Craig grew up with his mom, dad and three older sisters on a 200-acre cattle farm just south of Owensboro, Kentucky, in Utica. They lived on his Grandpa Gus’s farm, who, semi-retired, was down to 40 head of cattle and a bull. There was a lot to experience, Craig says.
“We cut hay with the tractor and I could remember being so small, driving that Massey Ferguson 135 tractor that when I had to push in on the clutch I had to get both feet on the left side of the tractor to stand on that clutch so I could either do clutch or brake,” he says. “So it helped me make good decisions when I was young, that old survival of the fittest thing. And it was all on a hill. You know the old fold-down sickle bar mowers, these things that hang off the side of the tractor that are great at cutting legs off deer (I mean, I never did that). Just, from a really young age, I remember understanding the physics of things. If you didn’t, you got hurt.”
Poppa Gus’s homestead and cattle farm, Utica, Kentucky.
Craig was always the skinniest kid, so when lifting up bales of hay onto the trailer he would have to figure out ways to leverage his body to his advantage.
Craig on the farm.
“Growing up in all that, and all the conveyer belts and things that want to chop you up and spit you out in smaller pieces, it just gave me an attention to that, to looking at the mechanisms of the old equipment and the new equipment,” he says. “And then I always had a go-cart, four-wheeler, three-wheeler and motorcycle, so I was always riding those things. I didn’t like the feeling of crashing so I learned how to ride safely. But I was just around a lot of mechanical things.”
The day after Craig outgrew his go-cart.
Craig’s dad, a welder, and brother-in-law, a tool and die maker, started a machine shop in the backyard when Craig was 14.
The first location of J & L Welding and Machine, est. 1977, Utica, Kentucky.
“I started working out in the machine shop begrudgingly, you know when you’re 14,” he says. “My first job was sharpening jack hammer bits. A jack hammer bit gets blunted on the end so I stood at our shop-built belt sander and put a four-facet point on it, kind of a four-facet pyramid point on it, and I heated them up in the torch and dunked them in oil. I did that for probably a whole summer.”
They soon got into building weight-lifting equipment. By now it was 1983. Customers would bring in pictures from weight-lifting magazines and ask for four-station machines with pulldowns, bench presses etc.
“And I would just look at the picture and I would measure from my elbow to my shoulder and just build the machine,” Craig says. “I would drill all the holes in weight stack plates, make the benches, I’d do all the spray painting, I’d do all the upholstery, make all the pulleys – I learned to work from minimal information.”
By the time Craig was 18, he bought his dad out and moved J & L Welding and Machine just north to Owensboro, Kentucky. There he made all sorts of things, such as fixtures for furniture companies to glue up chair frames and fixtures to rotate an entire couch while it was being upholstered.
The second location of J & L Welding and Machine, 1022 Oglesby St., Owensboro, Kentucky.
“It was just so awesome to have the trust of customers and to build and deliver what they needed,” he says.
He was working 60 hours a week but he liked the work and he liked working. When Craig was 22, he sold his part of the machine shop and went to work as a machinist for America’s Best Chew tobacco factory in Owensboro (back then it was known as The Pinkerton Tobacco Company; the name changed in January 2022). The 10-acre factory produced about 25,000 pounds of chewing tobacco and about 600,000 cans of snuff a day on three miles worth of conveyor belts.
Craig as a machinist at the tobacco company, 1994.
“I was in heaven,” he says. “All this stuff, cutting and chopping and conveying tobacco, kind of like what I grew up with.”
He found himself remaking the same stuff over and over. “So, I set out to fixing the problems that caused the never-ending use of all these spare parts,” he said. “I would re-engineer and remake the part. I would make a proper shaft once, instead of 15 shafts a year. And that really increased throughput in the factory.”
For about seven years during this time, Craig held several other jobs too. He would work at the tobacco factory from 6:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., then he’d work his side business, Jackson Contracting, grading and seeding new yards until 6 p.m. Then he’d teach machine tool technology at the local vocational school from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Jackson credits his mom and grandpa for his strong work ethic.
“They didn’t just sit around,” he says. “And they seemed to be the happiest people I knew. My favorite book of the Bible is Ecclesiastics, by King Solomon, maybe the richest, most successful person in the history of the world. All he concluded was, nothing beats a hard day’s work. He had all the gold, all the women, all the power, and he just said, it ain’t doing it for me.”
After about a decade at the tobacco company, Craig was promoted into a management role as continuous improvement manager over the entire factory. Although he was being groomed for Factory Manager, he ended up leaving in 2010 to grow Easy Wood Tools.
A Better Woodturning Tool
Craig stumbled into woodturning in 2007 while shopping with his wife, Donna, in Evansville, Indiana. Donna needed a pair of shoes so while she went into a Shoe Carnival, Craig went next door into a Woodcraft.
“I had never heard of a Woodcraft,” he says. “I went in there and saw a book by Malcolm Tibbetts, on segmented woodturning. I opened that up and I was just amazed. I had no idea anything in woodworking could be this complicated.”
Craig got into making segmented bowls.
“I bought a little Jet mini lathe, put it in my garage, and kept making bigger and bigger bowls, got a big Powermatic lathe, and a trailer, and a 30” chainsaw and it kind of got out of hand,” he says. “But the whole time I was like, what is up with these bowl gouges? This makes no sense! If I had set out to make the most complicated and dangerous cut known to man, I would end up with a bowl gouge.”
So Craig started playing around with carbide inserts. Unable to find anything he liked, he engineered his own replaceable carbide inserts (eliminating the need to constantly resharpen) with crazy angles. He then designed tools with stainless steel to hold the carbide inserts and wooden (mostly maple) handles.
Craig holding Robin’s work of art.
“I was just making the heck out of these bowls with my carbide tools and I thought, maybe I need to show somebody,” he says.
Nick Cook tried Craig’s tool for the first time in 2008. Nick helped Craig land his first retailer.
“Nick Cook has probably done more woodturning than maybe anybody on the earth,” Craig says. “So I handed him the tool and I said, ‘Nick, I made this tool. I got $125 I’ll pay you to just try this tool out.’ He said, ‘Let me see that thing.’ He took a few cuts with it and said, ‘You don’t owe me nothing. You need to get this on the market.’ I said, ‘OK, I’ll do that.’ And then I said, ‘Hang on. How do you take a product to market?’”
Nick told Craig that he’d connect him with some folks at Craft Supplies USA. Craig sent Darrel Nish a sample.
“They were like, ‘Yeah, you need to start making these,’” Craig says.
Craig knew he needed to go into mass production, but he had no idea how to go into mass production. He simply had to figure it out. Craig sold his tool with Craft Supplies USA exclusively for a year. Then Woodcraft called him up. He sent them some tools.
“A week later, they sent me a $75,000 purchase order,” Craig says. “So I called them back and said, ‘Hang on now. This is just me, my wife, and my two sons – they’re 8 and 10 years old – and the baseball coach. So I mean – we’re just – this is not what you think!”
Craig says a couple things set them apart – aside from the product – that likely made them noticeable to a company such as Woodcraft.
“We did pretty good at marketing and presenting of the product,” he says. “No. 1, we loved the customer. Whatever the customer wanted. I didn’t care how ridiculous it was. If you wanted a purple handle, I made you a purple handle.”
Craig told Woodcraft he didn’t have the capital to buy the raw materials to fulfill the purchase order.
“So they said, ‘We’ll send you a check,’” Craig says. “About three days later I got a $75,000 check in my mailbox. They hadn’t met me, they hadn’t shook my hand, they hadn’t seen my face. No contract. I sat there in the driveway and cried. This is, this is, OK.”
Craig then laughs thinking back at this poignant time in his life, when Easy Wood Tools was officially in business.
“All I’ve ever been and all I am still is just a machinist,” he says. “That’s all I’ve ever claimed to be. So we had to figure out packaging, logistics, shipping, mass production, all in the backyard.”
At one point they ordered all the packaging for the tools and it arrived on a pallet. The delivery person left the pallet in the street, and Craig and his family crew were left figuring out how they were going to muscle the pallet and all its contents up a slope to his garage. At one point, everything fell off the pallet, into the street.
“Everything you can imagine going wrong went wrong,” he says. “But we shipped that order, on time, in full, with no rejects,” he says. “I don’t know how we did it.”
The humble beginnings of Easy Wood Tools in Craig and Donna’s small backyard garage.
At first it was a family affair. In the evenings, Craig, Donna and their two sons, Noah and Sam, would package up products Saturday and Sunday nights while watching “America’s Funniest Home Videos” while sitting on the living room floor. Sam would get a cutter and drop it in a bag. Noah would add a screw and Ziploc the bag shut. Donna would fold it and staple it. Craig would box it up.
