Last week I walked into work to a brand-new Veritas spokeshave sitting on my bench. Chris had ordered several for students and kindly ordered an extra for me. (I’m spoiled, I know.)
Grateful, I took a picture of my new tool and posted it to my social media account, not thinking much of it.
The following day I received a comment: “Would you mind posting a video of how you file the throat (if you follow Chris’s approach)?”
Huh? File a throat?? This was news to me, but according to Chris, this is common practice when breaking in a new spokeshave.
He explained that in chairmaking, sometimes cuts that are ranker than the spokeshave will allow are needed. The solution? File the throat, just a hair or two to allow a thicker shaving to pass through.
So as asked, we created a video demonstrating the process. Next week’s chairmaking class will be the first to break the new spokeshaves in.
Well, back to work for me. I have two more spokeshaves to file.
This summer, the U.S. Postal Service released 12 stamps featuring photographs by Michael Freeman from six different preserved Shaker communities, commemorating the 250th anniversary of the first Shakers arriving in America. Freeman, along with June Sprigg and David Larkin, published “Shaker: Life, Work, and Art,” in 1991.
The stamps were designed by Postal Service Art Director Derry Noyes. Unhappy with the first design, which featured more detailed, close-up shots, Noyes put the project on hold for four years. Revisiting, she redesigned the stamps with a broader perspective. You can read more about her process here.
The pane selvage (the area around the collection of stamps) features a photo of Brother Ricardo Belden (1868–1958), taken by Samuel Kravitt, in 1935. Belden joined a Shaker community in Enfield, Connecticut, when he was 4 years old. Initially, he worked on the farm. In 1926, he joined the Hancock Shaker Village in Hancock and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and spent much of his time repairing clocks with wooden works.
The stamp’s First Day of Issue was June 20, 2024, at Hancock Shaker Village. If you’d like to know more about each individual stamp, check out this article.
Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill
One stamp features the beloved staircases at Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. Chris has visited and written about Shaker Village many times (including in 2006, which is this Saturday’s Earlywood post in American Peasant, free for anyone to read). His first visit was more than 30 years ago, and that experience sparked something new.
Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill
For John Wilson, it was Ejner Handberg’s “Shop Drawings of Shaker Furniture and Woodenware, Vol. 1.” In 1977, Wilson was offered a job to teach furniture making at Michigan’s Lansing Community College. He had two hours to prep for the class. He drove to the library, checked out Handberg’s book and taught his students how to make a dovetailed dining tray. Wilson, who died in 2023, built a life building Shaker oval boxes and producing copper tacks.
For Chris Becksvoort, it was a 1974 exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick gallery. “I went back to visit it five, six, seven times,” he says. Years later, Becksvoort would reproduce two of the gallery’s pieces in his shop.
For Jennie Alexender, it was several trips to Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community. There, she met Sister Mildred. Jennie wanted to see the chairs and remembers Sister Mildred quipping, “You know, it’s interesting. People think we’re chairs.” Several visits later, Jennie built her first Shaker one-slat dining chair.
Perhaps something as simple as these stamps will spark something for you, too.
In an article in “The Conversation,” researchers Rob MacKenzie and Richard Norby, with the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR), shared findings from a recent study published in Nature Climate Change. Their question: How will trees respond to more CO2 in the future?
Their laboratory is a forest in Staffordshire, England. Their equipment, tall pipes that infuse the air with extra CO2. Their samples, 180-year-old English oak (Quercus robur).
“After we increased CO2 levels to what will be the planetary level in the 2050s, trees took more of it from the atmosphere and their wood production increased by 10%,” MacKenzie and Norby wrote.
Several FACE (Free Air Carbon Enrichment) experiments are happening around the world in an attempt to better understand which trees are more likely to thrive in the future. You can learn more about BIFoR FACE here. And you can watch a video about the BIFoR FACE facility here, and a more recent video about BIFoR FACE experiments here.
I’m headed to Virginia this weekend for a few days at Colonial Williamsburg where I’ll be studying, measuring and taking careful notes on all the details of a late 18th/early 19th-century Virginia blanket chest in the CW collection – a chest I’ll be replicating for the 27th Annual Working Wood in the 18th Century Conference, Jan. 23-26, 2025.
