Category: Profiles

A quick look at Jenny Bower’s Instagram page will leave anyone who hasn’t met her in person wondering just who this woman is. A glamorous beauty with flawless hair and makeup, she usually appears in the kind of clothes most woodworkers only dream about – form-fitting sheaths, or retro mid-century dresses with poofy skirts when she’s renovating the interior of a vintage camper she purchased in 2020. But along with the glamour, a pervasive wholesomeness animates her posts – expressions of gratitude for family, friends and good work; visits to military veterans and vintage car enthusiasts; hand-crafting some of the most elaborate Halloween costumes you’re ever likely to see, only to lament the early onset of winter, which requires covering up all that hard work with a full-length coat; cooking around a fire pit with her daughter; late-summer cannonballs in a bathing suit off a dock into Lake Michigan’s chilly waters – the essence of down-to-earth pleasures. She peppers her posts with hashtags such as #workwithyourhands, a bit of encouragement to others based on how she and her husband, Nathan, earn their livings, as an engraver and clockmaker respectively.

“Which is the real Jenny Bower?” you may ask. Answer: all of them.

Jenny was born in Alpena, Mich., in 1980 and has deep roots in the area. Both sides of her family are from the same town. Her father is a retired chemist whom she describes as “very scientific, a super-perfectionist.” He worked at a paper company when she was little, then created new formulas for a company that made hot-stamp ribbons for products, such as the sell-by date on a bread bag. The hot-stamp tool was essentially a branding iron. “It was the weirdest job,” she recalls. “I never could explain it to my friends.” Her mother was a cosmetologist who worked at salons and also did hair for friends in their house. “I grew up around older people because she specialized in those old-lady hairdos with the hair sets.” Jenny has one brother, Jerry, who is two years younger.

When Jenny was about 6, her family moved to Michigan’s west coast. She has lived in a few towns since then, mainly between Kalkaska and Traverse City, where she and Nathan live today. She went to public schools, other than a couple years at private school between moves, and graduated from Traverse City Central High School in 1998 before attending college. To make college affordable (she paid for it as she went), Jenny did all her work through a “university center program,” basically a satellite campus, and graduated in 2004 with a BA in English Language and Literature and a minor in Elementary Education from Grand Valley State University; she planned to become an elementary school teacher.

That plan changed when she and Nathan married. “We had no money and one car. Most of the teaching jobs that were available were in surrounding districts. I had interviewed at a couple of surrounding districts, but by the time we thought about getting another car – we didn’t want to go into debt! – I thought ‘I’ll just wait a bit and work in my husband’s business.’” She liked it so well that she didn’t pursue teaching, despite her love of that work. Instead, she started her own business.

She and Nate met at a New Year’s Eve party in the winter of 2002-2003. She found him intriguing – he’d been home-schooled, then taken a few college business classes without feeling the need to graduate from college. In his spare time, he had fixed an antique clock for his mother and become increasingly obsessed with mechanics in general and how things work. At the age of 18 or 19 he cold-called a local jewelry store and asked if they needed someone to help with clock repair. They did; he started working there as an apprentice, then eventually opened his own business. Fixing old clocks was one thing – he found antique European clocks especially fascinating. But then he started making his own, a whole new world of creative mechanical endeavor. He now does both clockmaking and repair.

“My dad was concerned about me dating Nathan,” Jenny says – his primary concern was whether Nathan, being self-employed, would have a sufficient income. “My dad had always had a company job with benefits,” she explains. “[He] always worked a Monday-through-Friday, nine-to-five job.”

“(Nate’s) really mechanically-minded,” she told her dad. “I’m sure if the clock repair goes bust he’ll find something to do.”

While Nathan was single, he saved up as much money as he could. Those savings disappeared in short order once they were married and began renovating what Jenny calls their “junky old house,” a single-story built in the early 1960s. They bought the house because it was zoned as a residential home while being on commercial property, which made it affordable. They spent the first chunk of their marriage running their business and renovating. When they moved in, the house had fake wood paneling on the walls and shag carpet on the floors. One room had silver wallpaper with blue roses. They put in new ceilings – the dining room ceiling had caved in due to water damage caused by poorly planned rooflines. When they pulled up the flooring, they found the subfloor there, but Nathan had suspicions. “I just feel like I should pull up this floor and see what’s underneath,” he said. A good thing, too – the floor system consisted of boards simply stacked on bricks. There were no floor joists. They had to completely rebuild the floor system.