“It was a little Jackson assembly line and they thought it was just as normal as could be,” Craig says.
Craig, Samuel and Noah Jackson
The company grew and grew with upwards of 20 employees, and moved from Owensboro to Lexington, Kentucky.
Craig designed most of his packaging and branding, with the help of Tim Jones, and did woodturning demos all over the country.
Easy Hollower, patented by Craig.
Easy Chuck, patented by Craig.
Noah and Craig with woodworker Thomas MacDonald (aka Tommy Mac).
Craig and Donna filming “The American Woodshop” with Scott Phillips.
Craig and Scott Phillips.
There are two things Jackson is really proud of when it comes to Easy Wood Tools. First, it was the company’s ability to capture the essence of the power of possibility.
Something Jackson has always found interesting: At woodturning shows, during the auctions at the end of shows, wood blanks would often go for more money than turned pieces of art.
“And what that told me is the value of possibility is much greater than the value of possession,” he says. “I think that’s what I was able to do with Easy Wood Tools. I would give the customer the path to the possibility of making a great bowl because the tools are so simple. We could hand them to 8-year-olds and they would turn pens.”
Second, in the beginning, traditional tool companies would chastise Craig for taking away business. At first, this stung. But in his heart he knew he was not taking away anybody’s income. So he simply asked competing companies to simply give him a chance. He told them he would increase their sales by growing the number of woodturners. And sure enough, he did. Easy Wood Tools produced more woodturners who not only bought Easy Wood Tools, but woodturning tools from every other woodturning tool company as well.
The goal was to make woodturning simple enough for anyone to try.
“And then, by 2013, everybody and their brother was knocking me off and I was about done with it,” Craig says. “I mean, it was like 20 companies. I’d go to a trade show and on each side of me there were companies selling knockoffs, and they weren’t as good.”
This hurt, Craig says. “I built that company best I could not taking nothing from nobody and I just, I don’t know.”
In 2015 Craig sold Easy Wood Tools to Chicago-based Pony Tools Inc., of Jorgensen clamp fame. Within six months Pony Tools went bankrupt, and Craig didn’t get all his money. So he turned to what he knew best – machine work.
(Note, Craig has not had any affiliation, whatsoever, with Easy Wood Tools since 2015.)
“This past weekend, I knew I needed to test a new pasta board design…but hadn’t had time to sort out what I’d do with the pasta. Then when I’m out running errands, I spot some beautiful in-season asparagus at the local farm, which was nice and thick, just about the diameter of the cavatelli I was going to be making! Quick blanch and ice water bath on the asparagus, simple butter sauce with lemon juice and splash of white wine, finished with burrata, lemon zest, and of course an olive oil drizzle. Late spring on a plate!”
This paragraph from a recent Instagram post pretty much explains why I wanted to interview John Welch for the blog. John is a guy who primarily makes beautiful things out of wood for the preparation and serving of food. He’s not a furniture maker (though he certainly could be); his posts are not about dovetails, or techniques for finishing. Rather, he is motivated by a desire to “take something ordinary and make it special.”
The photo that accompanied the quotation at the head of this post.
The love of food has always been there.
When asked what brought him to the world of pasta molds and boards, he answered simply “I love food. I love cooking food, eating, all kinds of food.” Add to this his observation that “too many people have beautiful things that are too precious [to use],” and you’re on your way to understanding what drives this man to finish most days at the office with several hours of work in his shop. What could be simpler than pasta – a basic dough of flour, salt and water? But roll a pinch of that mix across a board carved with decorative patterns, and you’ve elevated the plainest of pastas to an art form – as pleasing to the eye as it is effective at capturing a spoonful of saucy goodness and conveying it to the mouth.
Texture aplenty in pasta made with parsley and saffron, respectively.
Evidence that food and woodworking belong together: A third-year birthday cake in the shape of a handsaw.
The origin of his interest was basically curiosity, John said in reply to my question about what got him started.
“I wanted to know if pasta could take and hold an impression. I assumed it would but had never seen a textured ravioli. I made my own mold first, then I did some Googling to see if anyone already made something like that.” John could have ordered a mold to use as an example but decided against doing so for a few reasons. “I am always very afraid of inadvertently ‘borrowing’ someone else’s idea, so I thought that the less I looked at them, the less likely I would happen upon a similar pattern or idea. Also, the motivation to make them was…a curiosity [as to whether] it’d work, then how to make it work; if I had one in hand, it’d be easier for me to reverse-engineer and that would have taken all the fun out of it! I didn’t make them with the intention to sell. It was just a fun project.” It took John a few attempts to figure out how deep the carving would have to be to show up on the pasta and remain sharp after cooking.
The first one he was happy with featured a wheat pattern loosely based on an example of Art Deco ironwork. Made in walnut, it had leaves in the corners; he put stars between them.
Early pasta mold.
A savory pumpkin ravioli. To see how John served it, go to the end of the post.Food preparation images by Jenn Bakos Photo.
The filling is pumpkin-based.
Flattening a small piece of dough with an old-fashioned rolling pin before running it through the pasta mangle.
Woodworking This is not a story about someone born into a family of woodworkers or generations who have made their own pasta from scratch. John’s forebears are not Italian; most are Irish mixed with French-Canadian. The “Francis” in his business name is his middle name; he’s John Francis Welch V.
The first spoon John carved, in process. The bowls for his ravioli molds are done with a router and jig.
John, the eldest of three siblings, grew up in a late-1800s house where his father always seemed to be engaged in repairs and maintenance. Although his dad didn’t compel or even expect John’s help, he exposed his older son to many aspects of home repair and restoration simply by carrying out household repairs and improvements.
As a woodworker, John is self-taught. When he was a kid his family didn’t have cable, but John could watch PBS, where he became a regular viewer of “The Woodwright’s Shop” and “The New Yankee Workshop.” He found the content interesting but had no intention of ever applying what he learned in real life. Even so, some of it sank in.
Teddy bear chair.
His parents loved handmade gifts, things from the heart. John dabbled in woodworking during high school; he was going to give his girlfriend a teddy bear and had decided to make an oak chair for it. His dad helped him cut the parts to size; then John built the chair with mortise-and-tenon joints. His mother had woven some baskets, so based on her example, he decided to weave a seat.
After that, woodworking went on the back burner as his interests shifted to motorcycles, fast cars and weight lifting, which led him to certification as a personal trainer. On his website you’ll find a portrait of John with bulging biceps that might lead you to wonder whether he’s more interested in appearances than substance. Not a bit of it. In middle school, other students had pushed him around, grabbing his books. His dad encouraged him to develop his muscles saying, “If you were strong enough to hold onto those books, they wouldn’t be able to rip them out of your hands.” So, as with most things that piqued his interest, John picked up that ball and ran with it.
The obligatory motorcycle.
He worked as a personal trainer in college, then, in his late 20s, he got into competitive power lifting. “I tend to be very goal oriented,” he explains. “I was losing focus – ‘Why am I going to the gym at 5 a.m?’ I’ve always been a very curious person, both [in terms of] ‘how does that work’ and ‘can I do that?’ Power lifting was very different from anything I’d done before.” The goal of competition provided just the oomph he needed, not just to keep going, but to excel. He won his first competition.
When John bought a townhouse in 2009, he had some home improvement projects in mind. He bought a miter saw and put up crown moulding, then replaced some doors. After the first few projects, he ran out of things to do. John was godfather to the daughter of a good friend; for her first birthday, her mother put in a request for a toy box. “I think she was expecting me to throw something together with plywood,” he remembers. “But if I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it well.” The toy box became his focus that summer. John had bought some handplanes on eBay; his brother deals in antiques, and John had tagged along on some of his adventures, which exposed him to more tools. He learned to sharpen. He bought some rough-sawn lumber and got started, building the toy box with stub tenons and solid wood panels. If it lasted, he figured, someday it could be used as a chest to store things other than toys. He worked in the garage, with a pair of sawhorses, a router, miter saw, circular saw and set of Kobalt chisels from Lowe’s.
A toy chest John made for his goddaughter.
The toy chest with finish.
In his day job, John designs extrusion dies for pasta at De Mari Pasta Dies. He was the first employee in the business who was not related to the founding family. Most of their products are in large chain grocery stores around the United States. “Every cartoon [mac and cheese made by one of the nation’s largest food corporations] for the last 15 years, I have personally designed all of those.”
