Category: Woodworking Classes

We are in the middle of prepping hundreds of parts for a July 11-15 stick chair class in partnership with The Chairmaker’s Toolbox, and I am setting aside my aversion to plastic for this one moment.

As Megan Fitzpatrick and I prepare the parts – straightening the grain, octagonalizing the bits and sometimes tapering them, I sort through them. I group the parts by color and grain. And I wrap each bundle of parts into packets with a minimal amount of stretch-wrap plastic. 

There are packets of legs, short sticks, long sticks and stretchers. When all the stock prep is over, I’ll group all the packets into 10 chair kits that are matched for color and grain.

It takes a lot of extra work, but I do this for two reasons. One, it makes for better chairs. Two, even the nicest people in the world become total dork-holes when it comes to picking parts willy-nilly from a big communal pile of parts during a woodworking class.

Inevitably, one or two people end up with all the exceptional boards. And the slow students, who need all the help they can get, end up with the dregs.

To combat this problem, I started picking and grouping wood for students years ago to avoid this “Lord of the Firs” approach to distributing parts. And I have stuck to this philosophy to this day.

Why am I telling you this? If you ever find yourself facing a pile of parts in a classroom, please be kind. Don’t be a hoggy-dog and take all the best parts for yourself. Someone is watching. And they are judging you.

And Furthermore….

If you are taking a woodworking class this summer, here’s a little tip that might make you feel better about your performance during the class.

If you follow a lot of instructors, schools on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter (like I do), you’ll see a lot of posts that exclaim, “These students are KILLING it.” Or “These students are amazing! Hardworking! Insanely Talented! Oblong!”

I’ve taken enough classes and taught enough classes to tell you that this piffle is either:

1. Unconditional positive regard (that is undeserved).
2. Marketing for the school/instructor.

Woodworking in a classroom environment is both tense and fun. In my experience, everyone struggles a bit – that’s what happens when you learn stuff. There are always failures in a class – a mis-cut, a broken part, a brain fart. 

If you struggle in woodworking classes (I sure do, both as a student and an instructor), then you are perfectly normal. All those social media posts are just the gauzy, filtered unreality that clogs our phones and likely contributes to a lot of self-esteem problems.

Bottom line: If you make it through a class without locking yourself in the bathroom while sobbing, throwing your tools against the wall, or making a through-mortise in your hand, then you have succeeded. (All these things have happened in classes.)

But I will say in all honesty that every student in my classes has indeed KILLED IT (as long as “it” is a tree).

— Christopher Schwarz

This month I am headed to Omaha, Nebraska, to build a Dutch Tool Chest over two days for the Omaha Woodworkers Guild, and anyone can buy a ticket to watch. And if you are lucky, you can try to win the finished tool chest in a raffle at the end of the seminar.

The event is May 21-22 and is being held at the German American Society in Omaha. During the session, I’ll build a Dutch Tool Chest using hand tools and discuss all the different hand operations and how you might be able to use them in your shop. Plus, there will be squirrel jokes.

I’ll be covering:

• Dovetailing
• Dados
• Basic hand mouldings (beads and thumbnail mouldings)
• Rabbeting
• Tongue-and-groove work
• Lots of sawing and shooting board work
• Finishing surfaces with handplanes
• Installing surface-mount hinges

At the end of each day, I’ll also give presentations on other interesting topics – on one day I’ll examine the history of workbenches in Western culture and on the other day I’ll do a presentation on chair comfort and show off one of my stick chairs (I think I have one of those thingskicking around here somewhere).

The admission fee also includes breakfast, lunch and an afternoon snack. 

You can register for the event here. You can read more about the two-day seminar here.

This should be a fun weekend event. I’ve never been to Omaha, and I haven’t talked to many human people during the last two years (except for Lucy, Megan and the cats). I’m sure I’ll be a little rusty, but I bet we can all get through it together.

— Christopher Schwarz

When I began teaching woodworking in the early 2000s, I channeled my favorite Russian literature professor. It was a huge mistake.

When teaching students to saw, I barfed out everything about the topic I could muster – the historical and sociological context, the changes in tools and saw-tooth filing over the centuries, the different perspectives on the core techniques, plus a discussion of the cultural differences among the major Western civilizations that used saws.

Two hours and a dry mouth later, we began to cut wood. I knew my teaching approach was wrong, but I didn’t know how to fix it until one day I read about how some Japanese woodworkers teach the craft. First, the student watches the teacher perform the technique, who may or may not explain the task with words.

