. In time she met new friends, one of whom, Wayne Crotty, was a musician/furnituremaker. “That was it,” she remembers. “I saw what he was making and was so astounded that you could make a table. I’d never thought about how things were made before.” She asked him to teach her. He did. She worked with him for 10 years.
Carol foraging in the wood pile during her 20s.
Her first job was a Shaker table with a tripod base. She learned about mortise-and-tenon joinery, dovetails, sharpening and setting up machines. “Wayne was not a fine woodworker. He was a good ‘practical’ woodworker. He knew a lot of people. He took me to meet people that owned areas of forest.” They would selectively choose and mill particular trees, being careful not to take too many. They also salvaged a lot of logs from forestry clearing, so she saw the whole process and developed a deep understanding of wood as a material. Of the men she worked with, she says “some of them appeared quite gruff and very blokey, not the sort of people I thought would take a young woman very seriously. I discovered, though, they loved the fact I was so keen. If you’re interested and you listen, the world opens up to you.”
She also ventured into the world of building theater sets. While working for a company that made stage sets for big events, she learned about what she calls “practical construction” – nothing precious or fine, but more “how to turn a ballroom in a grand hotel into a fantasyland or forest for a particular event or conference. You all worked together really hard on tight deadlines and drank a lot of cheap coffee.” The comradery was fabulous.
Large cabinet with camphor laurel drawers and etched glass.
By her late 20s Carol was ready “to make things that were really special and would mean something to people.” She began to design her own pieces and developed her own customer base; people would come to her with an idea that she would sketch, then build for them. For about seven years she did one-off pieces, working in Wayne’s shop, with the occasional exhibition of work that was more creative. “I started reading all the [issues of] Fine Woodworking magazine I could get my hands on,” as well as books by James Krenov and George Nakashima. She was especially interested in Japanese design. Unfortunately, she has few photographs of her work from that time.
In her early 30s, when she was running her custom furniture business, Brisbane furniture maker Simon Hooper, whom she calls “a real hero of mine,” asked if she would come to work with him at Bell Brothers, an old Brisbane furniture making institution. Carol leapt at the chance. The company also owned a funeral parlor; the shop was next to the coffin makers, and they often needed extra people to help with funerals. Carol would have to change out of her shop clothes into a black suit and drive an old Mercedes hearse. After the funeral it was back to the bench. “It gave you this crazy perspective on life,” she remarks. “If this board was twisted, well… It’s not the end of the world; it can be straightened. Everything is really about people,” she realized. “It’s not about stuff. People have been very generous to me with their knowledge and I have encountered mostly kindness.”
Box in Australian red cedar.
“I’ve not had formal training at all,” she continues. “We have some amazing woodworking schools [in Australia] now, and I think I would just love an opportunity to dedicate two or three years to learning.” Lacking that option at the time, she traded labor for instruction. There were no apprenticeships available in the kind of work she wanted to do; it was the 1990s, the dark age of particleboard and MDF. She wanted to work with solid wood. She picked up any new skills she could. As a result, she calls herself “a bit of a Frankenstein woodworker.”
Carol had met her husband, Nick, in 1996 through a mutual friend. They met at a country pub, The Dugandan Hotel in Boonah – “a pub in a paddock,” she calls it. Nick was working as a consultant for an IT company and had just returned from an assignment in Sydney. It was unlikely they would ever have met, but their friend was celebrating a birthday at that particular pub that day. They married in 1998.
The year before, she’d taken a job working in the showroom of Carbatec, a woodworking supply company that had recently begun importing the kind of high-quality tools no one else was selling. They also imported traditional woodworking tools made in Japan. “It was a wonderful place full of beautiful tools and enthusiastic people,” she notes, explaining why she left her own furniture-making business for a job in retail. “The prospect of a steady job was pretty enticing, too.”
When her employers announced they wanted to offer classes, she decided to teach joinery. She went to night classes to learn teaching skills and her work shifted to teaching and writing. Carbatec also had a fabulous catalog that required Carol to write a lot of copy. The owner of the business, Geoff Lowe, had sons-in-law who were American and worked in the business; the new American-made tools were quite an attraction. “Geoff was very generous,” she recalls, “always giving me the new tools and beautiful pieces of wood to try [them on].”
