When I started at Popular Woodworking, we were located in the syrup room of the old Coca-Cola bottling plant in Evanston, Ohio.
My blog at Popular Woodworking Magazine will end on Dec. 31, 2018 (backstory here), and I am posting some things there during these last two months that might be of interest.
The 2018 Anarchist’s Gift Guide will begin on Nov. 1. I have 11 items picked out (so far) that I’ve been working with this year. As always, the gift guide is focused on small items that are quite useful. And they aren’t hard to find or expensive. Starting in 2019, the Anarchist Gift Guide will be posted here on the Lost Art Press blog.
I’m also posting a series of essays that are not directly woodworking related. They are, instead, my thoughts on woodworking magazines, tool reviews and the woodworking internet. They are a bit rant-y. But I figure that after 22 years of working there, I have the right to spout off a few times. Note that some of the comments seem to have disappeared due to a technical problem there. Also, one of my posts was sent to another part of the site and I cannot get it posted back on the blog for some reason. I suspect something went wrong when they altered the template on the site. Anyway, it’s not malfeasance, it’s stupidity. Here are the posts I’ve put up so far:
I have a fourth entry in this series on social media advertising that will go up this week.
Please note that I am not ceasing my blogging efforts. Far from it. I’m just not blogging at PWM anymore. I’m not moving to another magazine. And I haven’t gotten a corporate sugar daddy. Instead, all my efforts will be here. Blog entries that I would have written for PWM will be posted here instead.
Finally, I don’t know what PWM will do with my 13 years of blog entries (there are several thousand). Those entries belong entirely to them – it was work for hire. So you’ll have to ask them.
I’m not teaching much in 2019, just a few classes here and there. But I couldn’t turn down an offer to teach in London. Yes, the famous London, with the clock. Derek Jones (aka LowFatRoubo) has arranged to run some courses at London Design & Engineering UTC, which has an excellent shop.
Here are the classes and the links. If a class is sold out, you can get on the waiting list here. There is always churn in woodworking classes.
Welsh Stick Armchair — Oct. 21-25, 2019
I probably wouldn’t call this a true Welsh chair; it is more Welsh-ish than anything else. We’ll be building this chair from materials available to a city-dweller, as opposed to a sheep farmer. You don’t need a lot of tools to make this chair, just a few magic tricks.
Staked High Stool — Oct. 28-30, 2019
This class is an excellent introduction to chairmaking principles, including learning to drill compound angles without trigonometry (or even numbers). These stools are built entirely by hand and will introduce you to tapered-tenon construction. You’ll walk away with a completely finished stool and the skills to make 100 more.
About 24 hours after getting off an airplane from Munich, I climbed into my pickup truck with Brendan Gaffney to drive to Jennie Alexander’s final workshop and home on Light Street in Baltimore, Md.
This week, with the help of family, friends and colleagues, we are finishing what Larry Barrett and I began more than five years ago when we visited Jennie and plotted out the third edition of “Make a Chair From a Tree.” She was going to write the text. Larry was going to help. And I was going to edit it. Somewhere along the way, we were going to build the chair for the book using the methods that Jennie had refined during her long relationship with the chair.
Jennie’s house, third from the right, is a green patch in a dense urban area called Federal Hill.
During the last five years, Jennie worked on the book, tinkering and refining it over and over with the help of Larry (at first) and later Jennie Boyd, who took care of Jennie during the last couple years. Jennie Alexander resisted my gentle nudgings to finish the job. I wanted to get the book published so she could see how it was received. She didn’t want to run out of things to occupy her mind and fingers.
So the book was stuck in neutral for several years.
When Jennie died, I was afraid the book was lost. Luckily, Jennie’s daughter, Harper Burke, made sure that would not happen. Jennie’s house is for sale, but I am typing this blog entry in her workshop, which has remained largely intact thanks to Harper, Peter Follansbee and a host of other people (whom Harper calls the “Woodpuckies”). We have Jennie’s workbench. Her kiln. Her shavehorse. Her tools.
And, thanks to Larry, we have a nearly completed manuscript.
Larry Barrett and Brendan assemble the frame of the chair for the book (Harper Burke can be seen in the background).
Yesterday we assembled a “Jennie Chair” (which is what Jennie calls it in the manuscript) with Larry at the helm. Harper and Jennie Boyd watched, asked questions and told us stories about Jennie Alexander.
The production of this book will involve people from every aspect of Jennie’s life. Nathaniel Krause will be here tonight to add the hickory bark seat. Peter Follansbee is going to read the text for technical problems. Jennie Alexander took a strong liking to Megan Fitzpatrick, so she will be the copy editor. During Jennie’s last months, she asked Brendan Gaffney to do the drawings. So he’s here taking measurements and helping with the photography.