The front living room and bedroom became the clock shop and their office, and remained so for about 10 years. Then they built their dream shop on the same property; it’s connected to the house but no longer inside the house. “We were penny pinching on all sides,” Jenny says, “but it was worth it to have our own business. It taught us a lot. When we built the new building [for their workshop], lots of that confidence came from what we learned in the renovation of the house.”

Remarkably, she says, Nathan wasn’t raised to be handy. His mother is an oil painter; his dad was a pastor turned children’s book author. “His extended family are all business owners and very hands-on, so he grew up feeling like it was OK to have a business or pursue something that was not a typical job. He really understands the mechanics of things; he’s not afraid to take things apart and try to figure them out on his own. He fixes everything. We’ve never had to have a repair person fix anything.”

Nathan has passed that readiness to solve mechanical problems onto Jenny. Shortly after she bought her old Jeep Wagoneer, Nathan encouraged her to replace the radiator instead of paying someone else to do it. He’d planned to replace it for her, but asked if she might care to do it herself. He taught her how. “It was kind of cool for me, because car repair in general feels completely intimidating and so far out of my realm of understanding, but Nathan was really encouraging.”

Family
For a long time I wondered where Jenny got her dark good looks. What was the source of that bone structure, those eyes? Were her ancestors from Italy or Spain? A post about fry-bread answered my question. Her forebears on both sides are at least partly Native American. “They were very quiet about their heritage,” she says of her grandparents when she was growing up. “It’s been hard to find out the story” – not surprising, if you know anything about historical efforts in Canada and the United States to erase cultural memory and traditions from Native American children. Her mother has tried to research her family history, but there’s little available at this point about which tribes her family members came from, along with related background. But fry-bread is a potent carrier of tradition; her great-grandma, grandma and mom all made it. “I loved it so much as a kid I thought my daughter would enjoy it,” Jenny says.

Jenny and Nathan wanted to be parents, but it took them about five years to get pregnant. “It was a very difficult time for both of us. But for me as a woman, it was very hard. My husband is the eldest of 12 children – lots of siblings, and his siblings had lots of kids. We were the first to have any issue. It was hard for me to see so many people around me getting so easily pregnant. It was a long journey. It felt like a lonely time for me. I didn’t like to talk about it much with other people. I didn’t know what the problem was; later on I found I had some issues that complicated it, but when we did get pregnant with [Maylin] it was a very happy time for both of us.”

Her daughter, Maylin, was born in 2009 and is now 11. They chose not to know the baby’s sex before birth; Nathan came up with the name Maylin, which has no gendered baggage. “Maylin’s great-grandmother’s middle name is Mae,” says Jenny. “My middle name is Lynn. We tweaked the spelling a bit to make it easier to read and pronounce, but the sentiment of a family name is there.”

Business

Traverse City is a touristy, affluent, artsy area, especially when snowbirds return for summer. Many of Jenny’s and Nathan’s customers live within 30 miles of the Bowers’ home. Most of Nate’s customers come to him for clock repair, an art now so unusual that people will often drive from Detroit or Chicago and leave their precious clocks with Nate for as long as they have to, because they know of no one closer. Most of the clock-business customers are middle-aged or retired. They want to have their clocks fixed to pass them down to their grandkids.

Jenny came to engraving through the clock business. Many old clocks have engraved numbers and decorative designs on their faces. Jenny had collected a lot of antique jewelry; she had a couple of engraved pieces she found especially compelling. “I really was fascinated by art on metal,” she explains. Nathan saw many engraved clocks come into the shop for repair, some dating back to the 1700s. After seeing the gun and knife work of a local engraver whom Nathan had met through a customer, Jenny became interested in the engraving process. She ordered some engraving tools and tried her hand at the new skill; the timing was ideal, as Nate was toying with adding some engraved components to new clocks he was building.

“For me,” says Jenny, “when I’m engraving, I get into this zone where I’m really absorbed in my work. Three hours could pass in a few minutes. I’ve always been a very artistic individual; I enjoy drawing and hand-lettering. But with engraving, I like cutting the metal.”

Most of her designs incorporate an artistic flourish or scroll, with a lot of acanthus leaves, vines and flowers. She prefers natural forms – she doesn’t do much with Celtic or repetitive geometric designs, both of which are common among engravers. She describes her designs as asymmetrical but balanced. “I like to draw things out to fill a space and look balanced, but if you look closely, [the design is] often not symmetrical.”

