The always-industrious Mary May has set up a special website where you can get updates on her forthcoming book, “The Acanthus Leaf: A Rite of Passage for the Classical Carver.”
Simply go to acanthusbook.com and you can sign up for the e-mail updates.
Mary has turned in a completed sample chapter with illustrations and photos and things are looking very good. We’re not exactly sure when this book will be released, but we’ll let you know as soon as we have news.
— Christopher Schwarz
“You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.”
— Charlie Parker
“We believed punk rock existed through people like ATV and Mark Perry. He said, ‘Here’s a chord. Here’s another chord. Form a group.’ And we believed in the things that were being said. So, it became true.”
— Billy Childish, guitarist and vocalist for Thee Headcoats
During a recent trip to Seattle, my family and I spent a day at the Experience Music Project to see the exhibit on the band Nirvana and to take in the permanent and fantastic exhibit on the history of the electric guitar.
As my daughter Katy and I made our way through the Nirvana exhibit I was blown away by the T-shirts, posters, album covers and instruments that had been made by the musicians themselves in the Pacific Northwest’s punk scene. It reinforced something that I have long thought but have never expressed: Making furniture and making music is similar.
You can be establishment. You can be punk. Or you can be anywhere in between.
Me, I’m a more of a punk furniture maker. I have little interest in high-style pieces that were made for the ultra-rich – things that are elaborate and require immense technical skill. Yeah, I respect the hands and the training needed to carve a Newport shell or create a hunting scene in marquetry. But it has no connection to the way I live or my taste in objects.
I like three three chords. I like simple lines. I like music that was made without any hope of selling it to the masses. I like furniture that was made by unknown amateurs who made what they could with materials at hand and sometimes struck gold. I like music that was written, recorded, printed and distributed by the players. I like furniture that was designed, built, finished and used by its makers.
I like music that cannot be pegged to particular moment in pop history. I like furniture that could have been made in the 17th century or the 21st.
Where is this sort of furniture? It’s everywhere (outside of museums), and it’s invisible to most furniture historians.
Where do you find the plans for this furniture? You don’t. There really aren’t plans. This stuff is so basic and so animalistic that plans aren’t needed. But there are three chords. Three joints. A few basic tools. A few progressions.
After that it’s up to you.
— Christopher Schwarz
Several Lost Art Press authors will be available at Handworks to sign your books.
If you want to get Don Williams and Narayan Nayar to sign “Virtuoso: The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley,” they have set up three times during the weekend for signings. The signings will be in nearby Cedar Rapids at the Scottish Rite Temple where the cabinet and workbench will be displayed. Directions here. Yes, there are tickets still available – details here.
Don is obligated to stay with the exhibit the entire time, so don’t look for him at Handworks. You’ll find only other bearded, suspendered men.
Here are the times for the three “Virtuoso” signings:
Friday at 2 p.m. to 3 p.m.
Saturday at 5 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Sunday at noon to 1 p.m.
“Virtuoso” will be available for sale both at Handworks and at the exhibit.
Roy Underhill and ‘Calvin Cobb – Radio Woodworker!’
Roy Underhill will be at Handworks this year to deliver the keynote address at 10 a.m. Saturday and will be floating about the show at other times spreading mayhem.
We plan to corral him for a book-signing at 11 a.m. Friday morning in the Lost Art Press booth in the Festhalle. Bring your copy of “Calvin Cobb – Radio Woodworker!” or pick one up at the booth.
Other Lost Art Press Authors
Peter Galbert has a booth at Handworks, so you can get your copy of “Chairmaker’s Notebook” signed there. George Walker, one of the authors of “By Hand & Eye,” will be at the show and is always happy to sign books. Matt Bickford, the author of “Mouldings in Practice,” has a booth in the Festhalle. Mike Siemsen, the host of “The Naked Woodworker,” is happy to sign your DVDs (pro tip: not on the silvery side). Joel Moskowitz of Tools for Working Wood and co-author of “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” should also be at Handworks.
