As the wet oak is rived, I can smell my daddy’s neck. There was no other neck. Time and time again he would come upstairs out of the basement or come inside from the back yard with wood shavings (most likely white oak, his favorite) on his chamois shirt, or his beat-up boots.
I could get a bear hug like no other. And to this day, I know the scent of a Woodpucky. The Woodpucky (a woodworker to most people) lives and breathes with wood. Always carries the scent of wood – dust probably hanging around them, on them or their clothes and hair. They understand time, growth, fit, math, structure, wet, dry – the whole gamut.
— Harper Burke, daughter of Jennie Alexander, at her father’s memorial
I have little clue what Roy Underhill is doing in the picture above; it’s from 2012 when I was in North Carolina with Christopher Schwarz assisting on a tool chest class at The Woodwright’s School. My best guess, however, is that Roy is poking fun at Chris’ overhand ripping technique by demonstrating his own underhand (Underhill?) ripping technique…while dropping sawdust into his eyes.
Roy is always funny, and a joy to be around – and shenanigans aside, he knows more about hand-tool woodworking than just about anyone I’ve met. You can meet him, too (and possibly get dragooned into shenanigans). He’ll be at the Lost Art Press open house (837 Willard St., Covington, Ky.) on April 13 from 10-11:30 a.m. and from 1:30-5 p.m. Stop in at any time during those hours to say hello, pick up a signed copy of “Calvin Cobb: Radio Woodworker,” and simply to hang out with Roy – always a delight!
Megan Fitzpatrick and I have spent the last couple days getting a huge batch of Crucible Card Scrapers finished and packaged up. And today we sent off nearly 700 of them to the warehouse.
I’d like to thank everyone in our supply chain – from the waterjet cutter to our machine shop to our magnet vendor – for busting hump to get these done. But mostly I’d like to thank Megan for helping me plow through QC, assembly and packaging today.
We think these scrapers are the cat’s pajamas. They are easy to sharpen and require little thumb pressure to produce beautiful shavings.
Note that the logo applied to the scrapers is a repositionable magnet and not a sticker. Hence they are a little crooked and off-center. You can satisfy your OCD to the max as the magnets are a precisely shrunk shape from my CAD drawings of the scraper.
Anyway, they are available now for shipment – $20 plus domestic shipping. You can read all about them (and how to sharpen them) here.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Brendan Gaffney is working on a huge batch of lump hammers that we hope to finish next week. Details, as always, on our Instagram account.
Most woodworkers with a connection to the internet have stumbled on images from Axel Erlandson’s (1884-1964) famous The Tree Circus, a California roadside attraction that featured Erlandson’s amazing pruning and grafting abilities.
He made furniture and sculpture by grafting branches and tree together, coaxing them to create great geometric patterns and unusual structures.
The Tree Circus didn’t last long, but the photos crop up every few months on Facebook or Twitter. This weekend I got to see one of the great structures from the collection – “The Telephone Booth Tree” – which is in the permanent collection of the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Md.
As you can see from the photo, the tree is no longer alive, but it is still impressive. And it is much bigger than I imagined from the photos. I spent a good deal of time admiring the joinery and the form itself.
And I thought: This guy had far more patience than your typical woodworker. Step one, graft branches. Step two, wait two years. Step three….
And, of course, I thought of the Welsh stick chairs from St Fagans that relied on branches that had been trained by the woodworker to produce the required shape for a chair while the tree was still alive.
You thought this wasn’t going to be a chairmaking post. Ha.
The day after the memorial service for Jennie Alexander, one of Jennie’s daughters, Harper Burke, posed an open question.
“Do you think Jennie was there?” she asked a small gathering of friends, family and woodworkers (who she calls the “woodpuckies”).
Now, I don’t think quickly on my feet, so I just smiled and kept my mouth shut. If I’d had a few minutes to think about her question, here’s what I would have said.
Of course Jennie (JA) was there. Jennie (and in her previous incarnation as John Alexander) had changed the lives of everyone who packed into that beautiful private Baltimore library last Saturday to remember her. There were chairs she had built. There were chairs that had been built as a result of her writing. There were people who had upended their entire lives to follow JA all over the world to teach the world about her beloved greenwoodworking.
And Jennie wasn’t confined to that room on that day. When I returned home from the memorial service, I retrieved a few small artifacts I keep at the shop. One is a plastic-handled screwdriver that’s been ground into a chisel. This was the screwdriver that Brian Boggs had turned into a chisel so he could make the chair from JA’s “Make a Chair From a Tree.”
Yup. Brian Freaking Boggs, one of the world’s finest chairmakers and designers. He’d read “Make a Chair From a Tree,” and that set him on a course to who he is today, which (of course) took loads of hard work and talent on his part.
Peter Follansbee has often told the story about how he traveled to North Carolina as a young man to take a class from JA at Drew Langsner’s Country Workshops, and how their relationship transformed the arc of his life. In fact, Peter dedicated his latest book, “Joiner’s Work,” to JA and used language so kindly that it made me think: Did Peter really write this? (He did.)
JA’s death in 2018 came 40 years after the publication of “Make a Chair from a Tree,” the book that brought us together. Every day in my shop, JA is there – in the tools, techniques, books, ideas (both the ones that worked and those that didn’t). With all the love and respect I can muster, I dedicate this book to the unforgettable memory of John (Jennie) Alexander.
Hell, some days I feel like I have JA working to the left of me. Brendan Gaffney has watched the video of “Make a Chair From a Tree” more than I have, he’s nearly memorized the book and is now building chairs based on JA’s at an impressive pace.
In fact, in the woodworking world, it’s hard to find a place where JA isn’t. Her books, classes, articles, videos and letters – so many letters – have changed how woodworkers all over the world think about moisture content in the wood and caused us all to consider how it can be used to our advantage.
She gave the world a chair that is neither traditional nor contemporary. It is loved by people who treasure the past and those who are building only for the future. It charms and inspires almost everyone who sits in it.
But there’s one place where Jennie isn’t, and that’s her Light Street home in Baltimore where she dwelled until she died last year. After the memorial service last week, Brendan and I wandered down to Light Street to take one last look at the place – it’s an amazing patch of green in the middle of a dense urban neighborhood.
JA’s tools, chairs, dinguses (jigs) and books are gone – all in the hands of loved ones and students. The trees and bushes of the 1400 block of Light Street – after being in service to JA and Joyce for decades – are now starting to take charge of the yard a bit.
I remember being stunned by the place the first time I saw it years ago. This is where so much incredible stuff had happened. On Saturday, I realized that the place itself had nothing to do with it.
Brendan and I then liberated one final memento – the last piece of pure JA that occupied Light Street – and headed back to our hotel, satisfied and happy we had known her.