Carol continued to read woodworking publications while working for Carbatec and was inspired by examples of work done by other women. She traveled with the company to Japan, where she met craftspeople and learned about Japanese woodworking tools, which prompted her interest in hand-tool woodworking. For years she’d worked with tools made by Stanley, Record and Marples, good solid stuff made in England of Sheffield steel. But “to pick up a Lie-Nielsen plane or a Japanese chisel…there was real poetry in that.”
Carol started to write for Australian Wood Review, published by Linda and Raf Nathan. She was thrilled to be the first woman on the cover – around 1999, she thinks. Australia had other woodworking magazines that she says were full of “more practical” stuff, but Wood Review was different – it published work of fine quality and cutting-edge design. The Nathans employed her part-time as an editor for a while, and it struck her that she’d returned, in a way, to the world of journalism where she’d started at the age of 17.
Carol, with two of her pieces, on the cover of Australian Wood Review magazine.
Animals & Life
When Carol was 38, she was sharing a workshop with two renowned Australian makers, Roy Schack and Robert Howard, as well as a few others. It was an inspiring environment with a lot of creative energy.
One day, 32 weeks pregnant, she had a brain hemorrhage. Fortunately, she survived, and her son, Hugo, was born without damage. But recovery took a long time and has changed Carol in so many ways that she now thinks of her life as “before” and “after” the aneurysm. Although she’s loath to use those changes as an “excuse” (her word), she hasn’t made much furniture since. The hemorrhage left her painfully sensitive to noise – routers, shapers, thickness planers and other machines all became unbearable. Her sense of sight was also affected. She tried to go back to furniture, “but it just wouldn’t come together.” Four years later, after Nick completed a doctorate, he was offered a post-doctoral position in the Netherlands and they lived there for two years. Carol didn’t make anything during that time; instead, she worked as what she calls a handywoman for the local school. But there’s a great tradition of carving in the Netherlands, which sparked her interest in that field.
After Carol and her family returned to Australia, Carbatec hired her back. One day she made a spoon in a class with Australian woodcarver Gary Field. “It was the first thing I’d really done in all that time [since the aneurysm]. The idea [is] that you start with a whole, and you take away. What you’re left with is the object.” After being wowed by the process of building a Shaker table in her 20s, she experienced a second epiphany in the spoon carving class. She decided to become a wood carver. “You’re going along and all of a sudden your life’s completely derailed,” she explains. “You have this partner who’s trying to make things right, but you can only make things right to a certain point. I was a furniture maker. But I wasn’t a great furniture maker, I never felt completely at home, I had moments where things were quite good. But [carving] was something I felt quite passionate about. It felt like coming home. Other than a band saw, I don’t use machines anymore.”
Huon pine twist spoon charred and finished in beeswax.
A wombat finished in natural rock pigments.
Whether you’re building furniture or carving a cat, she says, the work is “so much about people,” and never more so than when you’re teaching others to build or carve, as Carol does these days. “[Teaching is a skill] that you get to share with people. It literally saves people. It’s saving people now, in these really difficult times.” She refers specifically to Australia’s latest wave of lockdowns, which have filled many with a sense of foreboding. “That little bit of peace of mind people get from making something or growing something with their own hands can just keep them going. It’s the one part of their week that they can rely on.” They come to class and can – well, must – really focus on the work, because it’s so intense.
Carol reaching in her former workshop, an old cottage. (Photo: Yan Chen Photography.)
“I always look at animals,” Carol tells me. “I stare at them constantly. Nothing has ever brought me so much joy as creating these animal forms and trying to distill the essence into this little block of wood.” She compares the intensity of packing so much into a tiny form to the Japanese art of netsuke; it’s “an implosion instead of an explosion, an exercise in not overusing your skill – a couple of cuts in the right place.” In terms of her work, she says, “the world is shrinking into something small, but I’ve needed all the bigness of everything I’ve ever done to be able to distill it down into this small gesture.”
A bird carved in charred King William pine.
Carol and Nick have no animals of their own at present, which only enhances her appreciation for those other creatures who share many of our lives. There’s an Australian tradition of observing Anzac Day every April 25 to honor members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who participated in the Gallipoli Campaign early in the First World War, and all the wars where Australians have served since. It’s a national day of remembrance when people go to a cenotaph and listen to speakers and pay their respects. “We have a lovely local service that we go to, but it can be hard to hear because the PA system isn’t so great,” she laughs. What prompts her to mention the occasion is that “many people take their dogs, it’s in a park close by our home.”