While he appreciates his work and gives it his level best, he says, “I work my 8 hours and leave. With woodworking I can make what I want to make. It gives me the freedom to do what I want to do.”
For a time, he used his garage as a woodshop. He had to come up with some items to make that would need little space and very few tools. Spoons were one candidate, a handmade item that would “add a lot of love and care” in the preparation of a meal. His business took off from there.
As part of his day job for a time, John oversaw the installation of major pasta-making machinery at facilities around the North American continent, mostly in the Midwest, but with a few trips to Washington State and Canada. The travel for work underscored that his decision to buy a townhouse with his wife, Kara, a training specialist for a property management company, had been sound; their home required far less work than would have been required by a house with multiple rooms and a yard to maintain. While traveling for work, he had to use the garage for his car, not woodworking.
When the travel for work slowed down and John again had time for woodworking, he needed a studio space to rent – either that, or he and Kara would have to move to another house. The first studio he rented and the couple he rented after that were at Western Avenue in Lowell, Mass.; in June of 2021 he moved to his current space, 240 square feet in a repurposed textile mill that had been turned into artist studios. As he later learned, the building is the same one where his great-grandfather had worked decades before as a “grease monkey,” maintaining machinery for one of the mills that made Lowell, Mass., such a late-19th-century economic powerhouse that many still think of it as “the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution” (at least in North America). John’s great-grandfather also did some woodworking on the side. He built the house where John’s paternal grandmother grew up, followed by his own father, and where John’s parents continue to live. His great-grandfather had made a grandmother clock as a gift for John’s parents; today John keeps it in his studio.
The grandmother clock.
At this point, he says, “My goal was to pay the rent for my studio. If money was no object, I would make mirrors, wall sculptures, hand-carved tabletops. But the ravioli molds caught on.” When he started, charcuterie boards were a transition after the toy box for his goddaughter.
John is constantly looking for ways to improve his processes – to carve the ravioli molds, he’s upgraded his tool chest with some chisels from Japan, and he now makes some of the decorative patterns with a router. “As much as I love carving,” he acknowledges, “it gets to a point where it’s not financially feasible. I don’t really make spoons anymore; it’s partly because I can’t charge enough to make it worth it.”
This concern with workflow is a holdover from his day job, where he’s required to maximize efficiency. “I’ve always been more Type A,” John remarks. “The other artists at my former studio would tell me ‘You’re not a real artist,’ because my studio was so clean. I’ve always been like that: If something could be better, why not make it [so]?”
Some might have burned out after 300 ravioli molds, the number he sold in 2021. Not John. He plans to keep making them. “Part of what’s kept me going is that with the internet, a lot of people who buy them make these incredible dishes. I can’t tell you the rewarding feeling it gives me to see people feeding their friends and family with molds I’ve made.” He hopes to do more carving – art pieces, textured mirrors and more – but acknowledges the struggle involved in “going from ‘practical’ things to things that are meant [primarily] to be looked at. I blame it on my Yankee upbringing not to engage in ‘frivolous’ things.’”
He also continues to make a smaller number of other wares, such as charcuterie trays and pasta boards.
Carved bookend.
Carved platter.
Carved platter, underside.
Carved platter, detail.
Side table with carved top.
“I mentioned that I like to cook, but I LOVE to cook, and most of all explore with food. I love that the possibilities are endless, there is so much to learn, so much freedom of expression allowed. I love that you can travel to distant lands that you may never otherwise get to experience, all through flavors,” says John. “So with that said, my kitchen adventures have been pretty thorough: sausage making, curing meats, smoking, bread baking, pasta making (obviously), pâté and terrines, sous vide cooking, etc… About the only thing I don’t dabble in are baked sweets!”
Selfishly, I’d like to think it’s just a matter of time.
Spinach-ricotta filling.
Crispy prosciutto tops the pumpkin ravioli with brown butter sauce.
Izzi the dog with Dan in his office, where he keeps his drafting table and library.
Dan Phillips doesn’t advertise or have a website, so when Christopher Schwarz suggested he’d make a good subject for a profile, adding “he has a great eye,” I looked him up on Instagram. Here’s a guy who doesn’t give a fig for the accepted wisdom about social media, I thought; Daniel’s feed is a colorful mix of drawings, paintings, home interiors, music, kids and woodworking tools, all with a good dose of irony. Scattered among the variety you’ll find images of dovetails, other joinery details and finished furniture pieces. Not for Dan the segregation of woodworking from “life” or any of the other interests that characterize it, a different Instagram account for every one. How refreshing.
Painting. “Girl Sitting at a Chair.” Gouache on paper.
Given what I saw, I wasn’t surprised to learn that Dan, who goes by D.H. Phillips, is the son of artist parents. Born in Dallas in 1976, he’s the middle of three children. His father, Harvey Phillips, shifted from visual art to architecture early in Dan’s life. “For as long as I can remember that’s what he did, and still does,” Dan says. His mother, Susie Phillips, remains a practicing artist in paint.
Dan’s dad was also a professional carpenter who always had a woodshop of one kind or another. “As soon as I was old enough to work a bit, he would take me, first, to demolition sites,” says Dan. “Then I learned to frame houses and sheetrock and all that stuff. I really liked being in the shop more than at somebody’s house.” As he grew more interested in design, H.C. Westermann, a sculptor and two-dimensional artist, became a strong influence. “I wanted to learn that more fancy woodworking stuff, and that wasn’t really in my dad’s [wheelhouse].” Ambitious, he made a dovetailed box on the bandsaw “with lots of wood putty.”
Dan’s former wife is a paper conservator. One of her grad school teachers had trained in the book-binding program at North Bennett Street School. He looked the place up, took a two-week class in fundamentals of fine woodworking and says “That was it.” He applied to the full-time program. He was still motivated by two-dimensional artistic interests, “but once I was there, furniture making totally took over.”
Dan attended NBSS from 2005 to 2007. “I loved finding out about the early American decorative arts. We’d go on museum trips, and I loved the furniture. But all the other stuff – the quilts, paintings, folk art – that whole classical early American thing really did something for me,” he says.
Bar. Inside, there’s storage for beverages. The cabinet is mahogany, the doors are redwood burl and the top is granite.
Couch and lounge chairs with coffee table. Walnut, with the end panels on the couch of crotch walnut. House of Vonne, an upholsterer friend in Portland, Ore., made the upholstery; the cushions are removable.The coffee table base is ambrosia maple.
Built-in end tables of crotch walnut, detail.
Rear view. Walnut burl panels. Dan sought out the golden tone of the sapwood for contrast.
“There’s an aesthetic that carries through the periods,” he continues. “A piece of scrimshaw looks just as awesome to me as a federal secretary. That pre-industrial stuff…. You can see the hand in everything. I love to draw – I don’t use computers for drawing – so maybe there’s something there…a tactile thing, a certain crudeness, no matter how fancy something might look. You can tell it’s handmade, and I love seeing the transition through the periods and the details that stick, the things that change.”
After his time in Boston Dan moved back to Dallas in 2007 and set up in his dad’s shop. Slowly, at first, he began to get commissions; the first was a coffee table for his mom. Then, he says, “It just kind of snowballed. It’s been pretty steady.” There are times he’s overwhelmed and others when “my fingers are crossed that something’s going to pop up. I just sort of made furniture making my reality, whether commissioned work was actually happening or not.”
“From my scrimshaw fascination,” says Dan of this top piece, reminiscent of a sperm whale. White gouache on black paper. The bottom one is a photograph of a walnut sculpture Dan made, approximately 36″ long x 6″ tall.
Whales in black ink, painted with brush, on paper. This is the interior of the cabin in the gallery, mentioned in the text below. You can see glimpses of the three furniture pieces as well.
A comic depicting a true event, with Dan’s father reminding him to wear safety glasses when working on the table saw.
Dan’s work comes mostly through word of mouth. Although he posts work on Instagram, he says “I’m not sure how much business I get from it.” He always asks people how they found him. It’s usually from a friend, or they saw something he’d made.
Today he makes mostly residential stuff – desks, sideboards, wall units, beds, chairs but mostly “loungey” chairs. “I don’t know that I’ve ever made any dining chairs.” There are dining tables…some work for offices, such as desks, about which he remarks, “you can have some fun with all the drawers and hidden compartments.” At present his favorite thing is case pieces.
Sideboard, detail. Mahogany with a granite top. The drawer pulls are metal; Dan had them made for another job and had ordered a few extra. The moulded corners keep things from rolling off the top. “In my drawing I felt like it needed one more little bump, and that’s what I came up with.” He had the granite fabricators drill holes for dowels based on a template.
