Category: Little Acorns: Profiles by Nancy Hiller

This is Part Two of my interview with Kate Swann of the Florida School of Woodwork. You can read Part One here.

As Kate and her husband worked on their money pit home, she started acquiring tools. “I loved using them. It was magic.” She decided to make a table. “This was still pre-internet. I had no idea how.” She cut up some pieces of wood and put them together. As she carried it proudly up from the basement workshop to show her husband, one of the legs fell off.

Kate worked for a company that did credit card processing, but she spent more and more of her spare time learning to make things with wood.

“There was a local woodworkers’ store, Woodcrafters. [She makes clear that it was an independent store, not a branch of Woodcraft.] It was a wonderland — all these amazing tools with names like Powermatic and Jet. And wood! And people who would tell you about it.” One of the staff members took the time to explain to her how the various tools worked. “I had the most blissful times,” she remembers. “I fell in love with wood. In the northwest there is such an amazing domestic hardwood scene.”

The things she made were still “not very good.” But that would soon change. The Oregon College of Art and Craft had a 13-week program on Wednesday evenings and all day on Saturdays. She signed up. She got to learn from accomplished makers who weren’t judgmental about her ideas, some of which were more sculptural and experimental than was typical of the curriculum. Her pieces stopped falling apart. People started asking if they could buy them. “I’m my father’s daughter, so I said, “How much would you pay for it?” They named a number and I sold it to them.” I began this side hustle of making things and selling them. I didn’t know what to charge for them, and they would tell me to pick a number. My picking a number was very influenced by my lack of confidence at the time. But I really enjoyed that freedom to make and just explore. A lot of those things were very rudimentary, and not structurally appropriate. I didn’t know about grain. But I just loved it. I was deeply obsessed and in love with the craft of making.”

Then came 9/11. Her son, Caleb, was 18 months old. Her husband was recalled to active duty and offered a choice between three deployments: Afghanistan, Iraq or Tampa. With an 18-month-old, they chose the famous cigar-making city on Florida’s Gulf Coast. (The two divorced in 2015.)

Kate knew no one in her industry, so she set up a woodworking shop in the garage and got a listing in the Yellow Pages. Her prize possession was a Powermatic 66 she’d bought with her first bonus check at the job in Portland; it ran on 220 volts. There was only one outlet in the garage, and it was 110. So she stretched a heavy duty extension cord from the dryer outlet in the laundry room upstairs through the window and into the garage.

While establishing herself in the new community, she decided to work on her graduate degree at the University of South Florida.

One of her first gigs made her realize she needed better premises. In an entrepreneurial leap of faith, she rented a 600-square-foot workshop she describes as a “cell-like building in a bad part of town.” Nevertheless, she says, “I remember walking in and going, ‘This is mine. This is where I want to be, what I want to be doing. It was amazing…. In the process of doing commissions for clients you learn new skills, new approaches and techniques – really, my commissions taught me.”

One day, while she was resawing cocobolo in her non-air-conditioned shop in the middle of summer, a guy poked his head through the door. “Cocobolo turns your skin orange,” she points out. “So I was looking kind of weird – orange mustache, orange creases.”  The man, Carl, asked if she would take him on as an apprentice. Still thinking of herself as “the most amateur woodworker,” she found the notion ridiculous.

Not long after, Kate got a commission for a large project. The client, who was a walk-in,    began, “I have this project I want built. I’ve had a couple of other people build it for me and didn’t like it, so I refused to pay them” — hardly the kind of introduction that inspires confidence. The client wanted some way to display a collection of dolls dressed in national costumes. Kate proposed a set of three cabinets. “I was completely intimidated,” she lets on now. “But I have no fear.” Thinking another pair of hands would be useful for the job, she called Carl. He came in every day, and it turned out that he was a great engineering woodworker. Thus began a relationship that led to a formal business partnership. Over the years she and Carl have collaborated on numerous pieces. Both have learned. That synergy has allowed both to grow as woodworkers and build things that neither could have done by themselves.