Lucy and Claudia. “They tolerated each other,” writes Carol. “They’d join forces when it was dinner time. We lost them both last year. Claudia was 18, Lucy only 8-1/2. I miss them every day.”
This year she really noticed the dogs, “looking at their body language and how they’re looking at each other, wagging their tails, then looking up at their humans and waiting so patiently. There was this whole canine world below people’s knees. Watching them, I just felt that unadulterated joy that animals give us and we seem to give them – it’s like your heart is going to burst.”
Hugo is heading to university in Melbourne. Carol and Nick plan to move back to Tasmania. Both are looking forward to having four seasons, a pleasure Nick recalls from his native England, after so many years in Queensland’s tropical climate. And Carol’s looking forward to living with animals again, as well as developing her carving practice further.
Carol’s current shop is in a shared space at Botanick Nursery.
In the meantime Carol has a beautiful workspace in Brisbane she shares with fine leather workers Blue and Grae and Andrea and Gary Fitzpatrick, who have transformed an industrial space into the beautiful Botanick Nursery. It’s a space where she can carve and teach. “It has an incredible atmosphere, I feel so fortunate to be there. About 35 regular students come through each week and carve, chat, drink coffee and share their stories. Life is good.”
Family photo on Hugo’s 18th birthday, with his first beer.
The following is excerpted from “Country Woodcraft: Then and Now,” by Drew Langsner. After more than 40 years, Drew has revisited this long-out-of-print and important book to revise and expand it to encompass what he has learned since “Country Woodcraft” was first released.
The result is “Country Woodcraft: Then & Now,” which has been expanded by 100 pages and has been updated throughout to reflect what Drew has learned since 1978. Among many other additions, it includes greatly expanded sections on building shavehorses, carving spoons and making green-wood bowls.
The original book’s text is intact, and the old photos are in black and white. Throughout the book, Drew has added text, which we set in a slightly different font, to explain what he does differently now after 40 years of daily work on the North Carolina farm he shares with his wife, Louise.
In many ways, the book is a delightful conversation between the younger Drew, who is happy to chop down trees with a felling axe, and the older Drew, who now uses an electric chainsaw and band saw to break down stock to conserve energy (and likely aspirin). New illustrations and color photos throughout show how Drew works now.
Before screw vises and clamps became common, woodworkers used a variety of holding devices to secure their material. Some country craftsmen never had manufactured vises. The woodland craftsmen had their brakes and shaving horses, many of local design and all made in the workshop. Craftsmen also had a variety of devices for securing work for planing, chiseling, boring and sawing.
Old workbenches often had a variety of dog holes in the benchtop, and sometimes on the face of the front legs. These holes can be round or square. One or two dogs, set very low, can be stops to hold a board for planing (a). Another pair of dogs can be located at right angles to keep the work from side-slipping. A dog might have a steel cap with teeth cut in it to hold the work better.
A bench hook is a simple device to hold wood for sawing (b). This consists of a wide board or a pair of narrow boards with cleats at each end, but on opposite faces. The cleats are set against the front edge of the workbench. The piece of lumber to be sawn is placed across the bench hook, against the rear cleats. The wood is then held firmly in place with your left hand – if you saw with the right.
A hold-down (c) is used to secure wood on a benchtop for chiseling or mortise work. Made by a blacksmith, it resembles an upside-down L-shaped piece of steel. The leg is dropped into a mortise in the benchtop with the foot pressing hard against the workpiece.
The hold-down leg fits loosely in the benchtop mortises. It tightens by jamming as the heel is hammered against the workpiece.
It’s possible that the first hold-downs were a forked tree branch. Dave Fisher has posted a short video on YouTube where he’s using a naturally grown wooden hold-down. It was very interesting to see this.
(d) miter block (e) miter box (f) shooting board
Furniture makers and cabinetmakers have different types of miter guides used for sawing boards at precise angles. A simple miter hook (d) for sawing square and 45° angles can be made by screwing a small block, cut at the precise angle needed, onto two stepped boards. A variation is a miter box (e). Three flat boards are glued and/or screwed together to make a channel. Carefully sawed cuts at 90° and 45° angles are made through the box walls straight down and slightly into the base board. An aid in making these cuts perpendicular to the sides is to tack a small piece of square stock on top of the channel to act as a saw guide. These are used by holding or clamping the work against the backboards, then sawing within the slotted guides.