He works in mahogany and walnut, primarily darker woods and says, “I draw the piece and it will become obvious what wood to use.”
Mahogany high chair. Dan made this one for his daughter.
Dresser in mahogany with olive ash burl drawer faces. The handles are from an antique store; Dan was experimenting with unconventional placement.
He’s still a very active painter, too. His paintings, he says, “have evolved over time. I first did them as train graffiti tags, then moved to paper.” He paints in watercolors and washes but sometimes reverts to colored pencil and watercolors. Most are gouache on paper.
Painting of a mirror, life-size. Gouache on paper. Dan didn’t build the mirror; the painting represents one of the objects he “wish[es] people would commission.”
He sells in a gallery, though recent work has been commissioned. “I never just ‘make art.’ I’ve got to have a reason. There’s someone who’s commissioned a piece, or I have a show coming up. The furniture scratches so many of those itches. I do a ton of drawing, so I never miss out on drawing stuff,” he says.
Dan’s shop is in a former Ford Motor Company manufacturing plant, a huge building near Fair Park in Dallas. He’s been there about 10 years. Before that, he worked in a Quonset hut. “That was not good! Whatever the weather was outside, that’s what it was in there. I couldn’t make fancy furniture.” He moved into a friend’s jewelry studio, but it became too cramped. He currently has about 5,000 square feet in the whole shop, but that includes a couple of office/bench rooms, a storage room, a machine room and more. A Plexiglas fabricator uses half the space; Dan and his dad use the other.
Home is near the shop. In fact, Dan says, most of his existence takes place within about a 7-minute-drive circle. Even his kids’ school is within that radius.
One of the few times Dan has repeated himself and made a design again, after the original commission. These chairs are of walnut, with channeled leather upholstery.
Dresser in walnut with maple drawers. Asymmetrically cut-out pulls.
Jewelry box. Mahogany with painted black details. The long black horizontal strips are drawer bottoms, protruding at the front and intended to function as pulls.
Drawing on the Past Dan looks to antiques as a starting point. He has no interest in making period furniture as such but incorporates details he likes in his own work. “It’s an opportunity to participate [in furniture making] the same way the old guys did. You get these pattern books from Sheraton or Hepplewhite and use them as a starting point. The proportions…they worked it out! [Master those proportions, and your piece] already looks good. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel,” he says. Dan draws in pencil on printer paper and keeps refining designs, then makes a scale drawing and adjusts accordingly; for example, seat height is important when he’s making one of those “loungey” chairs, so he’ll base it on that.
He refines his drawings, which he calls doodles, until he’s satisfied. Then the challenge is “trying to get things to look like my ‘doodle.’ Sometimes things in the doodle are totally unrealistic, so I’m just trying to figure out how to get the same visual effect in the drawing. I like to draw stuff, and draw a lot of it. I’ve just developed a certain style from doing that. I probably have 8,000 drawings of furniture.”
Dan’s father’s wife gave him these notes her own dad had taken. He thought they’d make a good background for his own drawings.
Home & Family
From left: Mugsy, Jackie and Velena; the kids are sitting on Paul McCobb chairs.
Dan lives with Jackie Dunn Smith, an artist who paints and does tattoos, devoting about half her work time to each. They have two children; their daughter, Velena Phillips, is 10. Their son, Mugsy Smith, is 14.
Dan’s mother’s family moved to north Texas from Pennsylvania via Oklahoma. His father’s side came from Kansas, where they were asparagus farmers; then, in a turn of events worthy of his arch Instagram feed, his paternal grandfather won a contest held on the radio that came with flying lessons as the prize. After training, that grandpa became a pilot, flew in the Second World War and went on to a career as a pilot for now-defunct Braniff International Airways. That’s what brought his father’s family to Dallas when his dad was in high school.
Their home is furnished with all sorts of things, many of Dan’s own making. For one show he built a 12’x 18′ cabin and furnished it with a bed, blanket chest and lounge chair. The installation was for sale, but it didn’t sell, so he ended up with the three furniture pieces. He also has furniture he made in training. As for the family dining table, he got that back from a client who moved and couldn’t use it; the client thought that Dan might be able to sell it, but there were no takers. He wanted to keep it, and in the end, they said he could. The rest of their home is furnished with a mix of antiques and IKEA.
When asked to sum up his work as a furniture maker, Dan says,
Simply, it’s what I do. If I had to analyze it I’d say that I like the place I’m in, where people are aware of my thing and that they are choosing me for the thing they want. There is no shortage of available furniture. It’s almost ridiculous to be making more. But I’m glad to be doing it. I love the art form. I love hearing what the client wants and the spark that goes off in my brain and the subsequent pencil to paper to hash out the general idea. I love the first impression and the miles of yellow tracing paper refining the design. I love making a presentation drawing for the client to look at. Once they say yes, I love getting out the big paper and using the drafting table. I love the problem solving of turning the doodle into a set of working drawings. I love figuring out how much wood I need and looking at the available wood that will work.
I loathe figuring out how much something will cost. But then they say yes and the wood shows up and you agonize about how to break it down and then you break it down and then it’s a mad fever of strategy and efficient work flow until you don’t have anything else to do but get some photographs made and deliver it. Pretty damn fun. Glad to be able to participate in a centuries old way to make your way.
Jögge Sundqvist (woodworker, teacher, performer, musician and author of several books) and Nina Lindelöf married 12 years ago, after having been together for 30 years. How did they meet?
“Ho, ho! It was rock ‘n’ roll,” Jögge says. “It was lovely.”
There were a lot of parties during those days. “And I saw this wonderful woman and I was so shy, I didn’t even dare to look at her,” Jögge says. “And she started to raise some interest. It was just right, totally right. And it still is.”
In 1992 they moved to the countryside, to Kasamark, about 20 minutes outside Umeå. At the time Nina had been working as a successful costume designer for Umeå’s local theaters.
“But we wanted out from the city,” Jögge says. “We had a daughter, Hillevi, who was 2-years-old, and we wanted her to grow up in the countryside, close to the forest, free.”
They spent two years before they found an 1824 nearly all-original Västerbottengård, a log house with two squared rooms on each side, an entrance in the middle and a little sleeping chamber beside the entrance. They planned to restore it.
Jögge and Nina’s Västerbotten house. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Jögge turned the old barn into a workshop to begin the restoration.
“I didn’t know much about making bigger things, like houses,” he says. “But I was very happy exploring working with logs and the ways of restoring an old house carefully and with respect for tradition.”
A restored baking oven is the main focus of the kitchen. Wooden items such as spoons, ladles and spatulas are natural items in the kitchen inside Jögge and Nina’s Västerbotten house. (photos by Jögge Sundqvist)
They lived in another house on the property during the restoration process. They had a son, Herman, in 1994. After five years, they sold the house they were living in so they could afford to move to the Västerbotten house.
Wille, Jögge’s father, Herman and Hillevi (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
By now Jögge had quit his job at Umeå Central Station, having been headhunted by the craft society to work as a craft consultant, “which I really appreciated a lot,” he says. In addition to working on his own craft he served as a craft consultant throughout Västerbotten part-time, between 1988 and 1998.
Surolle, a Sour Old Man Who Set Jögge Free Jögge approached craft and parenting in the same way his father did, never insisting that his children become slöjders.
“Because then, it would never happen,” he says. “My father was just showing me how exciting it was. He was very enthusiastic – you can do this and you can do that. He was just very engaged when I had an idea. So that was my task when I had kids – to encourage them to have fun in creativity.”
Hillevi, his daughter, enjoyed drawing, and Jögge encouraged that. And he did the same with his son, Herman.
Herman planing with a shaving around his head.(photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Herman with his ship, made in the workshop. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
“We had a wonderful period in our relationship when he was waiting to go to school and he and I had about 45 minutes in my workshop when the rest of the family was already in town,” Jögge says. “And he had a lot of ideas about what to do. And we made wooden ships and figures, whatever he fancied. Because he loved to fantasize and tell stories.”
One of the family’s favorite stories involves Herman when he was about 5 years old.
“I had a customer visiting my workshop and they were pretty upper mid class,” Jögge says. “And I knew that they were probably going to order something pretty expensive so I told my family, ‘I’m going to have a visit and you have to behave, kids.’”
The customers, a couple, came, looked at pictures and were interested in a chair, which Jögge was really happy about. They went back to the house where they found Herman standing in the entrance. The man asked him a question he heard often: “Are you going to be a slöjder, like your father?”