She started doing Instagram after she and Nate did a couple of TV shows “A Craftsman’s Legacy” with Eric Gorges and “Handcrafted America” with Jill Wagner. Jill and the cameramen on Eric Gorges’s show suggested that she share what she was doing. She looked into it. “I had started engraving some tools and posted some on Instagram,” she says. She quickly found twofold value in sharing her designs. “It became a way for me to document projects I was doing, for myself and to share with other people. Unless people know what hand-engraving is, they think it’s done by machine. I wanted to show [them] ‘I’m not a monogram machine or a CNC laser! I’m carving the metal with my own hands and doing my own designs.’ I wanted people to see that process. I didn’t want to get into teaching, but I wanted to show how I [create] a piece, so if you buy my work, this is how it’s done. There were a lot of assumptions, and the best way to explain was to show how I do it.”

Instagram, she finds, calls for a delicate balance. “I don’t want to come across as a braggart,” she says – ‘Look at me!’ It was more, the process might be interesting to people because it’s an unusual art form that people aren’t familiar with. That’s why my Instagram page isn’t just pictures of finished work. I include pictures of my car and my garden. I’m not just an engraver. I’m an artist, and that sprawls into different categories.”

At this point Jenny has engraved so many handplanes that she’s lost track of the number; other common engraving projects are squares, tape measures, hammers, straight rules and calipers. She also engraves locks, and nameplates for badges. And ferrules for chisels – lots of them. “Those are fun. It’s so silly, really. A chisel doesn’t need to be pretty.” In 2020 she took part in a project to raise money for Color of Change; she engraved the ferrules, and each woodworker involved in the project made a handle. “Every chisel was different. It was so fun seeing what different woodworkers came up with.”

Jenny’s hand-tool engraving led her to woodworking. Her posts on Instagram caught the interest of quite a few woodworkers. “From that point I got questions about engraving hand tools and got to know a lot of people through the Instagram community and formed friendships with these people.” New friends encouraged her to try woodworking. “I was very nervous about that but interested in learning more about it. Through building friendships, I got to see the delight they had in their work.”

She took a chairmaking class locally to familiarize herself with hand and power tools – “a nice way to learn some of the fundamentals of woodworking.” The class was titled “Chair Making for Women.” When she showed up, she found herself alone with one other woman. Fortunately, the instructor was willing to run the class, which gave them a lot of one-on-one time. After taking another woodworking class locally, she took one with Greg Pennington in the fall of 2019 in which she made a continuous-arm Windsor chair. That chair is now in the clock shop.

Nate has been turning a storage shed on their property into a small woodworking shop for both of them. “Woodworking and clockmaking don’t really go together well,” she notes. “The dust from woodworking – you don’t want to get [that] into the mechanics of clocks!”

Going back to the question of who, on Instagram, is the real Jenny Bower, she remarks, “If there’s a realness that comes through, it’s because this is my real life. This is what I do every day. I don’t have a fancy camera; I just use my phone. It’s a snapshot of what I’m doing today. If somebody’s standing next to me in the shop, that’s what they’re going to see.”

“When I was growing up it was always about going to college. I didn’t understand that there were craft schools, that you could go away and learn these different crafts. Now I can say to my daughter, ‘If you want a college degree, we’ll support you in any way we can.’ But I want to expose her to craft alternatives before she makes that decision. There’s a lot of opportunity open to her.”

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

To describe my recent interview with English chairmaker Lawrence Neal as unusual would qualify as my greatest understatement of 2021, albeit from the standpoint of just one month in. Despite the research I did a few years ago for my book “English Arts & Crafts Furniture,” I didn’t become aware of Lawrence until Peter Follansbee suggested him for this series of profiles. Had I known of him five years earlier, I would certainly have wanted to include him in the book, along with a few others who keep Arts & Crafts traditions alive in silver, glass and wood.

Lawrence is a practicing craftsman in an unbroken line stretching back to designer Ernest Gimson. While engaged in the process we today would call “finding himself,” Gimson had taken some lessons in chairmaking from Herefordshire chairmaker Philip Clissett in 1890. Later, having established his workshops at Daneway House in the Cotswolds, west of London, Gimson encouraged Edward Gardiner, a young man in a family of sawyers who lived nearby, to learn to make chairs. Gardiner later moved to Warwickshire, where Lawrence’s father, Neville Neal, began learning from him in 1939. So I imagined that Lawrence would be full of stories, perhaps even willing to talk about such abstract notions as the meaning he finds in his work.

Nope. Instead, he was more chill about his life and work than pretty much anyone I can recall having interviewed, ever. At first I found his “Just the facts, ma’am” responses disappointing – where was the personal stuff, the color?