The task of planing panel edges to a right angle can be simplified with a shooting board (f). This is a flat plank with a narrow, thinner board glued on top, and a (third) straight back-up board glued onto the thin middle board. The piece to be planed is held on top of the middle board. A plane with sides that are square to the sole is placed on its side, then automatically guided at a proper angle by the bottom board. Shooting boards are nice to use where flat edges are joined together – tabletops, bucket bottoms etc.
Bench Vises
The common adoption of vises is quite recent. Development depended on the screw, which requires precise thread making. Skilled craftsmen could carve a screw and the corresponding nut from wood. Others used a die, similar to the kinds used for threading pipe, only much larger, and with a wooden body. Expert turners could also make a screw on a lathe. A round column was turned. The pitch was marked out at four points with a ruler or divider, and penciled in, spiraling around the column. Next, a shallow saw kerf was made following the penciled lines. The piece was set in the lathe and a skew chisel was used to cut the threads, following the saw cut.
Homemade leg vise. The screw can be from various sources, such as a trailer jack stand.
I once heard a story about an Appalachian woodworker who turned large screws used for cider mills. This man set a small log between two spindles, wound a rope around the log, then commanded his mule to pull the rope as he worked on the rotating log. Maybe this is similar to the tale about being chased by a rolling snake. Eventually, steel screws could be bought from industrial manufacturers. There’s also a needed nut to match the screw. The nut may be even more difficult to make by hand.
A leg vise – basically a variation of a blacksmith’s vise – has the outer vise jaw extended into a leg which rests on the floor where it’s pinned to a guide board acting as a hinge and keeper. As the vise is opened, the guide board is adjusted by relocating a second pin passing through a bench leg. The advantage of this vise is that the jaw can carry a great load, or take heavy pounding, without the screw being damaged or the vise being ripped off the workbench. With this design, the screw is fitted somewhat loosely, which is advantageous for clamping irregular work.
A leg vise is easy to make and handy to have around a farm shop. Vise screws may be purchased from several sources, or parts may be salvaged from an old vise or piece of machinery. It may be possible to adapt the screw from a trailer jack. The wooden parts are usually common lumber. Modern bench vises use a central screw flanked by two spindles that serve as guides for the jaw and a support for the work load. Older vises of this pattern were all wood. The screw might be 3″ in diameter, with two 2″-square guides.
Some deluxe factory-made vises have a ratchet-thread half-nut that can be instantly released for quick repositioning. The solid steel spindles on large vises are a full inch in diameter. On newer vises, the jaws are machined iron castings with wooden liners. Some vises also have a sliding dog built into the outer jaw that can be used in conjunction with another dog inserted into one of the several mortises on the benchtop. These large vises are an investment, but they will provide long, reliable service. Quality vises are marked by massive screws and spindles and generous iron castings. Deep jaws are needed to support heavy or long materials. The wooden liners allow you to work close to the jaws without risk of damaging sharp edge tools.
Estonian joiner’s bench – probably late 19th century. The rigid jaw vise has been retained by some Scandinavian workbench manufacturers.
An interesting built-in vise variation is found on some workbenches in Scandinavia. The design is quite old, and Estonian woodworkers were using similar vises toward the end of the 19th century.(1) Conceptually, it’s a conventional vise turned inside out. A fixed elbow extends from one end of the workbench. The screw and spindles pass through this piece. On the inside a pressure plate and on the outside an end plate maintain alignment. The advantage is that the screw and spindles don’t obstruct the jaw. This results in great holding power for large vertical pieces and for some carving and furniture work. It’s also evident that it’s impossible to hold large material horizontally. The design is excellent for a few woodworkers, limiting to others.
(1) Ants Viires. “Woodworking in Estonia.” Reprint: Covington, KY: Lost Art Press, 2016.
Although I’m grateful to spend time with my beautiful wife and three kids – the latter known as The Backseat Mafia™ – cramming everyone into our 14-year-old Volkswagen and driving the 620 miles to our family cabin seemed like Armageddon On Wheels to me. So, I had to be lured in. And boy did Marie know what bait to use: I was promised that we could stop the car whenever along the route to do chair-spotting.
