Some years ago, taking a group of children round the Tate Gallery in London, I was hurrying them through one room remarking that there was nothing much there, the more interesting pictures were further on, when one child stopped suddenly. “Oh no, don’t go on. There’s a lovely picture over in that corner. Look!”
Her quick eyes had discovered the one picture of note the room contained. It was quite small, a boy’s head sensitively silhouetted against a dark background, the best thing John Opie, a fashionable portrait painter of the late eighteenth century, ever did.
We crowded around and the little girl planted herself in front of it and gazed her fill. “It’s beautiful,” she declared, stoutly and convincingly. “It’s the best picture we’ve seen to-day.” To her it would remain a lovely memory long after all the others had been forgotten. She may even have gone back to look at it as soon as she was old enough to take herself to picture galleries. It is the kind of thing we all do with our first loves among the arts. Actually some time afterwards a few of the more outstanding works of British painters in the Tate Collection were transfered to the National Gallery and, if I remember righty, this picture was among them.
In the end, everything comes round to the person. If we are to be satisfied, we ourselves have to be the doers, the makers of things, even of discoveries, although we may have the wisdom of the centuries to guide us. Every man may not be guided into the same groove, not see things with the same eyes, and it is well that it should be so, for hence comes the interest and variety of everything to which men set their hands.
— Charles Hayward,The Woodworker magazine, 1962, excerpted from Honest Labour
Nancy Hiller’s forthcoming book of essays, “Shop Tails,” (hopefully out later this fall) is a companion book to her first book of essays, “Making Things Work.” In “Making Things Work,” Nancy shares her life story as a series of vignettes, each with a lesson about craft, business and personal relationships, all centered on cabinetmaking in some form.
While cabinetmaking is central to “Shop Tails” simply because a) Nancy is a cabinetmaker and b) many of the animals featured live in her home and shop, the essays in this book aren’t all about cabinetmaking – or the business of, or the art of, or the joy of. If “Shop Tails” were a carousel, woodworking would be the center pole. It’s always there, but it’s the wildly painted horses moving up and down and the amusing characters sitting on each that have your attention.
At first, Nancy wondered if we’d even publish it. And I suppose, if you look at our catalog of books, it can feel “off brand.” But we had no hesitation. As Chris recently said to me, “LAP isn’t one thing. And it will be different tomorrow.”
It’s certainly not necessary to know an artist to appreciate their art. But I do believe doing so can add depth. Sometimes curiosity’s reward is intimacy coupled with better understanding, especially when considering a person’s background, even in terms of craft. So if you enjoy reading our Meet the Author series or Nancy Hiller’s Little Acorns, or if books like Trent Preszler’s “Little and Often” (William Morrow) are on your nightstand, you’ll likely enjoy Nancy’s latest offering.
This, from Edith Sarra, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Indiana University-Bloomington, after reading “Shop Tails”: “It’s hard to describe these essays without lapsing into the kinds of qualifiers that usually sound (but definitely are not, in this case) overblown: breathtaking, searing, hilarious, intricate, and above all else – wild and original, like nothing else I’ve read (and I read a lot of memoiristic narrative, across three languages, and many centuries).”
And now, an excerpt from Chapter 15, “Warring Parties (2011-2017),” with a good mix of cabinetmaking and memoir.
— Kara Gebhart Uhl
About a year after Winnie died, I was ready to get another dog and fantasizing about a trip to the animal shelter. At the time, I was working on a job that involved refacing and modifying the kitchen cabinets in a newly built house. The place had been built on spec, so the builder had been careful about where he invested resources. The kitchen had a modified galley layout – base cabinets and uppers against the back wall, stove in the center and a capacious pantry unit on one end, all facing a big island of matching cabinetry that housed the sink, dishwasher and one of those pull-out-then-pull-up mixer stands I’ve always considered a stupid waste of space – and never more so than in a small kitchen such as this one. The cabinets had been built by a local shop. They were perfectly well made, but nothing that I would call craft. The carcases themselves were functional and made to cutting-edge standards, with undermount drawer slides and so on; it was the parts you could see – the doors, drawers and end panels – that were the problem.
The clients had been referred to me by one of their colleagues. Martha said they were happy with the basic cabinets, but there was something she couldn’t stand about their looks. As soon as I arrived for a first meeting, I knew what it was: The cabinets were “walnut,” which in this case meant maple-veneered MDF with a semi-opaque medium-dark-brown finish. Martha’s eyes were used to real wood.