Kate decided to name the cabinet “The Three Sisters” after a bit of northwest Native American folklore. A chief had three daughters and was ready for them to be married. They didn’t want to marry; they rejected all of the suitors he arranged. In punishment, the shaman turned them into mountains so they could bear witness. As Kate sees it, “They were bearing witness not to settle for something that wasn’t right for you.” When she and Carl delivered the cabinet, she shared the folktale with the client, who burst into tears and asked, “Did you know I’m pregnant with my third daughter?”

Kate counts a piece she was commissioned to build for the chief of medicine at Harvard Medical School as one of the highlights of her career. Another was participating in the build of a 24-foot boardroom table made of salvaged wood from a cigar factory. Both were things she would never have imagined herself doing.

Along the way she discovered surface and textural embellishment, which she loves. “I found that for me, it’s one of the loveliest things to do, the gilding of the lily. The finishing touch that brings the piece to life.”

Around 2004 she got a grant to take a turning course at Arrowmont with Betty Scarpino. Sharon Doughtie was the teaching assistant; Kate was smitten by Sharon’s work with pyrography and has made that art form a signature of her own work. “The furniture making has become less important than the stories I embroider onto the surfaces of a piece,” she explains. “The pieces [of furniture] are truly canvases now.”

Around 2008 Kate had a call from someone asking if she would teach her woodworking. She agreed. The student came back regularly. Kate enjoyed teaching, and word got out. A few years later she made a website. More students came. “It started interfering with my capacity to get my furniture pieces done.”

In 2009 Carl had bought a disused motor rewinding garage that hadn’t been occupied for a quarter of a century; after a year renovating, it became their woodworking shop.

Eight years later, Carl’s wife retired and his 94-year-old mother passed away. They’d had a couple of difficult clients and were weary. It was time for them both to start a new chapter, and for Kate that was the School.

In 2017 Kate set the school up as a corporate entity and started developing the programming. There were many makers she admired and wanted to spend time with. She also felt, and still does, that her time at the Oregon College of Art and Craft was really precious, and the way she articulates that sense is a fitting expression of how she sees her own school:

It was there that I realized I’d found something that filled my heart with passion and let my imagination and ideas run wild, and my brain and hands play together. It was a wonderful discovery to know I could do that. That I could make — that moment of magic when you step back and think, look at that capacity to create! I think about my teachers at the time, and it was such a gift. They opened a door into a lifelong passion. I feel like I have a responsibility to open that door for others and be a good steward of the knowledge in my head. I’ve had many years of making and learned many things, sometimes in hard ways, and I need to gift that back.

Opening the school was not a scary thing, she says, but more like an opportunity to say thank you. “I feel incredibly grateful. I still don’t feel like I’m worthy. I’m humbled by the caliber of instructors that come in. The delight at sharing the craft is so rewarding. It’s a wonderful place to come and learn.”

As for her evening classes toward a graduate degree, that project also has a happy ending. In 2006, when Kate graduated with a master’s in Instructional Technology, her parents flew over from London. “It was marvelous,” she says. “That 10-second walk across the stage — I’ve never seen my dad’s smile bigger. They earned that moment.”

— Nancy Hiller

Kate Swann, the force behind the Florida School of Woodwork, first came to my notice via an Instagram post in 2018. Who is this person? I wondered. How have I never heard of her?

When we crossed paths briefly at FWW Live the following year, I wished I could sit down and pepper her with questions. I knew just three things about her: She was English, she had recently opened a woodworking school in Tampa, Fla., and she had partnered with Fine Woodworking to host a week of instruction with several renowned woodworkers in the coming February. Clearly this was someone with chutzpah and ambition. Little did I know that in addition to these qualities she has an honors degree in French, Russian and linguistics, is the mother of a grown son and spent several years as a professional shepherdess.

