The Pirate Map used by the Visitor (before aging with tea, water, dirt, crumpling and folding). The Tropics of Newport are to the east; flying pigs, muddy banks and Larry the Ferryman are on the north bank. The swine whales live near the ‘O’s on the river. The visitor’s skiff has passed the Licking River and is between the ‘R’ and ‘I’.
My internet service was out for a while and I wasn’t able to respond to the comments to Chris’ reading of “A Visitor Comes to Covington” or to the backstory of the book. Thank you for the many very kind comments.
I wasn’t sure how the book would be received. In the letter sent with the book my suggestion was to put it on a high shelf in the library, push it well to the back and put something heavy on it. Alternatively, it could be buried in the basement. Fortunately, the Stick Chair Badge Approval & Distribution Committee (Chris and Megan) liked the book and I heard there was a bit of teary-eyedness when each had read the book. I didn’t intend to make anyone cry but have to confess I got a bit of moisture around my eyes when Chris read the book.
Below is a photo of my last cat, Bunky Beanie Bronzini. He was a big and solid 15-pounder capable of herding me towards the kitchen when he thought I might be headed in the wrong direction. If he had lived another few years he would gained another name or two. This was his “No, absolutely not,” expression.
The following is excerpted from Peter Follansbee’s “Joiner’s Work.”
If you like green woodworking, “Joiner’s Work” is doctoral thesis on processing furniture-shaped chunks of lumber from the tree using and axe, froe, hatchet and brake. If you are into carving, Peter dives into deep detail on how he festoons his pieces with carvings that appear complex but are remarkably straightforward. And if you love casework, “Joiner’s Work” is a lesson on the topic that you won’t find in many places. Peter’s approach to the work, which is based on examining original pieces and endless shop experimentation, is a liberating and honest foil to the world of micrometers and precision routing.
The book features six projects, starting with a simple box with a hinged lid. Peter then shows how to add a drawer to the box, then a slanted lid for writing. He then plunges into the world of joined chests and their many variations, including those with a paneled lid and those with drawers below. And he finishes up with a fantastic little bookstand.
Construction of these projects is covered in exquisite detail in both the text and hundreds of step photos. Peter assumes you know almost nothing of 17th-century joinery, and so he walks you through the joints and carving as if it were your first day on the job. Plus he offers ideas for historical finishes.
The primary material for joiners’ work is oak (I use white oak [Quercus alba] and red oak [Quercus rubra] interchangeably) that has been riven, or split, from the log.
This results in boards whose face is the radial plane, the most dimensionally stable surface possible. The stock is initially worked fresh from the log, a state we call “green.” After initial planing, boards are selectively dried some, then re-worked – the decoration and joinery are cut once the surface is dry enough to take a good finish, yet the interior of the stock retains some of that moisture, making it easier to cut than air- or kiln-dried stock.
Fig. 1.1 Here an eighth-section of an oak log is ready to become some perfectly quartered boards. Opening the log is always one of my favorite moments, when each piece reveals its potential.
When studying period pieces, I see that case pieces – boxes, chests, cupboards and related items – often display a mixture of riven and sawn stock. Usually the mill-sawn stock is the secondary wood, and in New England pieces this is often Eastern white pine (Pinus strobus). Other softwoods might appear as well. I’ve noted Atlantic white cedar (Chamaecyparis thyoides) riven into chest bottoms and drawer bottoms. It also appears as applied mouldings.
Fig. 1.2 Long sections of Atlantic white cedar are ideally suited for making applied mouldings. I don’t often get this wood, so I try to use every last bit of it when I do.
I’ve seen yellow pine (probably Pinus rigida or Pinus resinosa) in furniture from Connecticut and western Massachusetts. You can make the whole piece from riven oak, and many period works are just that, but when making case pieces, I prefer to use white pine for at least the bottoms, and often the lids, too. This is just a way to save some oak for future joinery work.