By way of illustration, I pointed to the cutting board by the sink. “This is walnut,” I said. I didn’t criticize the cabinets; I simply explained that the builder had probably chosen them because they were well made and more affordable than they would have been with walnut faces. She listed the details she wanted to have changed and I put together a proposal, which she and her husband accepted. The scope of work included removing the mixer stand, which I took to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore; refacing the cabinet end panels, including those on the island; making new doors and drawer faces; and switching out the vaguely Craftsman-style brackets supporting the overhang of the island counter with more modern brackets in welded metal. I was especially keen to replace the glazed doors at the top of the cabinets along the wall; instead of making them with rails and stiles, the original cabinetmakers had simply cut out a rectangular opening in each blank of MDF, probably with a CNC router, and left the inside corners round. In place of glass bead, they’d fastened the glass in the rabbet with flexible “glass bead” in “walnut.” Ouch.
I refaced the cabinets with custom-veneered panels that I cut to size, edged and fitted by hand. I made new glazed doors out of solid walnut with mortise-and-tenon joints, proper rabbets and wooden glass bead. Then I took them to a locally owned fabricator, Heitink Veneers, to have them faced with sequence-matched offcuts from the rest of the doors and drawer faces so the grain would run continuously from the tops of those doors through the ones below.
Late in the day, I was still dreaming about getting a dog when Mark texted me that he had a surprise waiting at home. “Is it a dog?” I asked. He refused to say. If it was a dog, that would certainly be a wild coincidence. As I pulled into the parking area at the top of the driveway that evening, a young cream-colored dog with rusty speckles on her legs ran down the hill from the house, barking ferociously, convinced that she was guarding Mark and Jonas from an intruder. “Henny!” I cried, the name inspired on the spur of the moment by her spots, which reminded me of a speckled hen. “It’s OK! I live here. I’m not going to harm your men.”
Mark told me how she came to be there. He’d been on his way home, driving along a favorite back road, when he reached a three-way intersection. The dog was standing there while two other drivers, who had each pulled over, were discussing what to do. “I’ll take her,” said Mark. He picked her up and held her in his arms. “She smelled like a baby,” he remembers; she was perfectly clean and well fed, not the condition you’d expect in a stray. Like Lucy, she appeared to be a cross between a pit bull and a Lab.
We reported her to the shelter, certain her owners must be looking for her, but no one ever called. So she joined our household.
I often took Henny to my shop, where she dreamed of playing with Louis. In typical feline form, he refused to acknowledge her presence. She’d lie down on the floor in disappointment and chew wood scraps to console herself. When I delivered pieces of work downtown, I took her with me in the truck. She sat in the front seat and napped, waiting for my return. Though quick to bark in defense of her family, she was exceptionally ingratiating toward one person: Mark. She’d laid her claim on him the day he brought her home. With the utmost delicacy, she would crawl, not jump, into his lap, and gaze adoringly into his eyes. She grudgingly acknowledged that I was the one who shared his bed.
Last week we reviewed the final page proofs of Monroe Robinson’s “The Handcrafted Life of Dick Proenneke,” finished up the diestamp (more on that soon) and sent everything to the printer – that felt good. We had hoped to have this book available for purchase by the end of the year, but it may be early 2022. As Chris wrote about here, U.S. printing plants are shutting down and consolidating, and we are working around significant paper shortages.
In the meantime, here’s a short excerpt from the first chapter, Starting from Scratch, written 53 years ago this week. A lot of the book is like this – excerpts from Dick’s journals (in regular font) accompanied by Monroe’s commentary (in italic font) and photography.
— Kara Gebhart Uhl
Dick and Raymond’s J-3 Cub and Elgin canoe, as seen on the first page of chapter 7. (Photo courtesy of the National Park Service)
August 13, 1968:
Today was a day to clean up my leftovers from the cabin. Saw them to length and split them for wood. A good pile by the time I finished.
I drew up plans for the fireplace and they look very satisfactory to me. Now I must try to figure out how much cement it will take. Yesterday I had sawed a few blocks of wood at both the main and guest cabin. Enough to last a day or two. Today I cleared the drift wood from the landing beach and picked up more big rock to make a beach a pilot would enjoy coming in to.
More small jobs – clean up the canoe paddle and give it a coat of shellac. Sharpen and oil the planes and chisels. Ready to return them to the main cabin.
Dick stacked the large rocks he removed from the beach to start a small jetty on the up-country side of the beach. The photo on the first page of chapter 7 shows Dick’s rock-free beach after he and his brother Jake stacked rocks to create a large jetty to protect their J-3 Cub airplane from the west winds.
I’m looking forward to the upcoming open house at Lost Art Press on August 7th. It’s a chance to share a project Jim Tolpin and I have been working on. Yes, we are at it again – exploring the world of design and artisan geometry. This latest adventure began after looking at a number of historic tool chests and tools used by pre-industrial woodworkers. Most of the tools like hand planes, saws and chisels were typically acquired from specialty toolmakers. Yet there was a group of tools that were often user made, including straight edges, try squares and miter squares. This grouping of tools had a few things in common. Generally, they are used for design and layout and they all embody the geometry that lies beneath everything. They provide that physical link between our designer’s eye and the work at hand.