I also wonder where the true Norwegian stick chairs are. We’ve been woodworking for over 1,000 years. We built our country and tradition on wood. I’m sure we’ve got birch sap running in our veins. Thus, there are of course stick chairs being made here, too. Some of them, like the Windsor-inspired Budal Chair, are even considered classics. The problem is that none of them are genuinely Norwegian in either form and origin. So I thought I’d start looking for them, and this trip seemed a good way to kick it off. Here are some of the chairs I encountered:
128 miles from home: Dalen, Telemark
In the traditional region of Telemark lies the small village called Dalen. We stopped here to visit the museum for Norwegian sculptor Anne Grimdalen. Part of the permanent exhibition was a display of her personal belongings. And among them was this staked Brettstuhl. Although the ornamental style of painting is almost quintessentially Norwegian, this is the first time I’ve encountered a chair like this in Norway.
This type of chair is more common in Germany and some surrounding countries. I don’t know much about them, so I got in touch with my buddy and fellow Chair Chatter™, Rudy Everts, who knows more:
Rudy: This is an odd one…. The interesting thing about this chair is that it looks like a Brettstuhl but the construction is different. The first thing I noticed was the stretchers, these are very uncommon for a Brettstuhl to have. In fact it might be the first one I have ever seen with stretchers!
When you look closer, you see the seat is thicker than a normal Brettstuhl and it lacks the cross battens that are so typical for these chairs. So the maker constructed it like a normal stick chair. And added stretchers.
The design definitely draws its inspiration from the Germanic Brettstuhl, but with its own twist. The shapes are more straight and the ornamentation more “Nordic.” A Brettstuhl often has round details in the backrest, flower motifs and so on. And there is usually a hole in the back rest to pick up the chair when not in use. Therefore I would say the chair was made there locally and not imported from the Germanic countries and painted afterward.
454 miles from home: Alvdal, Hedmark
Back on the road again. Next stop: The village of Alvdal, which is another very historical place. The oldest pair of skis known to man was found here, dated back to the year 600. We came here to visit a museum. And while my family went to see the main exhibitions, I scoured the building for chairs. The first one I stumbled across was this one. A freak of nature, begging for attention.
I’m really not sure what to think of it. Except that it looks like a giant insect. The low seat and short back could indicate it being a children’s chair. But that’s hard to say. Although this doesn’t look like the typical fireside chair, history is full of low chairs made for different uses
Each of the four legs are placed at the very edge of the seat. Combined with only a minor splay, this makes the stance of the chair clumsy to me. This combination is however not uncommon. English West Country chairs often look like this. Although it looks more balanced in a full size chair. Here it just looks a a bit wrong to me eyes. Kinda cute, but definitely more weird than wonderful.
So, I went to the café and got myself an overpriced cup of lukewarm motor oil labeled as coffee. Feeling robbed and unwell I looked for a place to sit, when lo and behold, this three-legged charmer made its appearance. Hand planed surfaces, octagonal legs and nicely worn original paint – what’s not to like? The large bevel around the half moon shaped seat also adds elegance. Though I would normally place such a bevel on the underside to make the seat appear lighter and thinner. Then again, it’s exactly these variations and improvisations that make the stick chair form so exciting to me. There’s often an element of surprise. Sometimes it works, sometimes it don’t.
The rest of the construction was also unusual. Instead of mortising the legs through the seat, they were mortised into three separate battens that were screwed onto the underside. That at least tells me the stool wasn’t hastily put together by a farmer who needed a seat.
Two hours and three ice creams later we all cramped up in the car again and went to find a place to put up our tents. We found a pretty decent spot and called it an early night.
The next morning we rose early. After coffee, bread and brown cheese we hit the road again. I encountered even more vernacular chairs during the following days and miles on the road. Some of them were even not weird at all, just plain beautiful, with some interesting stories to them also.
I’ll share them with you in part two. For all of these and future chair encounters, I’ve set up an Instagram account for you to follow. As always, please share your thoughts and comments on these chairs or chairs you’ve encountered yourself!
Proper proportions. This Shaker classic is one of the best examples of how frame components can influence the character of a cabinet. While the board between the doors does not exactly qualify as a face frame stile, that is one of its functions. Contrast its extreme width with the single-board thickness of the rails between the drawers. (Private collection, Paul Rocheleau)
Unlike most kitchen design books, “Kitchen Think” is a woodworker’s guide to designing and furnishing the kitchen, from a down-to-the-studs renovation to refacing existing cabinets. And she shows you how it can be done without spending a fortune or adding significantly to your local landfill.
Yes, there are hundreds of pretty full-color photos of well-designed kitchens, which are organized into 24 case studies throughout the book. They range from the sculptural (kitchens by Johnny Grey and Wharton Esherick) to kitchens of a more recognizable form.