Brendan and Larry close the joints on the chair with one of Jennie’s bar clamps.
And I’m here trying to make sure this gets done. I’m taking the photos and will be designing the book (much like I did with David Savage’s “The Intelligent Hand”) to keep the whole thing “in the family” or “among the puckies,” so to speak.
The goal is to have the book out by the summer. It’s going to be different than the other two editions of this landmark book. It will reflect Jennie’s thinking on her chair at the end of her life. It will be in full color. Hardbound. On nice coated paper. And it will include many appendices that will touch on Jennie’s influence in woodworking, a review of the types of chairs she made, and alternative approaches to her chair that have been developed during the last 30+ years.
This is not exactly how I wanted this story to end. But it will have to do.
The cute-as-a-bird-butt 10’ tape measures for Stanley’s 175th anniversary can be difficult to find. They get snatched up by collectors as soon as they hit the shelves.
For the last week I’ve been studying the 200 photos I took at St Fagans and thinking about the 29 chairs that Chris Williams and I examined during our visit there. The chairs look a lot different to me now – they are somehow even more beautiful.
In this blog entry, I’d like to point out some of the details I’ve noticed in these 29 chairs. Please note that I am not trying to make any generalizations about these particular chairs or Welsh chairs in general. The more chairs I get to study, the more variations I encounter.
Instead, these are the details that stood out in this particular group of 29 chairs. Some of these details will be useful as I make more Welsh-inspired chairs in the coming months. Perhaps this discussion will be useful to you.
Check out the variation in the shape of the sticks on this Welsh chair.
The Shape of the Sticks Most contemporary chairs – or reproductions – tend to have sticks that feature “entasis,” a subtle swelling of the stick or spindle. This entasis, which is found extensively in the built world (especially Greek columns), is pleasing to the eye.
Many of the Welsh chairs I examined at St Fagans featured sticks that were dead straight, bent, slightly wonky and, yes, with entasis. What appears obvious after looking at hundreds of these sticks is that a fair number of them likely came straight from the hedge. And so they had some natural curve or bend to them.
Bottom line: There is no rule when making sticks for these chairs. Add entasis if you like. If you prefer dead-straight sticks, the furniture record will support that choice as well.
This seat has been gently saddled.
Saddled Seats Of the 29 seats we examined, 12 were saddled and the remainder were not. Almost all of the saddles were quite shallow. And only a few featured any sort of pommel. None featured a gutter between the sticks and the saddle.
The issue of comfort comes up time and again with these chairs. Are they comfortable? How can they possibly be comfortable? While we weren’t able to sit in any of the 29 chairs, I have enough experience with them to know that a chair with a lightly saddled seat can be sat in for hours. I’ve been sitting in one every evening for 15 years.
You can obviously improve the comfort of any of these chairs with a cushion, blanket or sheepskin. When we visited John Brown’s home at Pantry Fields, one of his chairs was decked out with a sheepskin, and it quite added to the handsomeness of the form.
Undercarriages Few of the chairs featured an undercarriage. Of the 29 examples, six chairs had an undercarriage (or the remnants of one). Some were H-shaped; others skipped the middle brace of the “H.”
I make chairs both ways – with an undercarriage and without. There are visual and structural advantages and disadvantages to each approach. What is my preference? To make what the customer wants. They are both valid approaches.
A Welsh chair with a traditional H-shaped undercarriage and a one-piece armbow.
Armbows I wasn’t prepared for the wild variety of armbows I encountered at St Fagans. It’s fair to say that the armbow seems to be the heart of a Welsh chair (whereas the seat is the heart of a Windsor chair). The arms varied widely in shape, from one that was V-shaped to one that looked like three sides of a box.
They also varied greatly in their construction. Some of the armbows were made from one piece of curved wood, but most were pieced together from two or three pieces of wood. The joints varied from simple butt joints to mitered half-laps.
The Wood It’s clear that we moderns are spoiled with the wood we use. Many of these old Welsh chairs were made with wood that would never make it out of a modern sawmill, much less into a woodworking project. The seats were filled with knots and deep fissures. Stick were bent and twisted (and not from old age).
Despite the No. 6 grade lumber, the chairs were things of beauty. That is due to the chairs’ graphic forms, which trumped the grain at almost every turn.
There’s more to discuss – the shape of the hands on the armbows, the great variations in crest rails and the rake and splay of the legs, for example. This will have to do for now.