And, of course, I’ll be there and happy to sign anything – babies, bare chests and books especially.
— Christopher Schwarz
When you research how early furniture was built, one of the laments is the lack of construction drawings in the written record.
Did they draw their plans on scrap wood that was later burned? Did they just communicate plans for furniture forms differently than we do today? Were furniture plans a “trade secret,” like the “arts and mysteries” that were noted in the contract between apprentice and master?
Or were the plans just lost?
I vote for the last statement, sort of. There are plans out there, but they don’t look like the plans we are accustomed to seeing in books and magazines. While researching English campaign furniture several years ago I accidentally stumbled on the book “Gillow Furniture Designs 1760-1800” by Lindsay Boynton (The Bloomfield Press, 1995).
The firm Gillows of Lancaster and London is one of the somewhat-unheralded firms of the 18th and 19th centuries, perhaps because the company never issued a pattern book. Instead of developing and publishing designs, Gillows craftsmen simply made them.
Luckily, there is an incredible archive of Gillows – everything from construction drawings to a daily record of the company’s accounting. It really is a largely untapped source of historical information on woodworking, design and the lumber trade in the 18th and 19th centuries.
(Side note: I hope to enlist Suzanne Ellison, a contributing editor to Lost Art Press, to plumb the depths of the Gillows archive in Westminster for a future book.)
Back to the point, “Gillow Furniture Designs 1760-1800” blew my mind. It is simply a record of some of the drawings in the company’s archive. Some of the drawings were intended for the craftsmen with dimensions and notes. Some were intended for customers and are colored.
Naturally, I am drawn to the construction drawings. They did not need much to make some pretty incredible stuff – just a few dimensions and a sketch of the overall form. When I first saw this approach, I gave myself permission to back away from developing sheets and sheets of drawings before cutting wood. It was liberating – worth the cost of the book.
I don’t expect you to see the same thing that I do when looking at these drawings. Perhaps you’ll see something else. Even if you don’t care for the furniture itself, there is a lot to be learned from these sketches.
— Christopher Schwarz
I like SketchUp – not as a tool for designing furniture, but as a way to communicate complex ideas across vast spaces.
Instead of sending someone endless sheets of drawings, I can send an electronic model that the recipient can take apart and modify with ease. That’s the beauty of the program.
For most design chores in my shop, however, SketchUp is too slow. Paper, pencil and my imagination are far more efficient when I need to communicate my ideas only to myself. And when I do use SketchUp to model something for myself, I don’t draw any standard joinery – that’s a waste of time.
I can hear some woodworkers out there fashioning a hangman’s noose from a mouse cord.
So let me say this: If you enjoy drawing dovetails in SketchUp, by all means draw them. If you are facing a tricky joint with lots of intersecting elements, by all means draw the joint. If your hobby is drawing furniture in SketchUp while pretending to work as an insurance claims adjuster, then by all means draw the pee out of that joinery.
But if you just want to see what the object looks like in the round, you can skip drawing the joinery. Your drawers can be rectangles drawn on a box (yes, I’ve done this). You can draw the square parts of a project in SketchUp, print it out and then draw the curvy details on the printout. Yes, I’ve done this as well.
When else should you draw the joinery? When you are trying to explain it to someone else who might not know squat about joinery, such as when you write an article for a magazine. I draw all the joinery, mouldings and interior bits when I submit a SketchUp model to a magazine. That helps me develop a good cutting list for the article. And it helps me double-check my writing so that the illustration, cutlist and story all agree.
But when my ideas go from my head to my hands, SketchUp is rarely involved.
The illustrations with this article demonstrate my working sketches for the recent backstool that I built and then modified. They are crude compared to SketchUp, but they work.
This, I can tell you, is exactly how some craftsmen worked in the 18th and 19th centuries. And that is what I’ll discuss tomorrow.
— Christopher Schwarz