Kate, the younger of two daughters, was born in Aldershot, southwest of London, in 1965. Her parents had both been born shortly before WWII in London’s East End; both left school by the age of 15, as was typical among working-class families. Her father began his career as a milkman, an important job at a time when most families had bottles of dairy products delivered to their doorstep each morning before dawn. Her mother worked as a secretary.

In the early ‘60s Kate’s parents left London, where the cost of living had become unaffordable. Her dad had trained in foundry work at trade school; the family moved to Aldershot so he could take a foundry job there. In 1967, when Kate was 2, he took another job, this time in Reading, to London’s west. “Work was scarce and pay was based on work produced,” says Kate, “so the employees at the foundry would physically stage fights – yeah, like fist fights – to decide who would get the work.” When he learned about a job at British Airways, which paid him 22 pounds a week, reliably, he leapt at it (and worked there for 25 years). He drove a tug, one of those powerful, low-slung vehicles that push aircraft back from the terminal so they can taxi to the runway.

As anyone who worked for a major airline in the 1970s can attest, it was a golden age for travel, and one of Terry Swann’s job-related benefits was free flights anywhere in the world. “So we went everywhere,” says Kate matter-of-factly. “Of course, I was completely unappreciative at the time.” Singapore for spring break. Cypress for a weekend. “We’d eat sea urchins while staying in a caravan [a camper van] on the beach and the wild dogs would come around and we’d feed them. My mum would say ‘Don’t feed them, Terry! It’s dangerous!’”

“He never planned anything,” Kate continues. “So it was all very off the cuff. We’d arrive in Rome and my mum would go, ‘Where are was staying?’ He’d say, ‘We’ll find a place.’ People would come up to us and say, ‘Can we help you?’ and my dad would say, ‘Yes.’ So this lady comes up [she didn’t speak English, and the family didn’t speak Italian] and says, ‘Can I help you?’ and he says, ‘We’re looking for a place to stay. Can you suggest a hotel?’ We followed her through Rome and got to this apartment building, and she gestured for us to be really quiet. She led us up to about the fifth floor and asked for some money, and we stayed there. She asked us to be quiet the whole time, and we eventually figured out it wasn’t her apartment. She was the housekeeper! That [stuff] would happen all the time. It would drive my mother batty.”

After graduating from high school Kate took a gap year, then attended the University of Sussex in Brighton to take an honors degree in French, Russian and linguistics. “I really took the degree because I wanted to understand the language of birds. The songbird population of England and Europe was quite something, and I was interested in the dialectical differences between the birds of one country and another. Do French sparrows say something different from British sparrows?”

She was getting by on virtually no money. “I was living on potatoes and riding a 25-lb. cast iron bike seven miles to school every day. One time I was looking at myself and saw a line down the middle of my stomach; I didn’t realize that because I was so thin and climbing rocks and riding this bike I was starting to develop a six-pack. I don’t have that now!”

While attending university, she also lived a parallel life as a shepherdess, an avocation since the age of about 14. Picture Kate going out with her crook and her staff, tramping across the hills, tending to her flock — sometimes with a dog, sometimes on a horse. This work took her to the South of France, where she was employed as a farm laborer with a small flock of sheep and picked peaches in the Camargue.

Kate’s interest in rock climbing led her to apply for a spot with Operation Raleigh, a non-profit organization that combined adventurous opportunities for young people with scientific research and philanthropic work intended to benefit local communities. Those selected were sent on a three-month stint as the expedition worked its way around the world. The project was run by Sir John Blashford-Snell. “The last of the British Empire,” Kate quips. She recalled, “he literally showed up at my portion of the expedition in a pith helmet and putty boots. ‘What ho!’,” she laughs—”very upper crust. The epitome of the British in India.”