“And then my son, who is very talkable, looked them straight in the eye and said, ‘No. My father cuts in wood but I’m going to cut in flesh when I get old.’ And the guy looked at me like, ‘What kind of crazy kid is this?’ And I looked at my son as I had never heard of anything like this before!’ And then my son finished his sentence. ‘I’m going to be a surgeon when I grow up.’ And he is, he’s becoming a doctor.”
(The couple did, indeed, buy the chair.)
In many ways Jögge’s parenting style is similar to how he approaches his work. By encouraging a union of self-exploration of tradition and wild creativity, he makes room for good, beautiful and functional objects that are also filled with meaningful whimsy.
“My father was a trained furniture maker and that is much more precise and exact,” Jögge says. “But I was much more drawn to the older craft, to the axe, to the knife, to rougher surfaces. So when I decided to run my own business I knew I had to choose what path to take and I didn’t know where I was going.”
Jewelry box. Ash, birch. Artist linseed oil paint. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Box. Ash, birch. Artist linseed oil paint. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Book cover box. Ash, birch. Artist linseed oil paint. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Mirror top. Basswood. Artist linseed oil paint. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Armchair. Larch, hawthorn, birch. Artist linseed oil paint. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Chair. Pine, birch, glass. Artist linseed oil paint. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Box. Ash, birch. Artist linseed oil paint. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Spoons and ladles. Hook-grown birch. Artist linseed oil paint and raw linseed oil. (photo by Jostein Skeidsvoll)
Armchair. Pine, birch. Artist linseed oil paint. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
“I like colors. I like rough surfaces. I like carved surfaces. I like tradition. I like the way untrained peasants in the past had a special relationship to the material, how they picked the crooked and bent material in the woods and put it in the design so it was a special design, which I will say was the slöjd design of how things looked based on their traditional knowledge on how to use the knife and the axe and the materials and the joints that had worked for years and years and years. I wanted to go on that path. But I wasn’t sure if that was right,” he says.
When Jögge began pursing owning his own craft business full-time, he created thousands of designs and was sketching all the time. One afternoon he made a stool with a heart-like shaped seat, and three naturally bent legs, almost like they were dancing. He carved quotes and sayings on the top of it, such as “U better dance,” by Prince, and “Rock on!” He painted it bright red and the whole thing had a very traditional rock ‘n’ roll feel to it.
Kiss stool. Pine, birch. Artist linseed oil paint. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Jögge had the stool on the floor of his workshop when Hillevi came home from school that day. He was eyeing it critically, as usual, still unsure of his path. Hillevi had never seen anything like it.
“Who made this one?” she asked.
“At the time, I was really deep into thinking about my grandfather and the craft and my father and what the expression of traditional craft is,” Jögge says. “So I said to her – it just came out of me – ‘Oh, an old guy up in the mountains made this.’ And she asked me, ‘What’s his name?’ ‘Yeah, his name is Olle Olsson,’ which is a very common name in Sweden. ‘He’s a sour, grumpy old guy, Olle Olsson.’ And then she asked, ‘This Olle Olsson, what sort of animals does he have?’ Because we had a goat by then, and we had a rabbit and a cat but she wanted horses and everything else and we said no. ‘Olle Olsson, yeah, he has all of them. He has goats and sheep and horses and everything.’ And she loved naming things, so she asked me, ‘What kinds of names do they have?’ She was 9 years old by then so I finally had to tell her, ‘I’m just playing with you, I’m having fun.’ She just looked at me and said, ‘OK.’ And she ran to the house.”
Jögge continued working and about 40 minutes later Hillevi returned with drawings, “wonderful drawings,” Jögge says. Under them was a nickname, “Sur Olle,” “the Sour Olle.” She drew Olle’s girlfriend, who she named Agnes Södergran, and all of Olle’s animals, naming them too.
“And then I said to myself, I probably need a guy like that,” Jögge says. “I need someone to talk with. ‘Is this good or is this bad?’ An alter ego. So I started playing around with this guy. ‘What do you think about this stool?’ ‘No, it could be a little thinner there. The legs are splaying out too much, you have to tighten them.’ So in one way he was kind of telling me the truth but I was actually telling myself the truth. And what I realized afterwards was I was lifting off the pressure of being a very good, fine furniture maker. I was accepting that I had another path that I wanted to go, more rough, more material based, more traditional based. It became totally clear. That was the reason I needed this guy to help me. Today I think of it all as a way to approach a manner, an artistic vision that was unique and personal.”
Olle Olsson, Sur Olle, engaged to Agnes Södergran. (illustration by Hillevi)
“I used to describe the traditional wall as a very thick wall because in my world, I had so many influences there. And because it’s so thick, it can be hard to jump through. But surolle helped me saw a little hole in that big wall by telling me, ‘You just have to have fun. You have to follow your path. You have to do your own thing here. You can’t be afraid of not doing the right thing. You have to do what you think is right.’”
In 1998, Jögge started his own professional craft business.
“I needed a name for my businesses and it was totally clear it had to be surolle,” he says.
A Never-ending Exploration Today, Jögge’s business stands on many legs. He teaches classes. He gives lectures about craft and slöjd – what it is, the meaning of it. And then he has a show called “Rhythm and Slöjd.”
Rhythm and Slöjd performance, drilling the hole with an T-auger for a shrink box in rhythm to the Chemical Brothers.
“It’s a storytelling performance about 45 minutes long where I make a shrink box live on stage from the very beginning, the trunk of a tree, until it works. During the time I’m making it I’m telling a lot of stories from the craft field. The first five minutes it’s kind of heavy rock music on stage. I then do everything in rhythm. I saw it off in rhythm. I shave it on the shaving horse in rhythm. I drill the hole in rhythm. I carve in rhythm. It is all done very precisely and exactly in rhythm. So that is special.”
Beginning in 2004, Jögge has performed this show more than 30 times, at schools and for adults, at Plymouth CRAFT and Spoonfest, in Sweden, the United States, Japan and Great Britain.
“But my favorite thing to do is make objects,” he says. “That’s the main reason I’m working.” He recently expanded his shop. And lately, he’s been enjoying working on public commissions for the Swedish Arts Council: theaters, Umeå Airport, Umeå University Library, a nature trail, the Church of Sweden, Västerbotten County Council, the Nordic Museum, schools and more.
“Stairway to heaven” ladder in crooked-grown birch. Raw linseed oil. (photo by Jostein Skeidsvoll)
Littefox. Ash and crooked-grown birch. Public commission to Umeå City Library.(photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Västanå Theatre entrance. Pine, basswood. Artist oil color. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Amelia Earhart bench with back. Pine, crooked-grown birch, basswood. Public commission to Umeå Airport. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
“They pay pretty well and they’re a little bigger and so I kind of like that,” he says. “I would say right now I’m finally where I want to be.” His private commission waiting list is currently four to five deep. Clients simply ask for a cupboard, say, and he suggests designs, creates drawings and says how much it will cost. And clients almost always agree.
Jögge’s chip-carving knife, made in collaboration with Kay Embretsen. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Jögge is carving the design on some chip-carving knives the whole time he talks. He’s partnered with Swedish knife maker Kay Embretsen, who makes his own Damascus steel. A local store is selling a kit that contains one of Jögge’s books, a chip-carving knife designed and made by Jögge in partnership with Kay, and basswood blanks.
The beginning of the pandemic was “a total disaster,” Jögge says, as all his classes and lectures were canceled. But, he had just signed a contract for a new book a few months prior.
“The book was my pandemic babe,” he says. “My wife was working from home and I was working from here, just writing the book and making all the objects. I finally had all that time to make an object and realize, ‘This is not good enough – you have to make a new one – this pattern could be even better – you have to rewrite this one more time.’ You know that thing, as a writer, you have to really give it some time? I was able to give it some time, and even some more time in between that.”
Jögge’s newest book, forthcoming in English from Lost Art Press. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
The book contains 16 projects and Jögge made six or seven objects for each project just so he could pick the best ones as featured examples.
“I’m so happy because if I had so much other work at the same time, I doubt the book would have been so good because I wouldn’t have been able to go so deeply into each of the tasks, so to say. You know how it is it – the older you get, you have to have the right feeling for the design, especially the objects you’ve never made before. It has to take some time before you can really decide, ‘Was this good enough?’ So I was happy for the isolation that it actually was. Socially, it was a disaster.”
Jögge’s hope for the future is simple: To still be able to do woodwork as a way to earn a living, “as long as my body tells me it can,” he says. “I had some problems with my hips and I’ve been having problems with my shoulders and elbows. So I have to exercise. I have to go to the gym and do my work there. That’s the only worry I have in the future is not being able to work.”
