Category: Personal Favorites

Almost every day that I’m home, I spend time searching real estate listings or hitting the pavement, wandering around old neighborhoods in search of the perfect building for Lucy and I to live and work.

We’re picky. Our first house was in downtown Lexington, Ky., and it should have been condemned when we purchased it. And while bringing that building back to life was satisfying, it also was a lot more work than we ever expected. So we’ve vowed to buy a building that doesn’t have structural problems.

We also are looking for a particular vibe. We moved to our current house in Fort Mitchell, Ky., in 1996 for the fantastic schools. And while the town is quite nice, it’s far too gentrified, sleepy and homogenous for our tastes. We like being surrounded by other urban pioneers, independent entrepreneurs, craftsmen and artists. We like to be able to walk everywhere.

So we’re walking a lot of neighborhoods. And while we haven’t found the perfect building, street or neighborhood yet, we have found the perfect sign for the building.

One of the places we’re investigating is Pike Street in Covington, Ky., which is nearly perfect for us. Outside the Pike Street Lounge is this utterly fantastic welded and wicked metal bird. It suits my aesthetic perfectly – now all I need to do is find out who made that bird so I can ask them to make us a pair of dividers in that style.

Oh, and I need a building so I can hang it out front.

— Christopher Schwarz

While teaching at Roy Underhill’s The Woodwright’s School this week, one of the students brought in some unusual antique winding sticks and laid them on my workbench.

I laughed a bit at first. Then I said, “Hmmm.” Then I said, “Dang!”

The winding sticks came from Mark Firley, the lead staff blogger of the international The Furniture Record blog. See also the German site, Die Möbel Rekord.

What is fascinating about these winding sticks, which were found in an antiques store in Mount Pleasant, S.C., is how incredibly well they work.

Many winding sticks feature some small bit of inlay on one of the sticks. This inlaid stick, when placed behind the other stick, makes it easier to see how twisted a board is. I like the inlay.

These unusual sticks, however, had instead two half-moon holes on one of the sticks. At the top of each hole there was a little strip of wood that was beveled.

At first, the whole thing looked like it was roughed in from Roughsville. Then I started using them. When the user has a backlight behind him or her, the small bevels appear as darker than the rest of the stick. They are in shadow and act like inlay (without the inlay).

When something is waaaaay twisted or you have light in front of you, then the half-moons take over. You can see the amount of light admitted by each half-moon. If there is more light in the right half-moon, then that corner is low.

Pure fricking genius.

The sticks were made from mahogany and were workmanlike but not fancy at all.

When I get home on Monday, the first order of business (after kissing my wife) is to make some of these. Stay tuned.

— Christopher Schwarz