Kate was selected for the section of the expedition that would visit Chile. She was in her second year of college at the time. Thanks to her father’s job and their shared love of adventure, she’d already traveled extensively. All of which should explain why she wasn’t the least bit daunted by the prospect of being posted in a desolate region at an elevation of 10,000 feet, where the soil has been compared to that on Mars. “The Atacama Desert is a very interesting place,” she comments, “one of the driest deserts in the world, with salt plains and flamingos. That was the science thing, to study the flamingos.” There were volcanoes, as well. “We were going to climb them.” Thanks to her climbing experience, she was going to lead.

But the whole thing crumbled under the weight of reality. The scientists on the expedition couldn’t use her group because they lacked adequate transportation. The local community didn’t need (or want) their help. So they spent their time exploring. A couple of local policemen had horses, so Kate went riding in the desert.

The expedition was supported in part by military troops from each country they visited, as well as troops from other parts of the world — in this case, the United States and New Zealand. “It was a complete boondoggle for them,” Kate confides. While there, she met and fell in love with an American Green Beret. He invited her to visit him in Massachusetts for Halloween. After she returned to university in Brighton, the two wrote letters and talked briefly by phone once a week because of the cost. (This was still before the internet.) Because her father worked for British Airways, she could fly round-trip to Boston for 50 pounds, so she visited her Green Beret over every break. It was a transatlantic love affair.

Kate finished her degree when she was 21. She was so excited about moving on to her new life that she skipped the graduation, a decision she regrets. “My mum and dad had skimped and saved for me to go to university. I didn’t realize how important that experience of the graduation process was.”

She flew to the States and was married.

By 1989 her husband had left the military and the couple moved to Portland, Oregon. They bought a house built around 1919.

“It was a money pit. Every weekend it was, ‘What’s the project this week? Well, let’s fix the broken toilet. The tank was cracked; it had to be replaced. Then we found it had been leaking. The leak had ruined the floorboards. When we pulled those up, we found the joists were damaged.” The work on her home is what turned her interest to wood and tools.

Next up: Part Two: A Career in Woodworking

— Nancy Hiller, author of Making Things Work

As a woman who has been building furniture and cabinetry since 1980, when there were so few of us in woodworking shops that we prompted stares and questions (“What’s your real job?” “Did your husband teach you how to do this?”), I have a sense of how much better things are today. “Better,” of course, is not synonymous with ideal; some have tales of ongoing insult, from lower expectations and mansplaining to crude name-calling born from resentment. Nevertheless, images of women building furniture and working in other trades are increasingly common, and most prospective customers, at least in my experience, no longer assume that our work will cost less than that of our male counterparts (“because it’s not as good as a man’s” / “because your husband supports you”), or that it will be adorned with ducks and bunnies.

I’m always interested in hearing about other women who have been working professionally in this field since those lonelier days. Several months ago Chris Becksvoort introduced me to the accomplished woodworker and teacher Lynette Breton, whom I profile here.

As with many furniture makers, Breton’s woodworking career grew out of her interest in art. In the 1970s she moved from her home state of Maine to San Francisco, where she planned to attend art school. At the time, California’s state colleges offered tuition-free education to state residents, a promise that proved a powerful draw to many young people. To qualify, Breton had to earn California residency, so her first step was to get a job. She was working as a bookkeeper when a friend suggested she apply at a cabinet company down the road; the Women in Apprenticeship Program was placing women in non-traditional fields, and she thought Why not try it? She applied and was hired.

Breton was one of four people in the shop, which fabricated kitchen cabinetry and other built-ins. With no previous experience in woodworking, she dove in at the deep end and was trained by her colleagues on the job. “I became completely impassioned by it,” she says. “I read everything I could and studied on my own. Fine Woodworking had just come out; I was glued to that, as well as anything else I could find to read. Technical books by Tage Frid, Krenov and designers Judy McKee and Wharton Esherick were my inspiration.” She loved it so much that she abandoned her original plan to attend art school. Instead, she worked her way into the drafting department, so she was able to combine building and design.

