The first cover of the first printing of our first book. Designed in about 15 minutes.
When we sent our first book, “The Art of Joinery,” to press 15 years ago, I was teaching a class at Kelly Mehler’s School of Woodworking in Kentucky and got a phone call from the pre-press shop.
“The interior folio looks fine,” the voice said. “But what are you going to put on the cover?”
I stood there, dumbfounded. John and I hadn’t even thought about the cover.
So on my lunch break I grabbed my laptop and whipped up the cover above in about 15 minutes. I laid out the text and thought: Should we put some image on the cover? I quickly scanned through the images in the book and – with about two seconds of thought – threw the dividers on there. I sent the cover to pre-press and ran back to finish the class.
And that is how we got our company’s logo – dividers.
Believe it or not, it took a while for us to catch on that our books needed cover images. When I worked in corporate publishing, the cover and title were things that were settled and discussed by people way above my pay grade. So it wasn’t something I thought much about.
So “The Essential Woodworker” went through the same oh-crap-I-forgot-the-cover process as “The Art of Joinery.” It really wasn’t until “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” that my head really began thinking much about our books’ covers’.
A quick mock-up of the new diestamp for “The Essential Woodworker.”
These days I spend more time working on the cover – though we don’t fret over the marketing aspect of it. Like all aspects of our books, the cover is a joint decision between the author and me. So many times the cover is remarkably unmarketable. Which I love.
Now that we have Megan on board as the full-time editor, I have more time to breathe, think and look beyond the flaming crisis of the day. So this week I spent some time redesigning the cover of “The Essential Woodworker” by Robert Wearing, which is one of our core books. We are in the process of reprinting it for its 11th printing, and I don’t know when the new cover will appear. Likely this fall. And I don’t know if the cover cloth will be blue. Cloth shortages are wreaking havoc with our titles. (Have you seen the new cloth on “With the Grain?” I like it, but it wasn’t our first choice – or our eighth.)
Look, I know y’all are here for the posts by Suzo “the Saucy Indexer” Ellison and Megan. But if you aren’t totally sick of me and my voice, there’s a new podcast out there that might amuse you.
The Why Make? guys interviewed me last year for their podcast with high-end makers and artists. I am definitely the outlier when it comes to their guests.
In the podcast, we delve into my early days as a business boy. My first woodworking business? Making jewelry from bark I found in my neighbor’s mulch. Then selling it to the younger kids in the neighborhood. I also had a brief spat trying to counterfeit $100 bills that didn’t end well.
Luckily, I got some ethics installed in my redneck brain.
Our new Workshop Waist Apron is made in the USA and built to last. I have destroyed so many aprons made of “ballistic cloth” and other high-tech fabrics. This cotton canvas one takes a real beating. Above is a quick video discussing its development and features.
If I ever write a book on finishing, I’ll probably call it “Farting Around With Finishes.”
One of the things I like to do on a Sunday afternoon is mess around with dumb ideas. About 100 percent of the time, my results are ugly or unremarkable. But every once in a while I discover something interesting that eludes the rounding error of “about 100 percent.”
One of the things I love about old vernacular pieces are the (rare) unrestored finishes. The best of them have a dark and mellow glow that verges on black. They have a low luster, but it’s nothing like dried linseed oil, which can look flat and starved.
After talking to experts on furniture and finishing, I’ve concluded that many of these finishes are the result of soot from the hearth (consider what coal soot did to the buildings of the U.K.). And the shine? Burnishing from use and the natural oils from the body of the sitter. There also could be waxes. Grease from food. Soil from clothing. Water damage. Children. And on and on.
(The original finish on these pieces could have been anything from nothing/nekkid, to an oil, a linseed-oil paint or a wax. These made-at-home pieces were unlikely to have a fancy film finish applied by the builder, though anything could have happened to the piece in the 20th century.)