But as I worked in my own shop yesterday, my strength, along with my hemoglobin level, temporarily reduced by chemotherapy, the well-intentioned comments from some readers about the healing comforts of “making sawdust” jostled less happily around my head. It hit me how familiar, in the end, I found Lawrence’s “Just the facts, ma’am, just the facts“; it brought so many of the people with whom I worked at small shops in England in the 1980s shooting right back. Look, this is my livelihood. Sure, it’s a gift to be able to turn a drawing into a practical three-dimensional object. But there’s no need to wax romantic. In my own woodworking-and-design-icon-deprived muddling way, I’ve spent most of my adult life as a cabinetmaker. It’s simply what I do. Yes, my work gives me great satisfaction, and it’s easy for me to go on (at length) about how wondrous it is to have any kind of practical skill. But on an hour-to-hour basis, I’ll tell you that spending a day amid the wood chips, whether I’m building a set of paint-grade bookcases or a solid walnut sideboard with hand-cut joinery throughout, is work, not something I’m inclined to romanticize. Amid my frustration at my reduced productivity, Lawrence’s low-key attitude quickly turned into balm for my soul.

Lawrence was born in Stockton, Warwickshire (pronounced “Warrick-shirr”), in 1951 and has spent most of his life firmly rooted there. His father, Neville Neal, was a chairmaker; his mother was a housewife. He has a younger sister, Janice.

When Lawrence was a boy, Neville spent his days working at Gardiner’s Warwickshire workshop, but he had a shop of his own in an outbuilding at the Neal family home, a “pretty brick cottage” built in 1843. The same outbuilding had housed Neville’s grandfather’s business, a barbershop. Lawrence went out to play with tools whenever his dad was there; he remembers a shavehorse and a lathe, a small bench and “a big sash cramp he’d put the chairs together with.”

After Gardiner died in 1958, Neville stayed on at his mentor’s shop for a couple of years. When another workshop became available in 1960, Neville took it over. It’s where Lawrence works today.

Lawrence left school at 15, without taking GCSE or O-Level exams. He went straight into the chairmaking business, working with his father and a fellow who wove rush seats. “It was taken for granted that I would carry on with the chairmaking trade,” he says. Chairmaking had become part of the family; sometimes his granddad came over and joined them in the small workshop.

“I suppose I took the easy option,” he goes on, though he may be the only one alive who would call his life course “the easy option.”

“I’ve always enjoyed working with wood and any tools, really, so it wasn’t a problem going into the family business. My parents had to keep an eye on me when I was a kid, because I was forever getting into the tools and modifying the furniture in the house if I got half a chance!” One day his mother caught him “sandpapering the Welsh dresser, which didn’t please her too much.”

Lawrence takes the making of a chair through the entire process, from tree to finished seat. Early on, he felled his own trees, though he has not personally cut down any trees for chairmaking in many years. He and his father had an arrangement with the owner of a nearby woodlot; they’d choose a tree, fell it and take it to be sawn and dried. He still gets ash from woods near his home and has several people he calls on as additional sources. Sometimes he goes farther afield, within a radius of about 50 miles – to the Cotswolds in one direction, the Malvern Hills another. In addition to ash, he builds chairs in English brown oak, which he buys from a local timberyard.

He’ll select a tree and the sawmill will slice it into planks. Starting with green planks, Lawrence breaks the material down with a circular saw, then cuts it into smaller blanks. He turns the back legs, boils them, then leaves them in the bending frames for around a week. Next he saws the wood for slats; he planes the slats to thickness, boils and bends them, then mortises the back legs to accept the slats. He starts by drilling a row of holes, then trims them by hand with a chisel. Next he might do the spars (stretchers) and seat rails. He turns the former on the lathe and shaves the seat rails on the shavehorse, then dries them “properly” over the stove until he has the chair ready to assemble.

Lawrence used hide glue when he first started out; there was always a glue pot on the stove. Now he uses PVA. (This is the kind of disclosure that warms my heart.) He finishes the chairs and weaves the seats himself. Most chairs get a wax polish; Lawrence and his father used to make their own, from beeswax and turpentine, but he says “it was sticky, to be honest, and particularly ash chairs, which are light colored, tends to [collect] dust and dirt, which makes them look a bit grubby.” Today he uses a commercially produced wax made by Myland’s. Some customers want their chairs stained to match other furniture; recently, some have asked him to paint them grey. He prefers to leave the wood natural with a clear finish.