While working at the cabinet shop, Breton stumbled into an evening job at Pacific Atlas Woodworking, a business that built frames and chairs for upholstery. She describes the sight that captivated her when she peered through the open door: “I [remember] standing in the Pacific Atlas doorway, gazing at the turn-of-the-century production equipment and heavily-used pots of hide glue and brushes, heated for the workday in the assembly area. There were pattern templates, at least 500, hanging from the ceilings.” Her employer was so impressed by her growing skills and her eagerness to work that he took her on specifically to make things that were beyond his other employees’ capabilities, such as a three-legged table with mortise-and-tenon joinery. “I had never done anything like that,” she remembers, “but he could see my enthusiasm and gave me those opportunities.”

Inspired to deepen her knowledge and sharpen her skills, Breton took a furniture design class through the University of California-Berkeley Extension School with instructor Merryll Saylan. She also shared studio space with John and Carolyn Grew-Sheridan; she ended up working with all three artists and taught classes with them. “Carolyn Grew-Sheridan was a very recognized woman in the field [in] her time,” Breton notes. “[She died] suddenly of pancreatic cancer, and it was a big loss for many of us. I have searched for info on her through her husband, now John Sheridan, because when the Making a Seat at the Table exhibit came up, it brought up the memory of her work for me, wondering where she would have gone with it all if she had lived. I do want to memorialize her with some writing at some point but her legacy has vanished in this digital time.” (Breton sent me an article from Tradeswoman magazine, which you can read here.)

After a few years in the Bay area, Breton wanted to return to Maine. “I loved California but missed the seasons.” She and her partner decided to travel across the country, living in a camper, until they found a place to live in Maine. Unlike most people, Breton didn’t go out and buy a camper for the back of her truck; she built her own, which she describes as “a cross between a boat and a gypsy wagon.”

On arriving in Portland, she parked the camper in a friend’s driveway, where she stayed for a few months. The camper turned out to be important for more than sleeping. “That camper was my portfolio,” she says with a laugh. Eventually she drove it over to Thomas Moser’s shop. He hired her on a trial basis.

The first job Moser gave her was refacing the kitchen cabinets in his own home. She built the new doors and drawers in his shop. “It was still a small company,” she recalls. Chris Becksvoort and Kevin Rodel were her fellow employees. Each cabinetmaker built custom pieces from start to finish, cutting all their dovetails by hand. She worked for Moser three years.

In 1985 Breton and her friend Ann Flannery, a cabinetmaker, finish carpenter and boatbuilder, started their own business, Breton Flannery Woodworks. They bought a building in Freeport with a view to specializing in furniture and cabinets mostly of their own design. For the first couple of years Moser sent work their way – invaluable support to get them started. Eventually they began being hired for whole-house interior projects such as designing Southwestern style furniture for a home in the Bahamas and built-in cabinetry for renovations and new construction.

As the workload and scheduling became too much for two people, they hired employees. Lynette built select pieces while doing all the drafting, designing and customer contact. Ann led the shop employees, ordered materials and helped with estimates.

They ran the business for 10 years until a significant economic downturn led Ann to pursue a different path. Breton decided to close up shop.

From there she transitioned into teaching at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, where she was responsible for two- and 12-week programs. She taught there for nine years.

Finally, Lynette was ready to have her own shop again. She bought a timber-frame kit and in September 2004, had a traditional barn raising with all her woodworking friends; they completed the frame and roof  sheathing in one weekend. After that, she finished the building with a few helping hands and by December she had the place running, with heat.

Some friends who had houses in Hawaii, as well as in Maine, became prominent clients, hiring her to build the furniture and cabinets for both of their homes. Breton also designed the interior of a new house for them and oversaw its construction, in addition to building some of the furniture, a process that took 2-1/2 years. Today she continues to run her business, Lynette Breton Design, taking commissions for furniture and teaching classes in her shop.

— Nancy Hiller, author of “Making Things Work.”

Lynette Breton and Ann Flannery will host a weeklong Maine women woodworking adventure in June 2020. For details, check her website and posts on Instagram @lynettebretondesign.