Fig. 1.3 This chest with two drawers has a relatively broad range of woods. The carcase is red oak; the lid, floor, drawer bottoms and rear panels are white pine; the applied mouldings are Atlantic white cedar; and some panels and one drawer front have plaques of black walnut.
While I am quite content using oak for most any piece of furniture, you might want some variety in your work. Black walnut (Juglans nigra) and ash (various Fraxinus species) are perhaps the most commonly found non-oak timbers I have seen in period joinery. I have used them and some other woods, too. I’ve seen Spanish cedar (Cedrela odorata) in some 17th-century joiners’ work from Boston, and other timbers besides. And recently, I’ve been using some Alaska yellow cedar (Cupressus nootkatensis) for carved boxes. Try what you have. I’d say the single-most important feature is straight grain. If nothing else, keep that in mind. Recently a friend gave me several sections of riven black walnut. They were short lengths, but just right for a joined stool. My previous experiences with walnut were a mixed bag. I often joke about being a personal monoculture; I have used oak so much for so long that I had no reference point for most other timbers. But it wasn’t until I used the riven walnut that I could truly appreciate this wood.
I used to think “it’s not for me” – but that was because I came at it the wrong way. I knew that for oak, riven green wood was the ideal. Why I thought it would be different for walnut is just one of those mental blunders that hit us all from time to time. I was judging this wood based on cuts that I would never deal with in oak. My first walnut project was a wainscot chair, made from kiln-dried wood, complete with grain run-out and all manner of un-straight fibers. Next up was a board chest, this time in air-dried wide boards. Nice, but expensive. It worked so much better than the previous project, but the chest had few details, and I really didn’t get much out of it.
Fig. 1.4 Straight-grained riven walnut was a revelation for me. This joint stool is the second non-oak example I’ve ever made. I’d do it again if the wood came my way.
Then it all clicked perfectly with the riven green wood. A nice straight-grained walnut log is a dream to work, easy to plane and to chisel – and the axe work in walnut makes you feel like Superman. Turning it is especially satisfying. When it came to carving, I had to lighten up my mallet blows. When I used my usual approach, I blasted the walnut to smithereens. Less mallet work, more hand-work and it cut fine. Live and learn. Now I have to take back all the horrible things I’ve said about walnut. Riven, straight-grained, green, free – that’s the way I like my walnut.
Around southern New England where I live, the ash tree most commonly found is white ash (Fraxinus americana). I have used this wood for furniture almost from my very first projects. When I made ladderback and Windsor chairs, ash was a favorite riving wood for parts. It is lightweight, strong and splits well – an all-around great hardwood. It has a short shelf-life in the log, though; it can go bad pretty quickly if you don’t get to it. Seventeenth-century turned chairs were often ash, but some joined work was, too. You work it just as you would oak. I have found it’s somewhat stringy, and when very fresh it can tear out badly under the plane. But if you work it green then let it sit a while, it will work very well afterward. The color is pretty bland, and there’s no figure on the radial face as in oak. So carve it up then paint it, and no one’s the wiser. Nice wood.
The Way I Work Some woodworkers keep a stockpile of lumber on hand, and draw from their stacks as they begin a new project. Others buy enough lumber (with some extra) for each piece they are planning to build, often working from a list that includes all the pieces in a given project and their rough dimensions. I work in a different way. I start with a log and split out almost every piece of oak that I use at the bench. Starting with the log is a lot of work, but it’s fun. This approach usually results in me starting several projects at once, then I leapfrog back and forth among them. Sometimes I have quite a few pieces underway, usually limited by shop space. As I write this, I have a joined chest, a chest with drawers, a chest of drawers, two wainscot chairs, a long table and several joint stools in progress. I just finished a carved box in the midst of all these.
It’s not an attention-span problem. It’s what happens when I open the log. I have an idea of what I want from a given log, but the tree has ideas of its own. I might be preparing stock for a joined and carved chest, but end up with more narrow framing parts than I need. These get shuffled over to the next project. Panels in a chest range from 7″-12″ wide, usually only about 14″-16″ long. Some logs offer wide panels that are longer than that, but are still too short to get two lengths out of them. These are ideal for carved boxes whose long front and back boards are usually around 20″-24″ long. It goes on and on.