Nina is a physical therapist who teaches as a lecturer at a local university, so her expertise in this matter helps. Together they enjoy spending time with their grandchild, Lova, who is 3 years old.
Jögge’s grandchild, Lova. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
“The thing that strikes me about having a grandchild – and having children – is that humans are always exploring,” Jögge says. “They want to know about the world. It’s so natural for them. She’s always thinking and raising questions, ‘Why is this?’ ‘Why is that?’ And that’s the fun part in craft – you always have to explore. And then you have to learn to control your body and the tool. And you have to know the material. And you have to find out how people did it in the early days, how they solved problems, and that’s a never-ending story. You can always find new and interesting ways of making things and exploring the world. And that’s what I’m doing. And, of course, it’s a discovery of yourself too, also in an artistic way. You’re exploring what skills you have and what you want to express but also what skills you don’t have and what you need to learn and in a way, what kind of beauty you want to show.”
The Language of Hands “If you find something you like, and it’s fun, and you’re good at it, then you should keep going on that track,” Jögge says. “That is what I see in good, old traditional craft.”
Jögge uses objects made by slöjders from the 1700s as an example. “They wanted to make objects that were nice to use and functional. And they had to be strong and decent. But they also had to have beautiful designs about them. So every time you work with them, everything from a spoon to whatever, you would say, ‘Oh, how nice! This is good work, this is something.’ And maybe you give thought to the one who made it. A way of passing love to the next generation is to make things that they can use for their children and think about the knowledge in the past that was used in the making, and that they had fun in the making and that they also wanted it to have quality. Because for them, it was about quality in the objects and quality in life. Those two things have to go together.”
“The four walls” box. Made using shrink-box techniques. Aspen, birch. 128 piercings. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Ladle. Crooked birch. Artist oil paint and raw linseed oil. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Spoon. Crooked birch. Artist oil paint and raw linseed oil. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Backrest on chair in crooked birch. Artist oil paint and raw linseed oil. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Six-leaf rosettes on the back of a mobile stand. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
This is why Jögge eschews production work.
“If you just make stools and you make thousands of them, after a while, it’s not love,” he says. “It’s just making money. So this is my path: To always put feeling in an object. Because when I feel, I’m satisfied. I don’t know if I’m satisfied all the time with the money I get from it,” he adds, laughing. “That’s the business part. That’s the surviving part. But for me, the main reason is that I want to hand it over and say, ‘Yeah. I’m really happy about this. It has strength. It has function. It has beauty. All the joints are perfectly done and the material choices are well done and it’s something that you can use for more than 100 years and it will be in your family as a treasured object and I’m happy. That’s my goal.”
When thinking about his life Jögge thinks a lot about driving forces: Why has it been so important for him to express himself by working wood traditionally? He recognizes that he’s drawn to its organic existence.
“People were living in a self-sufficient society where they really had to learn all the skills with the knife and the axe and the material they had. And they were trained to do that from 4 years old. So when they were in their 20s, they were professionals I would say, almost, everyone. And some of them wanted to express themselves really well. And they were really good. And you can tell by going to the archives in museums and looking at the stuff. Once in a while you will see something that a person did and it is really, really good.”
And Jögge isn’t just talking about wood here. He’s also heavily influenced by textiles, and the patterns in textiles, especially. When he sees work that someone has poured their heart into, he feels something.
“I can tell I have a friend there, a colleague there,” he says. “We are companions, we understand each other. I don’t know their names but we are still friends. It’s kind of a relief to think about that. A connection of sorts, to generations back. The language of hands.”
During the last four years, I’ve lost four members of my immediate family (mom, dad, stepfather, sister), most of them suddenly and unexpectedly. And if I’ve learned one thing from the experience, it’s this: Tell people who are important to you how you feel about them. Today. Don’t wait for a nice evening on the back porch.
As many of you know, Nancy Hiller is battling pancreatic cancer. Her treatment has its ups and (deep) downs. And while I am counting on her to be one of the long-term survivors of this horrible disease, I also didn’t want her to ever leave this earth without know how important she has been to me as a person, woodworker, writer and supremely ethical being.
I’m not alone. Kara Gebhart Uhl spent the last couple weeks talking to some of the people in and out of Nancy’s orbit. And below is what they had to say.
If you’ve read her books, been a student in one of her classes or been a customer of hers, you know that this only scratches the surface of a most impressive and lovely person.
C.H. Becksvoort, furniture maker, designer, author, contributing editor to Fine Woodworking magazine
I first heard of Nancy back in 2004 or 2005. I think it was a kitchen cabinet design article in Fine Woodworking magazine. She stayed on my radar for several more years and wrote a few more articles, as well as a series of pieces for Pro’s Corner. In 2017, her book “Making Things Work”really caught my attention. Here was a kindred spirit who made her living from woodworking, without a rich partner or a trust fund. And she did it in a male-dominated field. The book was amazing, in that she debunked the common woodworking images of curly shavings, satisfying smells and days of crafting hand-cut dovetails. Instead, she revealed what it was really like to run a day-to-day business: difficult customers, insurance payments, bookkeeping and tax hassles, and time management. She’s paid her dues.
Not only that, but Nancy is a wonderful, gifted and generous human being. And a good friend.
***
Laura Mays, woodworker, designer, educator, director of The Krenov School
When I first came across nrhillerdesign.com a handful of years ago, I was genuinely confused; was this a group of people? A workshop or a company? Were they designers or historians or cabinetmakers? It never occurred to me that I was seeing the prodigious output of just one person, and I navigated away, bemused.
It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I read “Making Things Work” [some of which takes place in England], and I started to understand the fullness, the depth and breadth of Nancy. But before understanding came a lot of laughing, deep out-loud belly laughs, that are rare for me in adulthood. It was the descriptions of the miserable weather/plumbing/dampness/general decrepitude seen through the eyes of an affectionate outsider that really got me. I had grown up at a similar time on the adjacent island of Ireland, where similar conditions prevailed, and I had gone through a somewhat parallel trajectory of abandoning academia and a professional career for woodworking. I resonated.
So when Deirdre Visser, Phoebe Kuo and I embarked on interviewing women woodworkers for a project, called at that time “Making a Seat at the Table,” I knew this would be a tremendous opportunity to meet Nancy in person. This long-limbed woman with a huge laugh welcomed us into her house in Bloomington, rearranging her pets, making us comfortable, with a constant stream of talk that moved quickly, seamlessly, between the profane, the intellectual, the moral, the practical. It involved swear words and Latin quotes; it revealed someone who reflected on her life while also enthusiastically pouring herself into it.
This, I think, is one of Nancy’s greatest gifts to woodworking and the world: to bring together morality and material, to examine what it is to do good work, in both an ethical and craft sense. This of course is the primary idea at the core of the Arts & Crafts movement, and it is no surprise that she has studied and written about that period extensively. There is a direct line of thought between them and her, between their concerns of labor and value and honesty and meaning, and hers. But where they, at least in my rather flippant understanding, appear to be a bunch of middle-class men who dropped out of London society and moved to the Cotswolds, she is the 21st-century self-employed woman version, working out how to make a living from her work in the context of Ikea and supply chains and gig work, and all the other pressures and intricacies of late capitalism “Me Too” globalization.
Nancy’s book about English Arts & Crafts furniture is an exemplar of how she brings together the material and the mundane: not only is a beautifully written study of the ethics at the core of the movement and short biographies of some of the key thinkers, it is equally a how-to, or a how-done, on the actual making of several pieces of furniture. While this combination might, I suppose, reduce the book’s academic gravitas on the one hand, and on the other, be off-putting to someone who just wants the woodworking content, for me, it is exactly this juxtaposition that makes Nancy important. “No ideas but in things,” and vice versa.
In article after article in Fine Woodworking magazine and elsewhere, Nancy pores over how to make a living, make a life, making things. She parses, for example, the relative merits, ethical and otherwise, of different pricing structures with an honesty and a depth of detail that is refreshing, like having a window thrown open on what can be murky and hidden. She doesn’t shy away from the annoyingness, the hard work, the nitty-gritty, but she always brings it back to what it means to live a good life, to be fair and just to oneself and to others. There is no one whose moral compass I trust better than Nancy Hiller’s.
***
Nancy with her dog William.
Charles Bickford, carpenter, writer, photographer and former senior editor of Fine Homebuilding magazine
It’s hard enough for anyone, at any time, to run a one-person cabinetshop. It’s a whole hat rack full of jobs rolled into one – getting clients, keeping clients, managing clients, design, building, finishing, maintaining the shop, keeping track of expenses – that usually doesn’t leave much time in the day for anything else. Somehow, Nancy Hiller has managed to run a successful shop by herself for the last 30 years or so (a feat worth celebrating in itself), while at the same time, she has written five books, countless magazine articles and blog posts, in addition to leading the occasional furniture class.