The 2025 Conference theme is “To Furnish a Town: High, Low, and In-Between.” At a glance – and that’s all I’ve had so far – I think this chest part of the “in between.” While it’s not a fancy piece, it likely wasn’t made for the least fortunate. I’ll use it as a stepping off point to discuss dovetails (surprise), blanket chests and painted furniture…and will discuss my presentations in more detail when I have more detail. The most difficult thing (other than standing on a stage and speaking to an audience) will, I think, be finding air-dried yellow pine boards wide enough to replicate this piece, which has overall dimensions of 22-5/8″ x 45- 1/2″ x 17-7/8″ – and I might not be able to (in which case I’ll call it a reproduction rather than a replica).
High-style work will be represented by renowned cabinetmaker and teacher Steve Brown, who will present the build of a Virginia cabriole leg dressing table, discussing its design and construction, as well as its relationship to New England examples. And by CW cabinetmakers Bill Pavlak and John Peeler who will trace the evolution of style and construction through the lens of fall-front desks and a drop-leaf dining tables (if you follow Bill and John on Instagram, you’ve seen some of what they’re working on for the conference…at least that’s my guess! And it’s making me anxious, as I’m itching to get working, too!).
Also presenting are CW joiners Brian Weldy and Ayinde Martin, who will demonstrate the sophisticated greenwood turning and joinery techniques from seemingly humble forms, and carpenter Matt Sanbury and others will show how logs were turned into lumber.
You can read more about the 27th Annual Working Wood in the 18th Century Conference and register (for in-person or virtual attendance) at the conference website.
Millions of PBS viewers first met Dick Proenneke through the program “Alone in the Wilderness,” which documents Dick’s 30-year adventure in the Alaskan wilderness. On the shores of Twin Lakes, Dick built his cabin and nearly all of the household objects he required to survive, from the ingenious wooden hinges on his front door to the metal ice creepers he strapped to his boots.
And now, “The Handcrafted Life of Dick Proenneke” examines this adventure through the lens of Dick’s tools and the objects he made. Written by Monroe Robinson – the caretaker of Dick’s cabin and his personal effects – the book weaves together vintage photos and entries from Dick’s journals plus new drawings and images to paint a portrait of a man fully engaged in life and the natural world around him. The italic text after Dick’s journal entries is commentary by Robinson.
June 28, 1968:
Today I would build some furniture. First a kitchen chair and then a bench three feet long. I had them both ready to glue by 11:30. Back on the job I augured the hole for my table legs and the bunk poles were ready. I could sort, cut and fit them in. I’m near the end of the job of building on the cabin until I get a plane, glue and polyethylene for the roof. By the time I had the scraps cleaned up and tools sharpened as I do every evening it was time to call it a day.
Three-foot bench. (Photo by Monroe Robinson)
In 1995, Dick wrote, “My chair still giving trouble. One back rest support broke off at the hole in the seat foundation. I would shorten it a bit and shape a new end to fit in the hole with the broken support end. Working like a beaver when here came a Cessna 180.”
My replicated chair without caribou pad. Note the black bear tooth punctures in the end of the seat. (Photo by Monroe Robinson)
In 2001, a black bear broke the chair when it climbed through Dick’s nine-pane window to pull the chair and its caribou fur pad outside. I repaired Dick’s chair only to have it break when someone leaned back too far. I replicated his chair, repaired this new break and sent Dick’s chair to the archives.
In replicating the chair, I particularly focused on drilling the mortise holes for the legs and back rest at angles matching Dick’s. The chair’s stance, the splay and rake of the legs, along with the angle of the backrest support-post, make it a beautiful and comfortable chair. The back legs splay back a few degrees more than the front legs, and the back legs are slightly shorter. The chair looks simple but most handcrafted chairs at wilderness cabins are not crafted like this. Dick’s matter-of-fact approach did not mean a thrown together, uncomfortable chair. And constructing a handsome chair did not mean taking all day.
When a black bear, in 2015, managed to turn the handle of Dick’s door and pull out my replicated chair with a new caribou pad along with Dick’s four-legged stool with his original caribou pad, it was apparent the fur created an attracting odor. All fur was removed from Dick’s cabin.