Fig 1.5 This bedstead is now more than 15 years old. When it was new, the color difference between the various woods was obvious. Now they have blended rather well. There are white oak muntins, red oak panels, and the long rails and stiles are white ash. The finish is linseed oil.
Selecting the Timber If you are going to split your stock, it starts with the log. Finding the right log isn’t half the battle, but it’s a good chunk of it. Ideally, you’ll work with an oak that grew dead-straight, is clear, or free of knots, bumps and branches, and is large enough in diameter to yield wide boards along its radial plane. With all those criteria met, you can get even more demanding and look for an oak log that meets all these demands and is also slow-growing. In some places, you can find this timber at sawmills and log merchants, and sometimes even firewood suppliers will have short sections that fit the profile.
If you’re skipping the log-splitting aspect of this work, you can come close to this material if you look for straight-grained quartersawn boards. When using sawn stock, I prefer air-dried to kiln-dried. To me, the kiln-dried stuff seems stiffer and less cooperative. Air-dried is harder to find, but it’s out there. Flat-sawn boards can be used in joinery; they certainly are prevalent in surviving English work of the 17th century. They require some careful planning and much more effort in working, but you can make joined work with flatsawn stock – it just won’t be as much fun as working with riven stuff. When using riven stuff, you’ll be working the wood green, or unseasoned. If you have flat-sawn stock, it needs to be seasoned. The general rule of thumb is one year of air drying per inch of thickness. When I use sawn oak, I like to air dry it outside, then bring it in the shop for a few months before breaking it down to rough-size pieces.
Oak Most of the oaks are ring-porous hardwoods, meaning their growth rings are comprised of two different types of cells. The material that grows in the spring is generally more porous than that from summer growth. This results in a distinct division between the spring or “earlywood” and the summer or “latewood.” Also visible on the end-grain view are the ends of the medullary rays. These are cells that radiate outward from the log’s center, or pith, toward the bark. Ring-porous hardwoods, with only a couple of exceptions, split predictably both in line with the growth rings and perpendicular to them, along the medullary rays.
Fig. 1.6 This section of end grain is strictly firewood, but the structure of the oak shows clearly. Just inside the bark is a narrow band of greyish-white sapwood, then the bulk of the material is the darker-colored heartwood. Radiating out from the center are the ends of the medullary rays, showing up as almost silvery bright lines. Concentric growth rings encircle the very center, or pith of the tree, in this case rotten and bug-eaten. This one has almost everything that can go wrong with a log; the pith is off-center, the log is out-of-round, the medullary rays are twisted and bent and there’s insect damage. There’s also cracking along the growth rings and injury to the tree at a couple of points in its life. Burn it.
The end grain of a large oak shows two distinct colors in the wood. The outer inch or so (just below the bark) is the sapwood. This material is the part of the tree that conducts the sap. It is more prone to decay and infestation, and is considered weaker than the darker-colored “heartwood.” In oaks, the greater proportion of the tree’s diameter is taken up with the heartwood. A young sapling is all sapwood, but over time as the tree grows, there is a transition in which the inner layers of sapwood undergo a chemical change into heartwood. For our purposes, the principal difference between sapwood and heartwood is the greater resistance to decay that heartwood exhibits. In woods such as ash or maple, most of the usable stock is sapwood. In the oaks, the sapwood is generally discarded, and the heartwood is the stuff of choice.
When splitting out oak stock for furniture work, the radial face is the best one to use for a number of reasons. The primary benefit is the dimensional stability of boards oriented this way. In a straight-grained example, there is little shrinkage across this radial face, thus little to no distortion, either. Another feature of this radial plane is the ease of working it – the wood cuts more easily on this face than on the adjacent tangential face. So the carved work is always done on the radial face. Mouldings are often cut in this plane, also. When using riven oak, the stock is usually oriented so the radial faces compose the front of the piece.