And while other craftspeople might consider writing just another means to marketing their goods, it seems like Nancy has spent as much time writing as she has building. (I suspect she’s fast on the keyboard, but that’s just a guess.) As she has pointed out, she’s not writing for the money, of which there is precious little anyway in the writing game. That’s a shame in itself, because she’s as good a writer as she is a furniture builder, and by now should be wealthy as Croesus.
She writes to inspire and advise the community of shop rats, both the professionals and the part-timers, that are her audience. Where else would they go for advice on the potential pitfalls and obstacles of running your own shop? How to stay creative, or how to deal with customers? Or info on the proportions of a sideboard, Johnny Grey, Arts & Crafts design or (who knew?) Hoosier cabinets. Or how to train and keep a hop-a-long canine shop foreman named Joey? Who else does this? Through her hard work and by example, she raises the bar for everyone else, and continues to weave the strands that make the woodworking community stronger, more aware, more connected and more informed.
She still makes great furniture, too. And don’t you forget it.
Being in our 60s, Nancy and I have been involved in the woodworking world for about the same amount of time. But it wasn’t until four years ago that my friend and colleague, Chris Becksvoort, started to mention her. He suggested that I get to know her. He felt it would be beneficial for me to hear her stories. He would always say “she has really been in the trenches.” One might question why I did not know of Nancy since she had been published for a while. Well, the answer is after going through a challenging professional experience in 1994 that lasted a decade, my self-confidence was so shaken that I chose to go underground, making my woodworking world small and self-contained.
Fast forward to 2018 when I ordered Nancy’s book “Making Things Work.” I was so taken by her writing style, her wonderful sense of humor, and her honesty. I devoured the book and then read it again. I share so many of her experiences, especially being a woman in a non-traditional field trying to make woodworking my career. Nancy’s down-to-earth approach put us all in a level playing field – no more hierarchical attitudes that I had grown accustomed to. Quality work is quality work no matter how one chooses to express that.
I have read so much of Nancy’s work since my initial introduction to her. Her example evokes confidence in others, promotes support rather than judgement, encourages us to share successes as well as hardships and to remain vulnerable to the whole journey. Whether we make historic pieces, carve beautiful wooden critters, make contemporary furniture, create beautiful kitchens, conserve other’s work or make wooden barrels, we are the lucky ones who have found common ground through her. I will be forever be grateful to have found Nancy. Her bright light helped guide me back to myself and the places I have honored before.
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Nancy and her great smile.Nancy teaching at a cabinetmaking class at the former Kelly Mehler School of Woodworking, 2008.
What a lucky day it was when I first saw some of Nancy Hiller’s beautiful cabinetry in the pages of the Sept/Oct 2005 edition of Fine Woodworking magazine! Little did I know that reading that article and subsequently contacting Nancy would result in a long-time professional association and a warm friendship that hasn’t diminished over time and distance. I invited Nancy to teach a cabinet-building class at my former* school, her first such experience, and I was pleased that she accepted the offer. After seeing her in action, I invited Nancy back many times, and she developed a following with many students who continued to sign up for classes she taught.
It was clear from the first class day that Nancy had not only the technical skills necessary to teach, but more importantly she had the people skills that made the students feel comfortable with taking on new information and new skills. Nancy has a great smile and a frequent laugh. Her affirming ways with class participants inspired confidence and motivation even when technical problems arose. I specifically remember Nancy splayed out on the floor helping a student to problem solve a difficulty with hanging the door of a cabinet. The tone of the interaction went from frustration to laughter right away.
I have so enjoyed seeing Nancy’s prodigious skills gain recognition and accolades over the years. Yeah Nancy! Since our first encounter in 2005, Nancy continues to shine brightly through her writing (books, blogs and periodicals), her teaching and her design talents. She has an uncanny nose for sniffing out talent and originality in the work and stories of others. Her articles and interviews are fun to read as she describes the makers and their settings and work.
Nancy’s own work blends the integrity of good design with the joy of creating cabinetry and furniture that reflect the unique settings in which those pieces are placed, and the practical ways that the pieces are to be used. I learned those things from Nancy first-hand as she helped us design a completely new kitchen in our former residence, a 100-year-old log home. The outcome of that effort is a comfortable, functional and aesthetically pleasing kitchen where friends and family gathered. What a gift!
Nancy is a people-connector for certain. Above and beyond woodworking, that is her gift. I’m so glad that our paths have crossed and zigzagged in so many interesting ways.
*The former Kelly Mehler of Woodworking is now owned by Berea College and operates as The Woodworking School at Pine Croft.
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Nancy and her great laugh.Nancy and Johnny Grey, 2019.
Johnny Grey, kitchen designer, author, educator, founder of Johnny Grey Studios
I have a soft spot for workers of wood. Nancy is in that mould but unusual in straddling the practical life of a carpenter with great skill in writing both academic and lifestyle books. Though in correspondence with her for many years, I only met her when she and her husband, Mark, came to stay with us in England not long before lockdown. Our family took warmly to them – a mutual love of dogs and the gift of a fine bottle of bourbon playing a role – and the visit was over all too quickly.
Nancy’s journey starts, I think, with her mother’s can-do attitude, a way of life of making things that she luckily passed on to her daughter. It happens that I share some early experiences with Nancy. Like me (and many of us), she took pleasure as a child in rearranging the furniture in her living room and bedroom. We both also started out on our careers, coincidentally, by restoring an 18th-century pine dresser, a halfway house to making something new. A similar dresser is pictured in Kara Uhl’s charmingly interesting blog profile of Nancy.
I first came across Nancy when she was writing “The Hoosier Cabinet in Kitchen History” (2009, note to publisher: please reprint). This was the book I was looking for without realising. It serves as a justification for an ambitious and slightly crazy idea of mine: making kitchens with real furniture along with coining the phrase ‘the Unfitted Kitchen’. In Nancy’s vision, kitchen furniture was both an organising principle and a space for creativity, fun and efficiency. Hoosier, a company from Indiana, built functional cabinetry for cooking and storage but also developed their own quirky and witty marketing. They used catchphrases and slogans such as, ‘A kitchen without a cabinet is like a farm without a plow’ and ‘Saving work is saving youthfulness.’ These were fun, modern responses to domestic workloads, and by 1920 the Hoosier Manufacturing Company had sold 2,000,000 cabinets.
Nancy’s analysis in the book relates the wit and energy from this period of kitchen history to fresh thinking in our time. She explores current kitchen culture, including gender roles, and questions the nature of a ‘residential’ kitchen. One answer to that comes from our recent response to lockdown, as we now regularly acknowledge the kitchen as a hybrid space that all the family occupies and use as an office, homework zone and place to play. Nancy generously includes some of my ideas on this sort of thing in her chapter on the Hoosier legacy. She includes quotes from Christopher Alexander in “A Pattern Language” on the ‘self-selecting features’ of a friendly home, and celebrates the concept of the kitchen as a living room that has, ideally, evolved well beyond the cramped little workplace for hard-pressed women that it admittedly still is in many cultures.
Nancy breaks through glass ceilings without making a fuss. I find it extraordinary that there are not more female cabinetmakers in the U.S. (it’s 7.5 percent, according to Zippia), although she tells me that there has been a growth in women working in the U.S. construction sector. In the U.K. it’s a worse story. Statistics are hard to come by. The number of craft courses at the tertiary education level has dropped by 46 percent due to the government’s education reforms.
I see Nancy as a designer-maker ambassador, a timeless figure who embodies the craftsmanship and the emotional and ecological benefits of the handmade. We need more voices like hers in the world of construction, design and the kitchen industry, but don’t hold your breath.
I noticed Nancy’s work before I noticed her. She had a piece in Fine Woodworking magazine when I was at Popular Woodworking magazine, and I remember thinking that it was a fine example of Art & Crafts work… and we were always looking for good Arts & Crafts (and Shaker) for Popular Woodworking. Then I noticed it was by a woman. I think it’s fair to say I started stalking Nancy. I read everything of hers I could get my hands on (she’d written a couple of books at that point, and articles for Fine Woodworking, Fine Homebuilding and Old House Journal). There just weren’t that many other woodworkers who were women, doing the kind of work I liked, who were featured in major magazines. I didn’t know her, but I loved her from afar for showing me what was possible (and because she’s a darn fine writer).
