In a 1937 Chips from the Chisel column, which is also featured in “Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward Years,” Hayward wrote, “The influence of mind upon mind is extraordinary.” The idea being there’s often room for improvement. (You can read the entire column here.)
Recently, one of Chris’s chairmaking students, Lo blue, sent us another way to drill sticks for chairs.
So now we want to know: What else have you thought of, tried out and improved upon?
To that end, we’re asking any LAP readers who have built projects from our books to share your ideas for improving the design, construction or finishing of a project. We will feature some of our favorite submissions in our new series, Mind Upon Mind. Those featured will receive a $50 Lost Art Press gift card from us.
To submit:
Include written steps or a summary of your improvement. Write it in a style you, as a reader, would find helpful and easy to understand. But don’t fret too much. We’ll edit it to make you look good, promise.
Include photos to help illustrate your improvement. You don’t need special equipment to do this. Just good lighting and your phone should be OK.
Include your name as you’d like it to appear in print and any links you’d like to share with readers, such as your personal website or Instagram account.
As a great example of the above, here’s Lo’s recent submission, showing a different way to drill sticks for a chair, as detailed in “The Stick Chair Book: Revised Edition.”
— Kara Gebhart Uhl
Drilling Short and Long Sticks Lo Style
Well, after drilling the sticks for my armchair at the Lost Art Press workshop with a laser, I wondered – do I really need one? What I didn’t like about using it was how long it seemed to set up the whole ordeal. For each stick you have to move the tripod and laser, line it up, then go back to the chair, line it up and drill on. Also I just don’t want to buy more “things” (I don’t have much storage space in my shared shop). So I set out to come up with another method that so far has worked without fail on two chairs. I’ve never explained a process before but I’ll give it my best shot and hopefully it makes sense.
Things You Need
BBQ skewer or small dowel
Different colored pens
That sticky poster-hanging stuff that’s in the random items section in the grocery store
Marking Your Skewer
The spindle decks of my chairs so far have been 2” wide, so I mark a centerline and go over an inch on both sides. The different colors really do help here. That way, when you’re aiming down, you can match up your measurements. I spaced them 1/8” apart.
Set Up Your Axis
(Maybe that’s what it’s called? I’m not really sure, but hopefully you get what I mean with the photo …)
Snap some lines so you set up your skewer just right, lining up the driver’s side stick with the passenger side stick.
Yep, just like that.
For the back sticks, you can just line up the skewer by eye so it sits right on the 2” marking.
For this one, that meant it had to be angled.
Now, put that sticky stuff on the middle of your skewer jig and get ready to drill.
It was a bit of a challenge to photograph the fine lines of the skewer, but you can just barely see two dashes on the left here. Now, line up your drill very cleanly between the two matching dashes.
Here, for instance, you can see I’m angled a wee bit too far back.
Here, I’m almost a quarter of an inch too far to the right.
Once you line up the dashes between your armbow, drill your top hole and move your skewer to the next stick position. Drill your spindle deck hole. If you’re kinda nervous (like me) you can check with an undersized dowel to see if yah buggered up your drilling …
Well, I didn’t screw it up, great, move on to the next.
And well, that’s it. Personally, moving a skewer from one hole to the next is a lot faster and less stressful than setting up a laser.
Here are all my sticks lined up, pretty darn straight …
Maybe you’re wondering … “But did it work when you put the armbow on?” Yes, I had zero resistance while gluing up, significantly less than when I used the laser.
But … as per usual, I was sure to f%$# something up in this process.
Idiot …
Oooopsy … I drilled into the leg. 🙁
I didn’t get too worked up about it. It’s wood, it can be repaired. When I was at school for luthiery, there was a repair guy who did a lecture and I’ll never forget something he said. Something like, “I don’t repair something to make it look like it never happened, when I’m done, they’ll know it was repaired but repaired well and with care.”
I just plugged a piece of cherry in my little accident.
Here is the final chair.
About the damn ugliest thing I’ve ever made. Good god, I hope to never make anything again that inspires words like “Regal!, Master, I’ve done well in the stock market now I just like to smoke cigars! Conquer!”