After Jim and I made some of these tools and began using them, we both came to realize there is something deeper going on. Yes they are highly functional and a pleasure to use. More than that, these tools are teachers. Turns out that building a set of traditional layout tools is a class in advanced hand-tool techniques as well as a master class in artisan geometry. All these tool builds use geometry to generate the tool, but also utilize geometry to dial in each tool to a high level of perfection.
A simple tool exploration on our part blossomed as we looked at historic examples and built one tool after another. To our delight we learned that each build and each tool contains insights that deepens the connection between hand and eye. Jim won’t be able to attend the open house, but I’ll be there with a pile of these “Tools of By Hand & Eye” for you to handle and see for yourself. I look forward to hearing from you and perhaps gaining insights from your questions and perspective. These tools have a way of sparking the imagination.
P.S. I also will be bringing along a special surprise for anyone interested in the nautical history of the Ohio River Valley.
The Peggy Shepherd Pottery Collection (at least, most of it) now lives in Nancy Hiller’s office. The whisk brush was made by Aspen Golann.
After a small flurry of emails this past weekend related to the dust jacket in which Nancy, Christopher, Megan and I discussed word choice, the number of lines, the space between “Shop” and “Tails” and more, “Shop Tails” is now at the printer.
Makers, whether of a dust jacket, a book, a spoon or a kitchen, tend to eschew materialism, or, at least certain types of materialism. And yet we make material goods. As Nancy writes below, the “things vs people” dichotomy can be false and destructive, and that holds true whether you’re talking about a person on a factory production line or someone working in a one-person workshop.
In this excerpt from Chapter 11, Winnie (1996-2010), Nancy addresses the concept of materialism, and suggests considering a new way of looking at objects – appreciating how things embody important characteristics of their makers, as well as memorialize others.
— Kara Gebhart Uhl
When Winnie, William, Lizzie, Tom and I officially moved into the house next to my shop in the winter of 2004-2005, I kept the dogs confined to the laundry room and kitchen instead of giving them free run of the house. Not only was I loath to see any repeat of the destruction at my bungalow in town; I had begun laying the hickory floors in my spare time, and it was an unimaginably slow job, done on my hands and knees.
Alan had kindly loaned me a flooring nailer. It was the manual type you whack with a dead-blow mallet. I tried it repeatedly, but the hickory was so hard it just bent the nails. Once a nail was bent, it was far more time-consuming to remove from the dense wood than it would have been to drive by hand. A pneumatic nailer might have done the trick, but I didn’t have one, so I bought several pounds of large finish nails and recalibrated my expectations. I had to pre-drill the tongue of each board about every 18 inches along its length to keep it from splitting. I drove the nails with a hammer and finished with a nail set. It took a week of spare time to lay the floor in the 13 x 18-foot living room, but as I watched the hickory spread slowly across the OSB subfloor, I was thrilled by the transformation in my surroundings.
After the living room I moved down the hall to the bedrooms, then hired my friend John Hewett to sand the floors. I applied two coats of Waterlox Original tung oil just before driving to Florida with a kitchen full of cabinets for Maggie and her husband – the tung oil was so heavy on the solvent that I didn’t want to be in the house while it cured.
Considering how much work the floors took, I was not about to see them scratched up by the dogs’ claws, so I decided to confine them to the kitchen and laundry room, rather than allowing them the run of the house.
***
Every so often someone complains that I’m too protective of material artifacts, whether the floors in my house, the top of our kitchen table or the quilt made by our friend Kim, a gift when Mark and I were married – “Use the delicate cycle! Those are Kim’s hand-sewn stitches!” These criticisms, which are often veiled, pit things against people (or things against dogs, in the case of my floors), implying that I value the former over the latter.
I get it. When I was around 10, Esse, gave me a melodica, a hybrid between a wind instrument and a keyboard. You blew into a mouthpiece, pressing keys to produce different notes. The resulting sound struck me as artificial, and the instrument itself was mostly made of plastic. It didn’t seem like a serious instrument. I had no idea back then that the melodica was good enough for the coolest of professional musicians, like Jon Batiste on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” I was touched that she’d bought it for me, but not that interested in learning to play it.
The gift of the melodica coincided with the influx of hippies living in our yard. From them I learned that attachment to material things was bad. “You gotta let it go, man. Free yourself,” they’d say – not about my melodica, but about other, grown-up things. Their happiness living with few possessions impressed me. I wanted to follow their example. So one Saturday morning, when a couple mentioned they were going to a swap meet to divest themselves of still more possessions, I asked if I could join them. It would be an exercise in renunciation.