He gathers rush from local rivers, mainly the Avon, harvesting between mid-June and mid-August. I asked whether he had to get permission from local government authorities. “We just ask the farmer,” he replied. “The river authorities and all that don’t seem to bother with us at all. You’re not really doing any harm, because [the rush] just grows back the following year.” He twists the strands of rush for the seat’s top side and edges, then weaves them around and around the frame “until there’s a seat.” Like you do.

Lawrence has spent the last 30 years with his partner, Alwyn. She worked at a solicitor’s firm (a law office) until she retired. “She likes life in the village,” Lawrence says, “the various clubs, things like ‘Knit and Natter’ (known in the States as ‘Stich ‘n’ Bitch’), the Women’s’ Institute, walking clubs and so on. There’s quite a lot going on, really, but COVID has put a stop to that.” Stockton’s population is about 1,000; its economy was long based on a combination of farming and two cement works, which took advantage of the plentiful area limestone. Many of the village houses were originally built for cement factory workers.

Lawrence and Alwyn have “quite a lot” of his chairs “scattered about the house.” He considers the chairs “very comfortable,” not least thanks to their woven rush seats.

None of Lawrence’s children is interested in going into chairmaking, though he says his middle son, Daniel, who works in digital marketing, has been getting into woodwork of late. Lawrence’s daughter, Laura, works at the solicitor’s office where Alwyn used to work. His eldest child, Joe, was a musician; Joe died in 2018.

Even Lawrence, who wants the craft to continue, describes his career in chairmaking as “almost more by accident.” The craft, he says, “could easily have died out at some point. A lot of [credit for its survival] is down to Edward Gardiner. He struggled to find work in the ’20s and ’30s. He’d started with Ernest Gimson in the late 1890s. He went back to [his] family sawmill during the First World War, then returned to chairmaking following Gimson’s death.” Neville, Lawrence’s dad, started with Gardiner in 1939, left when conscripted, but went back after his time in the army. “Since my dad took over in 1960, there’s been plenty of work,” Lawrence says. “There was a bit of a craft revival in the ’60s, and from there on it’s not been difficult to find work really, at all.”

Lawrence has trained a couple of apprentices, Sam Cooper and Richard Platt. That project began when a friend, Hugo Burge, offered to sponsor two apprentices; he paid them while Lawrence trained them to build chairs for his customers. Hugo lives at Marchmont House near the village of Greenlaw in Berwickshire (“Berrick-shirr”), Scotland; his property has several outbuildings that he has turned into creative spaces. When Richard and Sam left following the onset of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, they opened their own workshops, so they’ve been in business nearly a year. While Lawrence appreciated the opportunity to pass his skills on, he missed building chairs himself while training his apprentices – all he had time for was prepping and planning. “It was a bit strange, really,” he remarks about that time.

Lawrence has no plan to take on other full-time apprentices; he’s unwilling to commit another two or three years. Instead, he says, “I’m enjoying working by myself.” He gets by on a government pension and doesn’t “desperately need” to make a lot of chairs, so once again he’s enjoying the process of making.

He and Alwyn live in a modern house, built in the ’70s. They sold the family cottage – neither he nor his sister wanted to live there.

These days Lawrence gets a lot of repeat orders from families who bought chairs in the past. Other orders come from parents who want to buy chairs as a wedding gift for their children. In recent years, he’s also received plentiful work through interior designers, a phenomenon he attributes in large part to the internet. Then again, it’s a nice echo of how those we now know as luminaries of Arts & Crafts design – the Voyseys, Barnsleys, Gimson and their peers – sent prospective patrons or clients who had attended their lectures or seen their work published in magazines to trusted workshops.

To learn more about Lawrence’s chairmaking, see this video and this one. Also check him on Instagram, where he shares images of covet-able chairs, along with some amazing historical photos of his forebears at work.

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

Sometimes when life knocks you off your feet, you find yourself in a surprisingly happy place when you pick yourself back up. Such is the case with furniture maker Jeff Miller. Most woodworkers know Jeff’s name through his many articles, books and videos for Fine Woodworking, Popular Woodworking and Wood Magazine. (He also has upcoming articles in Mortise & Tenon and Furniture & Cabinetmaking.) Jeff has taught at woodworking schools across the United States, from the Northwest Woodworking Studio and Port Townsend School of Woodworking on the west coast to the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship on the east, and others – Red Rocks in Colorado, Marc Adams in Indiana, Kelly Mehler’s School of Woodworking in central Kentucky (now Pine Croft) and Highland Woodworking in Georgia. He has presented at Woodworking in America, Weekend with Wood and the Association of Woodworking and Finishing Suppliers, and at more clubs and guilds than he can easily call to mind. He has won numerous awards for his woodworking, among them the Distinguished Furniture Design Award from the Chicago Athenaeum Museum, and for his publications, including the Stanley Golden Hammer Award for his 1997 book “Chairmaking & Design.” The Chicago History Museum has Jeff’s “Spider Handkerchief Table” in its permanent collection. And you will soon find his work on the prestigious back cover of Fine Woodworking magazine.