Editor’s Note: Michele Pietryka-Pagán is the French-to-English translator on the three-person team dedicated to bringing André-Jacob Roubo’s work to life. We have Michele, along with Don Williams and Philippe LaFargue, to thank for “With All Precision Possible: Roubo on Furniture” and “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry.”
These volumes are no longer in stock as we’re making room for new deluxe editions of each. The deluxe edition of “With All Precision Possible” will be for sale later this month and we plan to offer a deluxe edition of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible” soon.
Michele and Philippe have also completed the translations of more volumes of Roubo focusing on interior carpentry, garden carpentry and carriages. (You can read more about that on Don’s blog, here.)
Michele Pietryka-Pagán grew up in Vermont, the eldest of six children, born to native Vermonters.
“My parents were children of the depression, and so we grew up with a heavy dose of ‘Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without,’” Michele says. “That’s a common Vermont philosophy. My parents were also educated, and they wanted all of us to be educated, too. There was always a subtext of do-it-yourself, and that included putting yourself through college, so we did.”
Michele’s dad was a mechanical engineer who liked to, and knew how to, fix most anything. In the early 1960s, Michele’s parents bought a 19th-century house in Bennington, Vermont. It had no kitchen cabinets, so Michele’s dad drove to the lumberyard, bought lumber and taught himself how to make the base and upper cabinets. It was her first exposure to home renovation, helping her mom to wallpaper the old, horsehair plaster walls.
Michele’s mom was a teacher who stayed home to care for the family until Michele’s senior year of high school. When Michele was young, her mom taught her hand skills – sewing, embroidery and knitting.
“She taught me everything she could so maybe I would survive the next depression,” she says. “One of my earliest memories is getting a set of seven tea towels for Christmas one year, one for every day of the week, with a different motif to embroider on each one.”
As she grew up, Michele bought more and more complex patterns. By high school, she was able to make her own prom dress, and by the time she graduated from college, she made a friend’s wedding dress.
While Michele was growing up, her dad changed careers and became a high school industrial arts teacher and, later, a mechanical engineering professor at Vermont Technical College. Because of her dad’s position, Michele’s tuition at the University of Vermont was free. There she learned most of what she knows about textile science, in addition to perfecting her hand skills with fabric – turning 2D pieces of fabric into 3D garments.
“I had a real classical training in dressmaking and design,” she says.
Some of it she already knew – how to sew a straight seam and put in a zipper. She had whole semesters where she just studied tailoring or fabric draping. She spent two semesters studying textile science. She also learned how to make her own mannequin, which later came in handy when making mannequins for garments and costumes in museum exhibits. She graduated in 1973.
“Then, of course, the Bicentennial happened in 1976,” she says. “If you talk to a lot of museum folks of my generation today, we all got bitten really hard by the historic preservation movements that came about when the bicentennial celebration happened.”
Michele, John and Gracie, their terrier mix, today
In the mid-1980s, Michele earned her master’s degree in textile studies at the University of Connecticut. It was during this time that she met her husband, John Pagán, who was in the U.S. Naval Submarine Force. They married in 1984. Together they traveled up and down the East Coast, following John’s assignments both at sea, and at the Pentagon. In 1987 they moved to Washington, D.C., where they lived on and off for nearly 30 years.
Conservation & translation
While living in Washington, Michele and her husband hosted international students, researchers and writers. They had a particularly good experience with a young man from France, who stayed for a couple of summers. In part because of this, Michele began studying French in the evenings through a program with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Michele also studied textile conservation at the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute, and became one of their Research Associates. While there she helped a senior textile conservator with a small French translation project.
Don Williams, who was the senior furniture conservator at the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute, heard about her translation work. He had a couple of books about French carpentry written by an 18th-century woodworker named André Roubo that he wanted translated. He asked Michele if she’d be interested in volunteering.
“I naively said, ‘Sure! Why not?’,” she says. “For the next seven years, while most people were watching some sitcom on TV at night, I was sitting at my big dining room table surrounded by six or seven French-English dictionaries, a couple of them dating back to the 18th century,” she says.