Last fall I took a trip to Europe to travel around with Chair Chatters™ Klaus Skrudland and Rudy Everts. We drank a lot of Belgian ale and talked non-stop about chairs for about a week. Near the end of the trip as we were driving back to Munich, I wondered aloud if it would be possible to create a finish that would somewhat mimic old finishes on vernacular pieces (without dangerous chemicals or a 32-step process).
I had a dumb idea. Perhaps the finish could be based on a plant oil that is similar to sebum, the oil and waxes made by our sebaceous glands to keep our skin moisturized. As it turns out, jojoba oil is similar to sebum. (There is synthetic sebum out there, but the sources I have found are too expensive to use as a furniture finish.)
Jojoba is inexpensive, widely available and edible (but not digestible). Like linseed oil, jojoba is a drying oil. It is combustible, and there is a small risk of it auto-igniting if you foolishly bunch up your rags. So take the same precautions as with all drying oils and dispose of the rags as recommended on the oil’s Safety Data Sheet.
So jojoba is indeed a good candidate for a wood finish.
The next hurdle was how to get the hearth smoke into the finish. My first thought was to grind up lump charcoal or simply get some ashes from the fireplace and mix it into the jojoba. My experiments with those sources didn’t go well. The finish felt really gritty.
The solution was to switch to carbon black. Carbon black is essentially soot that is used as a pigment in inks and paints, and to color the rubber in your tires. It’s cheap, and you can get it as an extremely fine and consistent powder.
So what happens when you mix together jojoba oil and carbon black? I started with 1 ounce of jojoba oil and mixed in 1/2 teaspoon of carbon black. I stirred it with a popsicle stick and within a few seconds the carbon black was evenly distributed in the oil.
Then I ragged it on a scrap white oak chair arm that has been hanging around my shop for a year.
Immediately after application. Top: The jojoba oil/carbon black mixture. Bottom: Jojoba oil only, which has a nice color on oak.
Surprisingly, it looked pretty good. The oil gave the wood an orange color, and the carbon acted like a pigment stain – collecting in the wood’s pores and sitting on top of the wood. I let the finish dry for a couple hours then checked it again.
The downside is that the carbon black rubs off on your clothes a bit. After the oil dried to the touch, I rubbed it quite a bit with clean, dry rags. The finish on the wood didn’t get any lighter, but I continued to get some carbon black on the rags. (Though it was less and less the more I rubbed.)
So next, I’m going to reduce the amount of carbon black in the mixture and see what happens. And I’ll try adding a spit coat of shellac to the sample boards to see if it locks in the black color. Third option: cook up some soft wax with jojoba, beeswax and some carbon black.
All this might be a dead end, but I enjoy the process (and I hope that maybe Lucy will get me a lab coat for Christmas – ooooh, and a clipboard).
— Christopher Schwarz
Here you can see what I’m after. An orange glow plus a dark brown/black. Yes, that is my bare foot. It was Sunday. (I am fully clothed.)
Since we started this company 15 years ago, customers have asked us to start waiting lists for products, especially when they go out of stock.
Maintaining waiting lists is a lot of work, and we would rather plow our time into making new books, tools and workwear. But after much research we have added a function to our store that is the next best thing.
When a product goes out of stock, our store’s software now adds a button that says: Notify Me. Click on the button, enter your email and you are done. The minute that we restock that product, you will receive an email notification.
Some good things to know.
You will not get any follow-up, nagging emails. We hate that crap.
Your email will not go on a marketing list or be sold or given away. We hate that crap even more.
Your email will not even go into our database of customers. After the email is sent, your address is deleted. Gone.
This function is expensive for us to use. Let’s hope it makes everyone happy. Or at least not grumpy.
If we can make this function work financially, my hope is that we can use it to notify customers when a new book or tool comes out. Say we announce on the blog that “The Stick Chair Journal” has gone to press. We plan to set up a page with a “Notify Me” button. So as soon as the book is released, you will get an email about it.
That will, I hope, reduce the number of blog entries I write about restocking.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. We are working hard to get those chair templates back in stock. We can’t get 1/8” Baltic ply to save our lives. But we have a solution in the works.