So it may come as a surprise to learn that professional furniture making was nowhere on Jeff’s radar for his first 27 years. Music was his passion, and in that department, as in academic performance and his commitment to physical fitness, he was no slouch. For college he applied to the University of Rochester, home to the Eastman School of Music; Oberlin, with its distinguished Conservatory of Music; and Yale. In the end he chose Yale because the curriculum emphasized academics as well as music studies. He minored in literature – Russian, English, French.

While at Yale, Jeff took a semester off and dipped his toes in the field of instrument making, learning from a then-recently published book, “The Amateur Wind Instrument Maker.” Guided by the book’s instructions, he made several baroque and renaissance wood instruments. Looking around his scantly furnished apartment, he decided he could use some tables and chairs, so from plans he made a few pieces he now calls “just awful!” Those projects gave him confidence that he could learn to use a lathe and other tools, as well as make what tools he needed. With experience, he took on better pieces. Friends saw them and asked him to make them some furniture, though he says it was still on a strictly amateur level.

After that semester off, Jeff returned to his formal studies and graduated in 1978 with a Bachelor of Arts in music. Like many musicians, he picked up gigs as a freelance musician in New York City. When he learned the Chicago Chamber Brass quintet was looking for a trumpet player, Jeff auditioned and got the job. He moved to Chicago in 1983 and launched a career as a professional musician, touring the eastern United States and recording a CD.

A serious runner for both fitness and fun, Jeff was training for one of the runner’s ultimate benchmarks, a marathon, when he noticed his legs were swelling. A nurse friend urged him to see his doctor.

“The next day I was in the hospital,” he says. “They did a kidney biopsy and pretty much within a week my life had changed.” He was 27.

The original diagnosis was lupus, which his doctor thought had caused the kidney disease. Jeff’s mother was visiting from New York at the time; they read that lupus was chronic and fatal. (This information came from an outdated medical textbook and was – and, happily, remains – no longer accurate.) Jeff recalls all too clearly “that moment where I could almost see my mom…mentally collapsing…and the blood drained out of my head completely, and it was just one of those moments where everything seemed to fall apart around me.” The medication to treat his condition made him weak and jittery; he went from running a fast 8 miles to not being able to run across the street. It was clear he could no longer play the trumpet at his former professional level. He left the quintet.

As a therapeutic diversion Jeff took up building furniture in his nurse friend’s basement. He’d work, nap, then go back to it. “It was my salvation,” he says, “a creative outlet that was the salve for losing music – and I felt I was actually better at it than at music.” He was still rather naïve, but he learned quickly. Just as exciting, he adds, “I was also designing, and learning more as a designer, which helped push my skills tremendously.”

About a year after starting in his friend’s basement, he had lined up enough paying work to cover rent and moved to a shop of his own. He split off the front to use as a showroom and kept the back of the building, along with the basement, as a shop. Coincidentally, his shop today is just a block away from his first shop in West Rogers Park, home to many new immigrants; he relishes the everyday experience of hearing seven or eight languages in a stroll through the park.

Although Jeff gave most Yale alumni events a pass, he said yes to one in 1986 at the Hilton on Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago. He’s glad he went; he met a young woman there, Rebecca Wurtz, who was training to be a doctor. “We were talking, and she said, ‘Oh! I have this idea for a bed!’ She sketched something out and I was terribly impressed that she could sketch.” They had dinner and, he says, “just hit it off.” They moved in together and were married a couple of years later. Their son, Isaac, was born in 1993; he’s now in graduate school, training in social work. Their daughter, Ariel, was born the following year. With a degree in creative writing from Oberlin, she is an aspiring writer and illustrator.

Starting out, Jeff found a lot of people ordered beds. He’d done some work for a local company that made futons, as well as easy chairs for futon-like cushions. After a year or so he moved beyond bedroom furniture to another part of the house on which people proved happy to spend money, the dining room. He started with tables. Inevitably, people asked about chairs. Through what Jeff now calls “an excess of confidence” he began them. As he came up with increasingly sophisticated chair designs and translated them into functional pieces, he gained proficiency. He also appreciated the many lessons that came with the process of making the same piece multiple times: “If you’re paying attention and are critical in terms of design,” he says, “you can constantly improve.” Most of the work was commissioned by local customers, but once he got a website, Jeff began to get orders from around the country.