Language changes over time. When Michele would get stuck trying to find an appropriate word in a 20th-century dictionary, she moved on to her 19th-century dictionaries, and then to her 18th-century dictionaries. She worked one sentence at a time: one paragraph, no matter how long it was, was always one sentence.
First, Michele would read the paragraph-long sentence and circle all the words she didn’t know. In the beginning, this ended up being about every third word because she’s not a woodworker nor a native French speaker.
“… So then I had to translate word by word, each word that I didn’t know,” she says. “I had to find the word in one of those dictionaries and then break up the paragraph into smaller sentences. That alone was a challenge because if I chopped up a paragraph into, say, three sentences, then I had to go back, after the translation, and see if the whole thing made any sense.”
Michele and Don, 2018.
With time, the work became much faster. Today, Michele can look at one of Roubo’s French paragraphs and typically type it into English, having to look up hardly anything.
“That’s how much I have improved over 18 years of doing this,” she says. “And now, of course, if there is a word that I don’t know, I just use Reverso. And the beauty of it is that it not only tells you what the word is, but it also puts it into context for you. So that’s really been lovely. But my French conversation still stinks!”
Michele and Philippe LaFargue, a native French speaker, work on the translations.
“My translated text then goes to Don, who adds contemporary information for today’s woodworkers,” she says. “Roubo was a master woodworker at the end of the 18th century in France. Some of that information translates to today, but not all of it. Don’s image of the project from the very beginning was to make this information as tangible and accessible as possible. Then the work goes to Philippe, who makes sure that my translation works with what Don is trying to say, for American woodworkers.”
Still learning – & teaching
Michel and John’s house in Dorset, Vermont.
John, Michele’s husband, retired in 2015. In May 2016, they bought and began restoring an 1825 farmhouse in Dorset, Vermont. It’s something Michele and John are well-accustomed to, having bought and restored four old townhouses while living on Capitol Hill. “All the homes on Capitol Hill are old, and they ALL needed a new furnace!”
Michele and a neighbor recently spent about five years researching 42 homes in their little village of East Dorset. In July 2025, the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation met and reviewed their application, calling for East Dorset to be named a historic district. It was approved.
“It was a long haul but definitely worth it,” she says.
“It’s a national search for 19th-century schoolgirl needlework samplers,” she says. “We’re trying to find them, document them, photograph them, analyze them and research the genealogy of all the girls who made these samplers and put them online. It gives me goosebumps. Nobody has ever done this before! Here we are, in the 21st century, and nobody has ever looked at a schoolgirl sampler, read her name, her birthdate, maybe her town all stitched there, and asked questions. Who were her parents? What kind of people were they? Did they have any role in making this country that we call the USA?”
Since November 2022, Michele and her team have found and documented more than 770 Vermont samplers. In 2025, in cooperation with the Vermont 250th Commemoration of the start of the American Revolution, Michele is coordinating a driving tour of 20 locations all over Vermont where visitors can stop and see exhibits of 19th-century schoolgirl samplers that all tie back to the American Revolution in some way.
In addition to research, for the past five summers Michele also served as a presenter at the Bennington Museum’s Summer Teachers Institute. There she teaches teachers seeking additional accreditation about how to use museum artifacts in their lesson plans.
“There’s nothing more gratifying than having an audience full of teachers, because when you’re teaching teachers, they are absorbing every single word you say,” she says.
Whether it’s translating, researching or teaching, Michele is all in. Case in point: She tore up part of her own meadow and planted flax, wanting to know more about how our ancestors planted, harvested, spun and wove it into linen. She brought the flax into her classes, along with different kinds of fiber for the teachers to observe under a microscope.
“This gives my life new meaning,” she says. “It’s a new chapter. I’m still really happy to be associated with Don and the Roubo project. What’s really special about working with Don is that he has so much respect for women: His wife and two daughters have raised him right! Occasionally, Philippe will call from France – we have never actually met – but I can tell he’s a really great guy, too. So, this has been a truly wonderful project to be part of.”