Nancy is an excellent person to emulate in work and in life. She is obviously a talented furniture maker and designer – but she is also hilarious, incredibly generous on every front, and kind to pesky editors and small animals. I am honored to now call her my friend, and to love her from close up.
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Nancy during a photoshoot in 2017. (She’s just pretending to be mad.)
In 1988 my career took an interesting turn when I was offered the opportunity to switch from running restaurants, hotels and country clubs on the west coast to selling hardwood lumber on behalf of Paxton Lumber in Cincinnati. That is a story, but this story is about Nancy Hiller. Knowing absolutely nothing about hardwood lumber, I was assigned to a sales territory that included all southern Ohio, southern Indiana and Kentucky. I would introduce myself to my inherited and prospective customers as a service-oriented salesman with no experience in hardwood who needed their help in understanding the processes of cabinetmaking, flooring, furniture manufacturing and custom millwork. In return for teaching me about their craft, I would be sure that they received the quality lumber they needed, when they needed it. My customers were happy to show me their craft and I made sure that I delivered on my promises. My territory grew quickly. Bloomington, Ind., was in my territory and there were quite a few small woodworking companies of all sorts there, so I spent a good deal of time there building relationships.
In my work there I came across a small high-end cabinetmaking shop in Nashville, Ind., run by Nancy Hiller, the only female cabinetmaker I had yet encountered. The shop was small, only Nancy and her husband. I made sure to visit them when I was in the area and was awed by Nancy’s spectacular work. She said that she learned cabinetmaking in England, which I found to be extremely interesting. She stood out to me instantly as being at the top of her field, overshadowing the work of every other cabinetmaker in my vast territory.
I enjoyed our visits and I made sure that my service and the quality of the lumber I shipped to the shop matched the respect I had for her as a person and as a fine woodworker. Our visits were always enjoyable, and I learned about how a fine craftsperson worked. I was her salesman for about six or seven years, then I wound up working with another company and we regrettably lost touch. In 1996, I started to work with the Frank Miller Lumber Co., in Indiana, covering the U.S. west and all of Canada. I found out after a few years there that Nancy bought some quartersawn white oak from their outlet store. Since my territory was nowhere near Bloomington, Ind., I passed my greetings to her through her salesman.
Around 2010, I started traveling the country lecturing on the quarter-sawing process, the core business of Frank Miller Lumber. I found myself as speaker at a traditional building conference in Baltimore. I went to the room where the speakers were to drop their materials and when I turned around, I saw Nancy. It had been almost 20 years since I last saw her, and she immediately recognized me and gave me a hug. It was a brief but happy reunion and when I told her that I was working with Frank Miller Lumber, she said that they were favorite lumber supplier. She was very pleased that I worked for them. I said I was giving a talk the next morning and she was crestfallen that she would miss my talk, since she had to leave that night after her talk. Shortly after our chance meeting she gave a great talk about the evolution of the American kitchen. As she opened her remarks, she told her audience that her “favorite lumber salesman from her favorite lumber supplier” was in the audience. She gave them my name and told them to all come to my talk the next morning. It was very kind of her since my talk was scheduled for 8:00 a.m. on Saturday and I had low expectations for attendance. I was pleasantly surprised to see many members of her audience in my audience the next morning. That was a great kindness that I will never forget.
Several years later I took a film crew with me to Bloomington to interview Nancy and document her building a Voysey chair with Frank Miller’s quartersawn white oak. She was an inspirational subject and a generous host to me and the crew, even providing us lunch.
I have read all her books and have learned much from them, but by far my favorite is “Making Things Work: Tales from a Cabinetmaker’s Life,” which chronicles her amazing professional journey starting in England, where she dropped out of Cambridge and set herself on the harrowing journey to become the fine wood craftsperson she is today. It is an inspiring story of tenacity, strength and perseverance – the qualities she is teaching us as today as she faces her current health challenges. Nancy brings beauty to the world through her art and is a stellar human. The world is a better place because she is in it.
I would not be making a living as a cabinetmaker today if it were not for Nancy Hiller. Nancy took me on as her assistant in 2004. At the time, her shop was newly built and somewhat unfinished. It was home to two insane dogs, Wilhelm von Wundt and Winnie, who became my workday companions, and a cat or two depending on the year. Nancy’s shop was a relatively small workspace for two people, so when there wasn’t an interesting NPR story on WFIU or a machine blasting, we would regale each other with absurd stories and silly jokes. I’ve always been able to make Nancy laugh hard – in her signature hyena way – and take great pleasure in seeing her keel over from one of my inappropriate jokes.
When I was offered the job as her assistant, I was thrilled to be working alongside a craftsperson who was trained in England and had an impressive portfolio of work. I knew it was a great opportunity to hone my craft alongside such a skilled practitioner. But I didn’t know all the other things that I would learn along the way.
Working with Nancy provided me with invaluable lessons in historic preservation, the history of furniture design, building relationships with homes as if they were people, etymology, grammar and, of course, myriad woodworking techniques. She also modeled how to run a woodworking business with integrity.
It became clear to me early on that Nancy has a deep ethical core. While she can wax eloquent on the philosophy of ethics, she lives out her principles daily. I witnessed Nancy’s integrity in her treating clients with fairness and respect, building things the right way (even when it was less profitable), and always having her employee’s back – when the work ran dry, when clients behaved badly and when dark clouds rolled in.
It has been an honor to have had the opportunity to work alongside Nancy and be able to call her my mentor. It has been even better to maintain a relationship with her and call her my friend.
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Anissa Kapsales and Nancy.
Anissa Kapsales, furniture maker and editor at Fine Woodworking.
If you know anything about Nancy Hiller you know that her contributions, her commitment and her place in the woodworking community are legendary. For decades she has plugged away in a calling where it is difficult to succeed professionally. She has written countless articles showing how to make gorgeous pieces of furniture. She has written books about designing and woodworking and life. She’s a woodworking social media icon. She has taught and lectured around the country. She has blogged about the realities, joys, trials and every other aspect of the woodworking life you can imagine. Through her LAP blog “Little Acorns: Profiles by Nancy Hiller,”Nancy has introduced us to each other. She has a remarkable knack for seeking out the fascinating aspects of people’s lives and writing eloquently about them. This I attribute to the person Nancy is. She doesn’t simply interview her subjects with a series of questions, rather she just talks with them. She enjoys the conversation and gets to know them. She listens. She’s naturally curious, interested and sincere.
Nancy has paved the way for aspiring woodworkers, authors, women in woodworking and designers. And now she is illuminating a dark path for anybody who struggles, so … all of us. In the same strong, determined and steady way that she moved through her career, Nancy is confronting her pancreatic cancer diagnosis, thinking creatively, managing one obstacle at a time, learning, teaching, advocating. I am in awe.
All that said, I must tell you that I was intimidated by Nancy when I started out as an editor. At least I was, for a blip, way back in 2006. Fresh out of the nurturing cocoon that is the Krenov School, I had just started at Fine Woodworking magazine and was assigned to work on an article with Nancy. “Arts & Crafts Wall Shelf” would be my first (mostly) solo assignment, and I would be traveling to Nancy’s shop, with Mike Pekovich shadowing me to make sure I didn’t completely screw it up.
Prior to the shoot, Nancy and I had worked together on the months-long process via phone calls and emails getting her manuscript turned into a shot list. I had called to introduce myself, tell her the proposal was accepted and get things rolling. The instant we got on the phone for the first time it was clear I was out of my intellectual league and every other league I cared about. She was talented, educated, articulate and could woodwork circles around most pros. She could write quite well, had ridiculous design skills and was clearly going to be on top of her deadlines. And I was a nervous newbie editor/photographer. Every speck of intimidation was coming from within me, and had nothing to do with what Nancy was putting out. But intimidated I was, nonetheless.
When I arrived for the shoot, Nancy was all those amazing things. Even more, she was kind, thoughtful, very well prepared, humble, professional, accommodating, funny and had an ease about her that started things off on the right foot. We made our way through that shoot and article and today, more than 15 years later, we’ve done so many more together. I think we’re a pretty darn good team! I often wonder if I had been paired with a different author on that first shoot if I would have made it past the first year in a job with a steep learning curve.
What began with me feeling intimidated has transformed into something great. I admire Nancy for her life and woodworking wisdom, her sense of humor, her empathy, her sage advice, the breadth of knowledge she has on so many topics, her incredible talent as a designer and maker, her fortitude in the face of all things.
Nancy, I am far better because I know you. You have what is probably the best freaking laugh and smile on the planet. It is my pleasure to capture it every time we shoot together! With all my love, I am proud to call you my friend.
