Most woodworkers with a connection to the internet have stumbled on images from Axel Erlandson’s (1884-1964) famous The Tree Circus, a California roadside attraction that featured Erlandson’s amazing pruning and grafting abilities.
He made furniture and sculpture by grafting branches and tree together, coaxing them to create great geometric patterns and unusual structures.
The Tree Circus didn’t last long, but the photos crop up every few months on Facebook or Twitter. This weekend I got to see one of the great structures from the collection – “The Telephone Booth Tree” – which is in the permanent collection of the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Md.
As you can see from the photo, the tree is no longer alive, but it is still impressive. And it is much bigger than I imagined from the photos. I spent a good deal of time admiring the joinery and the form itself.
And I thought: This guy had far more patience than your typical woodworker. Step one, graft branches. Step two, wait two years. Step three….
And, of course, I thought of the Welsh stick chairs from St Fagans that relied on branches that had been trained by the woodworker to produce the required shape for a chair while the tree was still alive.
You thought this wasn’t going to be a chairmaking post. Ha.
The day after the memorial service for Jennie Alexander, one of Jennie’s daughters, Harper Burke, posed an open question.
“Do you think Jennie was there?” she asked a small gathering of friends, family and woodworkers (who she calls the “woodpuckies”).
Now, I don’t think quickly on my feet, so I just smiled and kept my mouth shut. If I’d had a few minutes to think about her question, here’s what I would have said.
Of course Jennie (JA) was there. Jennie (and in her previous incarnation as John Alexander) had changed the lives of everyone who packed into that beautiful private Baltimore library last Saturday to remember her. There were chairs she had built. There were chairs that had been built as a result of her writing. There were people who had upended their entire lives to follow JA all over the world to teach the world about her beloved greenwoodworking.
And Jennie wasn’t confined to that room on that day. When I returned home from the memorial service, I retrieved a few small artifacts I keep at the shop. One is a plastic-handled screwdriver that’s been ground into a chisel. This was the screwdriver that Brian Boggs had turned into a chisel so he could make the chair from JA’s “Make a Chair From a Tree.”
Yup. Brian Freaking Boggs, one of the world’s finest chairmakers and designers. He’d read “Make a Chair From a Tree,” and that set him on a course to who he is today, which (of course) took loads of hard work and talent on his part.
Peter Follansbee has often told the story about how he traveled to North Carolina as a young man to take a class from JA at Drew Langsner’s Country Workshops, and how their relationship transformed the arc of his life. In fact, Peter dedicated his latest book, “Joiner’s Work,” to JA and used language so kindly that it made me think: Did Peter really write this? (He did.)
JA’s death in 2018 came 40 years after the publication of “Make a Chair from a Tree,” the book that brought us together. Every day in my shop, JA is there – in the tools, techniques, books, ideas (both the ones that worked and those that didn’t). With all the love and respect I can muster, I dedicate this book to the unforgettable memory of John (Jennie) Alexander.
Hell, some days I feel like I have JA working to the left of me. Brendan Gaffney has watched the video of “Make a Chair From a Tree” more than I have, he’s nearly memorized the book and is now building chairs based on JA’s at an impressive pace.
In fact, in the woodworking world, it’s hard to find a place where JA isn’t. Her books, classes, articles, videos and letters – so many letters – have changed how woodworkers all over the world think about moisture content in the wood and caused us all to consider how it can be used to our advantage.
She gave the world a chair that is neither traditional nor contemporary. It is loved by people who treasure the past and those who are building only for the future. It charms and inspires almost everyone who sits in it.
But there’s one place where Jennie isn’t, and that’s her Light Street home in Baltimore where she dwelled until she died last year. After the memorial service last week, Brendan and I wandered down to Light Street to take one last look at the place – it’s an amazing patch of green in the middle of a dense urban neighborhood.
JA’s tools, chairs, dinguses (jigs) and books are gone – all in the hands of loved ones and students. The trees and bushes of the 1400 block of Light Street – after being in service to JA and Joyce for decades – are now starting to take charge of the yard a bit.
I remember being stunned by the place the first time I saw it years ago. This is where so much incredible stuff had happened. On Saturday, I realized that the place itself had nothing to do with it.
Brendan and I then liberated one final memento – the last piece of pure JA that occupied Light Street – and headed back to our hotel, satisfied and happy we had known her.
Madeline reports she is almost out of the latest batch of stickers. They’re $7 for a set of three and are available from her etsy store (she ships worldwide).
Your sticker dollars go to supporting Madeline’s wack-doodle cat, named Chickpea, who insists on unraveling and eating articles of clothing (among other things). I think Madeline is purchasing a variety of calming fluids and cat treats to soothe the savage Pea….
This grouping of stickers is a fun batch. We have the “Rest for the Weary” sticker that features a silhouette of one of the chairs I copied from St Fagans National Museum of Wales. There’s a “#NeverSponsored” sticker that proclaims your independence from sponsorship – it felt great to paste that one over the brand names on my machines. And there’s our Chester Cornett sticker that features the sales slogan from his workshop’s sign. Translation: “We Make Anything or it Can’t Be Made.”
To develop a good eye for chairmaking (or spoon carving or alligator wrestling), you need to study as many chairs as possible. Do it until your eyes glaze over.
Here’s a set of nice “Spinnstuhls” compiled by Rudy Everts in Bavaria. These so-called sewing chairs are from southern Germany and the Alps. These chairs are interesting to me in several ways. Some have a traditional undercarriage for chairs from this region – radical rake and splay, legs that taper to the floor, battens to thicken the seat – but some do not.
Check out the bent legs on a couple examples. A good guess is these came from a bent section of the tree, perhaps a branch or from the root section of a trunk.
Also, the variety of uppercarriages is fascinating. Some are joined, some look sawn from solid and some look bent.
Look through the gallery. Zoom in. Class dismissed.
If you didn’t get a chance to purchase one of the Crucible curved card scrapers, you can make your own with a dry grinder and an existing card scraper. It takes about 30 minutes.
Download and print out the following template. It’s a hand-drawn version of Chris Williams’s scraper, which is where our design started.
Cut it out and affix it to your card scraper with the help of spray adhesive. Or make a cardboard template and trace its shape on your scraper with a permanent marker.
At your grinder, set the tool rest to 0° – parallel to the floor. Dress the wheel of your grinder (we use an #80-grit wheel, but a #60 or #100 will also do) so it has a slight convex shape. This convexity in the wheel makes the scraper easier to shape.
Get a bucket of water and put it by the grinder.
(Hey wait, where are the step photos? I’m in a hotel room that’s 400 miles from my shop. You are going to have to use your imagination.)
Place the scraper on the tool rest and start grinding the excess metal away. Don’t work on one part of the scraper for more than a few seconds. Keep moving around the perimeter. After 10 or 15 seconds, try to pinch the scraper with a finger and thumb. If….
… you can pinch the scraper with no pain, continue to grind.
… your fingers reflexively jump away, cool the scraper in your water bucket.
… you smell bacon, also cool the scraper in the water bucket.
Once you have ground down to your line, you will have become pretty good at grinding flat shapes – congrats. Now you need to remove the grinder marks from the edges.
Use a block of wood to hold the scraper at 90° on a coarse diamond stone and stone the edges. Remove all the scratches from the grinder. Then move up to a #1,000-grit waterstone (or soft Arkansas) and then up to a polishing stone. Then you can proceed with normal scraper-sharpening procedures.
This is exactly how I made all of our prototypes. I promise that you will become emotionally involved with your scraper after putting all the work into it, and you might not ever want to buy one of ours.