The material nearest the center of the log is called juvenile wood. Formed when the tree was a small sapling, this wood is often very fibrous and can include twisted grain. There is no clear distinction between where the juvenile wood leaves off and the workable heartwood picks up. Each log is different. If the innermost fibers appear straight-grained, you can try to keep as much of that stock as possible. One place where you might push your luck with the juvenile wood is when you are trying to split out the widest panel stock you can get. (I’ll cover that in detail when we get to splitting and working panels.)
Editor’s note: Here’s the backstory for “A Visitor Comes to Covington: A Fairy Tale,” a delightful handmade book that Suzanne sent me in March. I have made a video reading of the book you can watch here. Enough of my yakking. Here’s Suzanne:
Back in January, I sent a New Year’s card to Chris and Megan. In return, I received a handwritten thank you card and three stick chair badges. According to the Stick Chair Laws I was required to make a stick chair. Not being a woodworker, only a user of wood-based products, this presented a problem.
My first thought was to make a collage featuring a stick chair and I played around with that idea with digital renderings.
This example was sent to Chris as a joke. Stick chair art on the wall, including a wedding photo, wallpaper and a John Brown chair.
Eventually, I went with the idea of a small book centered on a quote by my favorite 16th-century essayist, Michel de Montaigne, “Je veux que la mort me trouve plantant choux, mais nonchalent d’elle, et encore plus mon jardin imparfait.” In the story, a fairy tale, a Grim Reaper, arrives to escort a chairmaker to the great beyond. Having been given three stick chair badges the story would have a series of threes. I also wanted the book to be interactive with instructions to open, untie and unfold different items. I mined the Lost Art Press blog, Roubo’s “The Book of Plates” and other sources for the illustrations.
The prologue about the start of the visitor’s journey opens by lifting the planing stop from Megan’s workbench. The underside of the stop is lined with part of Randle Holme’s 17th-century tool kit. Somewhere in the chart is a stick chair badge.
All journeys begin with a map, and pirate maps are the best and most useful for constructing an alternate history of Covington and surrounding areas. The street map is from 1877, the decorative frame and the visitors skiff are from an Australian map.
The map was aged with the usual things: tea, water, dirt, curling, crumpling and folding. The manicules on the map point out where the story starts and will end.
The visitor’s arrival in Covington opens the main part of the story and and it is fairly clear he is a rather stylish Grim Reaper (I felt no need to depict him as a skeleton wearing a hooded robe). After hearing “Werewolves of London”on the car radio I added the line, “Under his hat his hair was perfect.”
The visitor has arrived well before the appointed time with the chairmaker and spends the first part of his trip visiting three old friends: a turtle, a cat and a queen bee. The idea for the animals as the visitor’s friends began with an old street name. On the 1877 map Covington still had a Bremen Street (now known as Pershing Street, probably renamed during World War I). A cat was one of the four musicians from the Brothers Grimm tale, “Town Musicians of Bremen.” The cat was a night singer (or yowler) and in one version of the story was named Burlόn. The image used is a sculpture by Gerhard Marcks, who also sculpted a statue of the four musicians that stands in the city of Bremen.
The three friends are representative of life cycles. Old Turtle will live for over a century; Burlόn, the cat, will live for less than a quarter century; Honey Tart, the queen bee, will live for a year or two and her worker bees only a number of days. They are also symbols of human characteristics: wisdom, independence and curiosity, and the industrious worker.
After imbibing a very nice Bordeaux and elderberry cordial the visitor mistakenly summons a third manicule that takes the reader to the middle of the story. Was the rogue manicule really a mistake or did it have another purpose? In the prologue it states the visitor has an obligation and here is part of that obligation, to delay his arrival to allow the chairmaker to finish his last chair. This is a mark of the visitor’s admiration and respect for the chairmaker.