The Roubo project is also giving back.
“My husband and I decided to use some of the royalty monies from the sales of the Roubo books to start an endowment at the Bennington Museum,” Michele says. “The endowment pays for one high school student per year to spend the summer working with the staff at the museum, for about eight weeks. We are into the fifth year of summer interns whom we have funded, and all we ask is that the student write us a little synopsis of what they did at the museum all summer. Since we don’t have children, this is our part of ‘touching the future,’ as Sally Ride, the astronaut, said.”
Despite living different lives, there’s commonality in Michele and Don’s work. In working on the translations, Michele says she was able to help Don better convey the antique processes and mindset for creating wooden furniture.
“Don and I are both conservators,” she says. “We both believe in historic preservation. We both believe in transmitting our cultural heritage from the past and making it accessible to today’s students. That’s why I enjoy making textile history from the past accessible to today’s teachers and their students. Don and I did the same thing in just two different specialties. We’re both educators. We’re both passing on information from the past to today’s and tomorrow’s students, teachers and historic preservationists.”
Recently, Owen Madden started a book club, and he wants you to join.
A professional cabinetmaker from upstate New York, Madden works as shop foreman at Rowan Woodwork.
“At our shop, we have a monthly meetup, and I get to meet some of the most talented woodworkers and artists,” Madden says. “Most of the conversations anchor around something learned from a book, at which point I write down that book and add it to the endless queue. I found that the best nuggets of information come from the discussion and innovation around the text. Naturally, I wanted to create a more organized space for these conversations so I could garner as much as possible.”
Madden, whose past work ranges from historical preservation and replication to modern architectural millwork, says he enjoys the community aspect of woodworking, trading stories and techniques about the craft.
We at Lost Art Press love Madden’s idea and hope to support the club in the future with virtual visits from some of our authors during meetings.
“The first book was selfish,” Madden says. “Nancy is a hero of mine, and I find that book relates to anyone who wants to make great, lasting things that connect to the people we make them for.”
Here’s how the club works:
Madden will set up monthly meetings to discuss each book. Longer books may require a couple of meetings.
“I would love to have everyone involved in some sort of conversation, be it on Zoom, Discord or even in-person splinter groups in their own community,” Madden says. “It’s still so new the structure will probably build as we have some meetings.”
You can learn more about The Woodworker’s Book Club here. You can follow the club on Instagram here. And you can join the club’s Discord change here.
As for the next book?
“After this one, I’m going to do a poll and see,” Madden says. “I also think it would be cool if the guest moderator picked the next month’s book. It’s all fluid and new still, so we will just see what works and what doesn’t.”
Editor’s note: The third edition of “Cut & Dried” should arrive in February. You can sign up to be notified when it arrives here. In this post, author Richard Jones explains his update to Chapter 6.
Rombald’s Moor: The opening image to Chapter 6.
In 2021, I decided I ought to update “Cut & Dried,” and the third reprint of it at the end of 2024 was a good opportunity to do so. For a long time I had been aware of two ways to determine wood moisture content, i.e., the “dry basis” (db) and the “wet basis” (wb). In Section 6.6 Measuring Wood Moisture Content in the already printed book, I emphasised we woodworkers use only wood’s dry weight as the base weight to assess wood moisture content. This dry basis methodology wasn’t actually named in the book and nor was the alternative wet basis methodology named or described except the wet basis was hinted at in an exchange I had with a furniture student at the end of page 76 and into page 77.
However, since the last printing of “Cut & Dried” in 2019, things have evolved and environmental issues are ever more pressing. The drive is on to reduce carbon emissions, reduce particulates and pollutants etc. I am not here to proselytise on these issues but burning biomass fuel in the form of logs, wood chips, pellets etc. is one potential source of particulates and pollution. Many people and organisations around the world burn biomass fuel for heating homes, cooking, industrial boilers etc., and burning wet fuel is both inefficient and pollutant. The U.K. government, for example, created legislation to regulate the supply of biomass fuel, including setting the maximum moisture content levels for biomass fuel suppliers, and putting in place organisations to verify that such suppliers meet required government standards.