But there’s also a heavy dose of practical instruction: how to build cabinets efficiently, how to make a basic kitchen island, how to build a wall-hung plate rack. Plus butt-saving advice that comes only from experience – like how to maximize space in inside corners, how to scribe cabinets and countertops into odd spaces and how to make sure you’ve left ample space for hardware.
All of this is built on a foundation of research into kitchens from the past. Hiller’s historical perspective on design might just change your mind about what makes a good kitchen.
Widths of door stiles & rails Bottom rails are almost always wider than top rails on old cabinet and furniture doors. Sometimes stiles are the same width as the top rail (before material is removed for fitting the doors), sometimes not – and sometimes they are dramatically different.
Dimensions of face frame stiles and rails (in addition to where they appear) For example, a true period look for cabinets predating the widespread use of mechanical drawer slides requires intermediate drawer rails. Even if you plan to mount your drawers on full-extension slides, you should incorporate rails between them to evoke the look of those that once supported web frames.
Style is cyclical. The pulls on these metal cabinets found in a garage inspired those Lynette Breton made for her mid-century style kitchen. She made the concave handle detail with a router with a shop-made jig, using a rub collar and core box bit. Before using the router, she bored out the center on the drill press to give the bit a place to plunge into. The core box bit removed the remainder of the waste. The process was more nerve-racking than it might have been because she did this routing after painting the cabinets. The pulls in the center are Bakelite with chrome from Vintage Hardware in Port Townsend, Wash. (vintagehardware.com). (Margaret Stevens Becksvoort)
Hardware What kind of hinges were used, and how were they attached? If the doors were hung on butt hinges, were they mortised into the door and face frame, or only into the door? What is the length of the hinge? How wide are the leaves? Are the pins removable or fixed, and do they have finials? What is the finish?
Hardware position Note the distance of the top and bottom (and center, if applicable) hinges from the ends of the door. Note the position of drawer pulls, doorknobs or latches; door hardware was commonly installed approximately halfway or two-thirds to three-quarters of the way up on base cabinet doors and similarly spaced in the opposite direction for upper doors. They were not usually located in the upper or lower corner, as is typical of cabinet doors today.
Set correctly. When we recreated the pantry in Lauri Hafvenstein’s 1917 house, I followed the original pattern Lauri had seen in a neighbor’s kitchen, with inset doors and half-inset drawer faces.(Lauri Hafvenstein)
Are doors and drawers inset, overlay or half inset? Drawer faces were sometimes half inset even though the doors in the same set of cabinets were fully inset.
Moulding profiles It should go without saying that moulding profiles are important. They can vary enormously and are one of the most distinctive and delightful details in a period kitchen. If you cannot replicate a profile yourself, you can usually have it done in the species of your choice by a millwork shop willing to custom-grind knives. Just be sure you order extra, as there will usually be a hefty set-up charge along with the grinding fee, and different batches can have dimensional variations invisible to the eye but great enough to cause headaches during installation.
Edge treatment of half inset drawer faces These may be eased, quarter-round, beveled or moulded.
Graduated. Notice the proportions of door elements in this elevation of a pantry “dresser” from an 1899 carpenter’s guide. (A gift to the author from Charles Bickford)
Proportions of graduated drawers Along with the proportions of face frames and door components, one of the least-noticed and most critical aspects of historic kitchens is the proportions of drawer faces. Many cabinetmakers make the mistake of building all the drawer faces in a stack to the same size. Not only does this look terrible, because when viewed from above (i.e., from normal standing height), the bottom drawer will inevitably look smaller than the rest, and so, out of scale. It’s also not how drawers were traditionally sized. You can make as many adverse comparisons as you like between 19th-century cabinetmakers and the furniture made by those who worked in the golden zone of northeastern American states during the late 18th century, but even oft-maligned Victorians worked with a tradition grounded in classical proportions. This was one of the first and most important lessons I learned from Roy Griffiths in 1980.
Toe kicks. Flush toe kicks were an option in 1927, and still are today. (1927 Universal millwork catalog)
Toe kicks Are they flush (i.e., does the bottom rail of the face frame go all the way to the floor) or recessed? If the toe kick is partially recessed – i.e., if the face frame stiles extend down to the floor with inset toe kicks between them – note the rhythm of this variation. In some cases the stiles are full-length only at the end of each cabinet run, with the kick recessed everywhere else. In others, the stiles may run down to the floor on each cabinet.