I set the melodica down with a bunch of other people’s stuff on a fold-up table in a dusty parking lot cooked by the Florida sun. I think I priced it at $25. Eventually someone haggled me down to $8. The money wasn’t important; what mattered was that I was letting go of another object I didn’t use. I was training myself to avoid attachments. I overrode the pang of guilt as I took the cash – my dear grandma had given the instrument to me – and told myself to grow up. When I told my grandma, she was hurt. “I bought that for you,” she said. “It was a gift.” She wasn’t trying to make me feel bad; she was expressing how she felt. I’ve been troubled by my superficial take on the melodica ever since.
As I thought about that experience over subsequent years, I came to see “things versus people” as a dichotomy that’s false and destructive. You can’t even have things without people; we’re interdependent. People make things, whether they do so on a factory production line or in a one-person workshop. Then other people put them to use. Beyond this, things are more than mute material; they express their makers’ dreams and values. This connection between maker and made object is most visible in artifacts crafted by individual makers to their own designs, or designs they’ve adapted significantly – think Megan Fitzpatrick’s Dutch toolchests, or Danielle Rose Byrd’s bowls. But even anonymous workers on the production line at Toyota or General Electric are expressing their dreams of a good life, albeit less directly, as they cut, weld or assemble parts to other peoples’ designs using tools and equipment they don’t own.
Material artifacts are also repositories of memory. They keep people and places alive. In my office I have a Victorian bamboo étagère, its shelves filled with antique ceramics. The stand and all of its contents – a Dutch urn resembling an antique from Greece; two sugar-and-cream sets from Japan; pitchers and vases from Germany, Romania, England – once stood in the entryway of my friend Peggy’s house, a converted timber-frame barn. She’d bought the barn in pieces and made it into a home filled with character and natural light. I always coveted the pottery collection (and kicked myself for doing so, because it was hers). After Peggy died, her daughter held a barn sale. I bought the shelf and the ceramics – not only because I loved them, but to keep those things together as the Peggy Shepherd Pottery Collection. Peggy lives on in these artifacts, as well as many others in our home: the curvy black metal chair she gave me at Christmas in 1998, the funky painted cabinet a former boyfriend of hers had cobbled together, the beautifully upholstered chair she gave me after I built cabinets for her barn-house kitchen. “You didn’t charge me enough,” she said. “I want you to have this.”
The World War II-era sofa in our living room, which I bought from Peggy many years ago, reminds me to be thankful that we’re not hiding in bomb shelters while subsisting on tinned meat, chicory “coffee” and other rations. The salvaged leaded-glass window I built into our bathroom wall carries forward the legacy of a client’s family home that was demolished as part of an airport expansion. The ceramic model of a terraced house on my office bookshelves reminds me of my first woodworking boss, Raymond, who gave it to me when Patrick and I were married, adding “You’ve always said you want a house of your own.”
When we buy things from those who make them, we not only support those craftspeople, we also do our part to keep craft traditions alive. In the factory-made Arts & Crafts-style cabinet I bought tenth-hand from a back room in a Bloomington grocery store in 1995 lies a silver cheese knife made by Hart Silversmiths in Chipping Campden, England, the lone surviving enterprise from Charles Robert Ashbee’s Guild and School of Handicraft. Mixed in with blue-green ceramics bought at yard sales and junk shops is a vase bought for me by my former husband, Kent, and his wife, Mary, on a visit to the Van Briggle Pottery & Tile. There are small pieces by Ephraim Faience that I purchased at The Omni Grove Park Inn and a Granny Smith green cabinet vase I bought from Scott Draves of Door Pottery in 2015, when we were in neighboring booths at a show in Chicago.
Even mass-produced artifacts deserve more respect than we generally give them, at least in the States. We have a famously materialistic culture in which too few people have more than the most superficial, consumerist understanding of material objects. As Elaine Scarry pointed out in her 1985 book, “The Body in Pain,”
…anonymous, mass-produced objects contain a collective and equally extraordinary message: Whoever you are, and whether or not I personally like or even know you, in at least this one small way, be well…. Whether they reach someone in the extreme conditions of imprisonment or in the benign and ordinary conditions of everyday life, the handkerchief, blanket, and bucket of white paint contain within them the wish for well-being: ‘Don’t cry; be warm; watch now, in a few minutes even these constricting walls will look more spacious.’1
Instead of “things versus people,” it would be more fitting to appreciate how things embody important characteristics of their makers, as well as memorialize others.
The things we live with also shape us in ways we often don’t even see. They impose their own demands on our behavior: We have to learn how to use the new email platform, drain the compressor, grease the sander’s gears, prime the pump. Many things, from the humble kitchen whisk to the thickness planer, bicycle or car, become extensions of our bodies, magnifying our abilities, for better or worse, and sometimes leading us to imagine ourselves more powerful than we are. (All it takes to prove the validity of this statement is a power outage.)