Crucially the authorised method of determining wood moisture content in the biomass fuel sector is the wet basis. It’s the case that the biomass fuel sector might be considered peripheral to us woodworkers with our focus on making things out of wood, and where we want to know its moisture content, but the biomass fuel sector, like use, require felled trees, so there is an environmental impact which deserves some discussion in “Cut & Dried.”
To illustrate the difference between dry basis and wet basis calculations for wood moisture content I’m including some text from the latest iteration of section 6.6 of “Cut & Dried,” but modified slightly for this blog post’s purposes.
A learner approached me with the following figures for a piece of wood both before and after oven-drying:
Wet Weight = 20 grammes
Oven-Dry Weight = 15 grammes
This learner questioned the calculated moisture content result. Using the formula already provided she calculated: ((20 – 15) / 15) X 100 = 33.3%MCdb. This learner, in trying to grasp the basis of the calculation, changed the formula to calculate thus: ((WW – ODW) / WW) X 100 giving the sum ((20 – 15) / 20) X 100 = 25%wb. We discussed the different results, i.e., 33.3 percent and 25 percent, and it is easy to mentally visualise a 5 gramme weight loss is a quarter of the 20 gramme wet weight of the sample, i.e., 25 percent. Similarly, it’s quickly apparent that a 5 gramme weight gain is one third (33.3 percent) of 15 grammes, the sample’s oven-dry weight. As soon as the learner understood the base line for the dry basis calculation is the dry weight of the wood, not the pre-dried wet weight, all was clear to her. She was then able to comprehend how, using the dry basis methodology of assessing wood moisture content wood MC figures such as 100 percent or greater were possible, e.g., wet weight, 200 grammes and oven-dry weight of 100 grammes.
This learner’s confusion had led her to unknowingly stumble upon the methodology for assessing wood moisture content referred to earlier, i.e., the “wet basis” (Forestry Commission, 2011). To calculate the wood moisture content percentage on the wet basis (wb) the formula given by The Forestry Commission (2011, p5) is:
“The MCwb = (the weight of water in a sample/ total initial weight of the sample) X 100.” MCwb as indicated earlier, means Moisture Content Wet Basis. Results are expressed as a percentage.
Further reading, if so desired, can be found at the following links:
Late this year, we sold out of “Cut & Dried”. Author Richard Jones had some changes he wanted to make in the third edition. This week, we sent the book, with these changes, to press.
Some of the changes were small corrections, such as moving an illustration up a bit to better match the text and a degree mark slightly lower and larger than the rest.
Other changes were more significant.
This includes an extensive rewrite of section 6.6: Measuring Wood Moisture Content. Here, Richard adds new information on how biomass fuel moisture content is assessed, which differs from the methodology used for assessing the moisture content of wood used by woodworkers.
Richard wanted to add this because it’s particularly relevant to environmental considerations, such as reducing pollution from wood smoke.
This addition added a few pages to the book, which may not seem like a big deal until you consider the table of contents, text in chapters directing readers to a particular page number, and the index. We were lucky enough to once again work with Rachel, who created the original index and was familiar with the book, to make the necessary index updates.
Another significant change is the cover. Since the book’s second printing in 2019, paper and printing costs have skyrocketed. When we received the quote for the third printing, we had two choices: Increase the retail price (by a lot) or ditch the dust jacket and switch to paper over boards for the cover. We chose to keep the retail price the same. This means the design on the dust jacket will be printed directly on the hardback cover. The 9” x 12” book will still be printed on heavy #80 matte-coated paper.
When reviewing ‘Cut & Dried’ back in 2019, J. Norman Reid of Highland Woodworking wrote: “‘Cut & Dried’ is one of the most complete and detailed works on wood and wood technology available to non-specialist cabinetmakers. For this reason, it merits a place on the reference shelves of all serious woodworkers. I highly recommend this important book.”
“Cut & Dried” should be back in stock in early 2025.