Then, when the student performs the task, the teacher would lay his or her hands on those of the student as they worked – showing how each tool is pulled, shifted and controlled during the cut.

At that moment, I put the book down and realized how my teaching had to change.

Just like with effective writing, teaching woodworking is about using the fewest words possible to explain something. And most of all, it is about showing – not telling. An example might help.

When I taught about marriage marks in my talkie era, I would explain how the marks worked and then show the students how to mark their work correctly. Inevitably, one or two students would ask about alternative marking-out methods, and they might even insist that a different method (colored dots, for example) was far superior.

This led to a back-and-forth discussion that was better suited to the beer hall than the classroom.

These days I mark all the students’ boards with marriage marks before class begins. I give a brief explanation of how to use them, and then we go to work. Inevitably, at some point during the day, a student will use the marriage marks to catch an error being made by a student at an adjacent bench.

And that’s when I explain their importance: Use the same system so others can help you. As the students are busy working (sawing, planing, whatever), I then expound on the “why” behind the marks. My explanation is available for people who want to know “why,” and it can be ignored by people who just want the “how.”

Here’s the funny thing. There are far fewer students who now question the marks because they find themselves in the middle of using them and relying on them. The genius of the marking system has already been shown to the student. And I didn’t have to tell or convince them.

Teaching has been a lot on my mind because I just spent seven days straight teaching two classes at The School of Woodwork in Florida. Because Lost Art Press has grown so much since 2018, I’ve been away from teaching for a while, even though it helps my writing, research and construction techniques. 

So I know I should teach a little – if only to test my ideas against those of much-smarter students. That’s why I agreed to do a chair class for scholarship students in July and the Chair Chat Class in October. And, because you have read this far (thanks!), I’ll let you know that I will teach one more chair class in 2022 (Sept. 19-23 at our storefront), which will be open to all students.

I don’t anticipate teaching on the road anymore. The year after I quit Popular Woodworking Magazine, I did 18 weeks of teaching all over the world. That’s not possible today with what Lost Art Press has become. But two or three classes a year? Sleeping in my own bed? Eating my own food? I think I can handle that.

Thanks to everyone who has been pestering me about this for the last three or four years. You were right.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Don’t worry, I’m not going to touch you during a class. That costs extra.

To lend a hand to people who are underrepresented in our ranks, I’m teaching a free stick chair class this July for women, BIPOC and GNC (gender non-conforming) woodworkers at our storefront in Covington, Ky. There are six spots in the class, and the scholarship covers both tuition and materials for the chair.

The emphasis of this class is to help create a new generation of woodworkers who teach. We have two spots for students who have some chairmaking experience and want to teach others, and four spots for students with little-to-no chair experience but who have some sort of active teaching practice (elementary school math, academic writing, shop maintenance in educational facility, podcasting, etc).

The class is being organized by Aspen Golann, who runs The Chairmaker’s Toolbox. You can apply for the class via this link. Aspen and Megan Fitzpatrick will be assisting during the week and helping out with the “teaching about teaching” component of the class – sharing advice, war stories and strategies for teaching woodworking in a live environment.

I am thrilled to be able to do this. I am sure some of you have questions. Here are some answers.

Why Not Offer Scholarships to Everyone?

For my first 10 years of teaching, I donated all the royalties from my videos to woodworking scholarships based purely on need. Of all the people I funded, I know of only one recipient who was female. Other free teaching that I do currently (such as at The Florida School of Woodworking) funds both need-based scholarships and scholarships for people who have been historically excluded from our craft.

Bottom line: I’ve funded a ton of scholarships for white guys like myself. For this one class, I’d like to do something different.

How Can I Help?

I rarely ask for help with these things. But I’ve decided to make an exception with this class. I am going to pay for all the material and stock preparation for the students from my pocket. And I’d like to use nice wood, such as cherry. I estimate that the wood for the class will cost between $1,500 and $1,700. If you would like to donate a little money to help, you can click on the donate button below.

If the button doesn’t work (sorry), try this link instead. Or if you prefer to use Venmo, my username is: christopher-schwarz-10.

This is not a tax-deductible donation. This is like tucking a $20 bill into my shorts at the pro shop. (Did that sound weird? Yes.) If I unexpectedly collect more money than needed for the materials, I’ll use the excess to pay for students’ meals during the class.

Thanks to Aspen and everyone who is working to expand the circle of people who love woodworking.

— Christopher Schwarz