Jeff’s first article for Fine Woodworking was on how to build a Windsor bed. He’d been reading the magazine for several years and had learned a lot, so he sent in a picture with a query. After all his academic writing at college, it didn’t feel like a big deal. He got the contract – his first editor was Sandor Nagyszalanczy – and has written about 35 more in the years since then.

A few articles in, Jeff was thinking big. He submitted a proposal for a book on chairmaking and design. He’d completed a commission for 75 chairs ordered by a convent. The first 50, he says, were “this amazing logistical feat” – aside from the slog of repetition, he had to figure out a way to store the chairs once he had them assembled. He started with a stack on one side of the shop, then moved to the other. With his book proposal he included pictures of the stacks, which caught the editors’ eye. Jeff got the contract. While working on the book, he also leapt into the world of teaching, an experience he found useful in conveying how best to write and illustrate the how-to. “It helped me to understand what students needed to learn.” And writing, in turn, “helped me to clarify and refine what I would teach somebody,” says Jeff. The writing, teaching and making came together as “an amazing trio, each feeding the other two.” Ever since, he has found this combo “the most satisfying part of what I do. It’s not any individual element; it’s all three together.”

At this point in our conversation Jeff switched back to his musical training, which he considers invaluable for its transferability to woodworking. First, he says, “as a musician you have to understand that your body is this crucial part of your ability to play. It is your primary instrument. That helped me so much in my woodworking, to understand that the tools were just extensions of what I thought and was trying to express in the wood. Using your body correctly in music and in woodworking makes a huge difference; it informs how you plane, chisel, saw and shape pieces.”

Second, Jeff goes on, “I think of my designs as musical compositions also. That makes a difference in how I think about the piece as I design it and how I build it. So many woodworkers find plans for what they want to build, and then they build. As a musician you’re given a ‘plan’ for a piece of music [the score], and you have to understand that playing the notes as they’re written on the page is just the beginning of turning that piece into a musical expression. The same is true for woodworking. You can build the piece precisely to specification on the page and completely miss what the person who designed it was trying to get across! When you build a piece of furniture it’s more like playing a jazz solo than following specs. You’re choosing how a curve goes, you’re picking wood as part of an artist’s palette. Every nuance is important.”

Third, “understanding musical composition also helps you understand designs in wood. There can be little motifs that appear in both small and large scale. The flow of lines in music is a huge influence in the flow of the lines in my furniture.”

Even a cursory click through the gallery at Jeff’s website illustrates these connections between music and design in wood. His pieces are both fluid and sturdily made. The back of a chair curves and swells to hold its sitter; there is rhythm, harmony and crescendo. Jeff’s love of technical challenge – how to achieve a flawless intersection of curving, angled parts in a rocker that must also support its sitter safely and comfortably, how to cooper a hexadecagon for a table inspired by a timpani drum – comes through in each design. And beyond these artistic and technical feats, he has garnered a national clientele – no small feat in its own right.

But Jeff lives with another formidable challenge, and his example here is no less inspiring. “The kidney disease has been a huge factor in my life for exactly as long as I have been woodworking,” he says: 37 years. “There have been periods of stasis when I’ve been fine; in others, a variety of crises. I lead a very healthy life. Still run and work out. I’m on my feet all day working in the shop. And yet I have been through more than most people I know.”

“The specific diagnosis may have been incorrect, but there was no doubt about what was happening to my kidneys,” he continues. “They were failing.” In 1993, six years after beginning his life with Rebecca, Jeff had his first kidney transplant. “I remember thinking we were just on a roll in the shop. I had two employees at the time. We were working well as a team, had plenty of work.” One day he got a call from the hospital at 3 p.m.: “We’ve got a kidney for you. We need you down here at 7 p.m.” to get ready. “That completely upended my life again. Over and over, there have been things like that.” The transplant was successful and allowed him to get back to work.

Meanwhile, Jeff had become friends with the father of one of Isaac’s preschool classmates. Like Jeff, John was a skier; they went on ski trips together with another friend. In 2002 Jeff’s transplanted kidney began to fail. “I was really pretty sick,” he remembers. But he wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity for great skiing, so he would “just marshal my resources and ski.” One day when they were skiing hard at Vail on one of their favorite runs, John was halfway down the mountain when he tore his ACL. Jeff and his other friend got off the mountain and stabilized him, then took him to the local hospital. That night they were staying with Jeff’s sister and Jeff was huddled by the fire, shivering, when John asked “what do you have to do to donate a kidney?”

“It’s based on blood type,” Jeff replied. John said, “If mine matches, one of my kidneys is yours.” Of course, notes Jeff, “he was high on painkillers and beer when he said that.” Jeff didn’t believe his friend would feel the same the next day. But back in Chicago, John insisted. Jeff’s cousin also offered to donate a kidney, but hers would not have been as good a match.

“It’s this unbelievable thing that he pushed and went forward with it,” Jeff marvels. “How do accept a gift like that from a friend?” John’s operation started in the morning, then Jeff was brought in for surgery that took seven hours. “I’m back in my room…and they force you to get up and walk. John walked in that night. He was a wreck. He said ‘I want it back!’” Of course he was kidding; for him, the act of giving the kidney was what mattered. “He described it as the most important thing he’d done in his life. It made it so easy to accept that gift and be grateful for it.” Five weeks later John was riding his mountain bike. They skied together the following March. But a transplanted kidney doesn’t last forever; John’s donated kidney failed around 2011.

Now Jeff moved to a new protocol, peritoneal dialysis, which involved “a suitcase-size machine you carry around, and boxes and boxes of fluid.” Imagine driving to a woodworking school and teaching a week-long class with that gear.

And there’s more. “They don’t tell you that your native kidneys, if they shrivel up, can become cancerous. One of the problems with peritoneal dialysis is that you have a tube in your abdomen.” (Apologies to you squeamish types.) The tube irritated his intestines, which led to infections. Sometimes he had to stay in the hospital for 10 days. During one of these stints his doctors ordered an MRI that found kidney cancer. “That,” says Jeff, “was probably the toughest period for me.” They removed the cancerous kidney, only to find, the following year, that the other kidney had also developed cancer.

At this point some might plunge into despair. Not Jeff. Instead, he felt gratitude. “I just feel like I’ve been so fortunate and appreciate so many aspects of what I do, despite the fact that there have been periods of real misery. It’s important to appreciate everything you’ve got. Whatever you get is a gift. So many people wander through life without appreciating that.”

People who find themselves faced with such challenges are “more alive,” Jeff thinks. “There are these moments where…things are miserable, and then all of a sudden they’re not so miserable and everything around you is more wondrous. I can remember moments where all of a sudden I’m walking and [realize] ‘this feels great!’ I can even remember where I was when that sort of thing happened.”

These days, Jeff goes to a local dialysis clinic for treatments three times a week, a process that lasts 4-1/2 hours, plus travel time. (Read that again.) He schedules his appointments in the late afternoons to allow him maximum time in the shop.

If you follow Jeff on Instagram you may be as taken as I am by two items that show up occasionally in his feed: Lola the shop dog and his fluting engine. Lola, a blue heeler, belongs to Juan, Jeff’s erstwhile assistant. (Jameel Abraham calls Lola “one of the finest people” he has ever met.) Sadly, Lola and Juan have been out of the shop since June, thanks to the pandemic and then Juan’s decision to attend grad school in furniture at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The fluting engine is a device Jeff made based on David Pye’s circa-1950 invention. Jeff was intrigued by the tool, which makes evenly spaced flutes on curved surfaces, inside or out. A bit of sleuthing turned nothing up since the description in “David Pye: Woodcarver and Turner.” Around 2018, Jeff studied the description in the book with a view to making a fluting engine of his own. He puzzled over it for a few months and built one as a side project. The biggest problem he encountered was figuring out the geometry of the cutters, which required a few variations in the grinding, forging and heat treatment to get things right. In action, the fluting engine makes a mesmerizing sound – for a user or spectator, it’s easy to love. On the other hand, it’s “incredibly infuriating” as it requires adjustments for every variation. But such frustration goes with any relationship. Bottom line: Jeff is hooked by the device, the process of using it and the texture it brings to his work.

As someone at heightened risk of infection, Jeff has been staying close to home since last March. He’s working on a couple of chair designs and a variety of commission work, along with projects of his own. As with many of us, he says “all sorts of design ideas are always percolating.”

In fact, he says, “my head is exploding with ideas. Dialysis takes a huge amount of time and energy. I wish I had more energy.” But Jeff’s glass is full — with “appreciation for being alive, for experiencing things. The sense of gratitude for being able to do what I do is amazing.”

Thanks to Father John Abraham for suggesting that I write about Jeff.

– Nancy Hiller, author of “Making Things Work” and “Kitchen Think.”