The double doors into which the visitor vanishes happen to be from Paris and the curious reader can open them. Inside there is a stern-faced cat blocking the view of a vortex. So, nothing to see here folks, move along. While the reader advances to the wonderful workshop on Willard, the visitor deals with some of the behind-the-scenes bureaucracy of manicules.
Figuring out how to illustrate the workshop took a few days of thinking. The inspiration came from a menko, a square origami packet. The menko opens outward like a flower, and in the middle is a square. The four views of the shop were taken from a video Chris made a few years ago. The middle, or floor, was blank until it became the space for woodworking classes (with students who have broken the laws of time and space to be there). The door to the workshop is a photo of the outside of the building facing Willard Street and is opened by lifting the Catbus. Bean, of course, is in the driver’s seat. The underside of the door reveals the first part of the workshop. The outsides of the remaining three flaps are covered by a marquetry pattern drawn by Roubo. If the opened workshop is held in the right light it is possible to see a few sparkles of purple glitter because it is impossible to totally eradicate that stuff. Somewhere in the woodworking class is the second stick chair badge.
The hinges on the workshop flaps, as well as the hinges on all the doors are a double thickness of heavy drawing paper. Eight sheets of the sketchbook were glued together to support the heft of the workshop, which sits in a recess that is about four sheets deep. I miscalculated the length of the Catbus and ended up trimming back most of the front bumper.
The workshop foldout was not suitable to display the wall of hand tools, or paries manus instrumenta, and deserved its own section. It is a simple four-part foldout. The wooden door is from Türkiye and has wonderful carvings on the central panels. A cat helps keep the door closed, contrary to the usual behavior of opening all doors. The third stick chair badge is in the wall foldout.
The door from Türkiye. I was sorry to cut off some of the lower end to make it fit in the book.
When the visitor returns he resumes his journey to Willard Street. To emphasize the gravity of the task before him and how much it weighs on him the word panels are now grey and become darker as he nears the workshop. As he stands before the building that is both a home and workplace he looks up at the iron cat on the roof and he is saddened. At this point he is the only one that fully understands the meaning of the iron cat.
The story shifts to the chairmaker in the workshop and this shift is emphasized by the color of the word panels and a change in typeface. The word panels are again blue, but a darker shade because we are nearing the end. The photograph of one of Chris’ chairs was turned upside down and put on a black background to bring forward the detail, to see it from the chairmaker’s perspective and to see the “smile.”
When the visitor and chairmaker leave the shop the last chair seems to glow in the darkness. The accompanying multi-layer image started with a black and white photo of the workshop and a overlay of opaque black that left bare outlines of the interior. The darkened frame of creepy vines (stolen from the designs for the Stick Chair Journal) was the last layer before adding the chair. The trail of stars curving up and away from the chair represent ad astra, to the stars.
When the chairmaker leaves with the visitor two cats free themselves from the iron cat, descend to the street and walk through the fog to catch up with the chairmaker. The chairmaker was unaware they had been waiting for him and is overcome when the three are reunited (not to mention the cats can talk). I wrote a backstory that bridges the visitor’s sadness from when he sees the iron cat, to the point in the epilogue when the cats reunite with the chairmaker.
The Backstory of the Iron Cat
The two cats and the chairmaker were constant companions in the shop. In his grief after the second cat died, the chairmaker mounted the iron sculpture at the peak of the roof. He had no knowledge of the cats’ agreement with the visitor. When the first cat died he refused to leave and eventually convinced the visitor to let him stay until it was the chairmaker’s time to leave. The cat agreed to stay hidden, no hijinks, no haunting. The same agreement was made when the second cat died. When the iron cat was put on the roof the two cats decided to enter it and stay until they could reunite with their chairmaker. When the visitor looks up at the iron cat he sees the sadness and grief experienced by all three.The second part of the visitor’s obligation was to free the cats when he came to escort the chairmaker. The red string in the epilogue represents the unbroken connection between the cats and the chairmaker.
The Endpapers & a Few Other Things
The endpaper inside the front cover is a collage of illustrations from various woodworking books in the public domain. I made it a few years ago and may use it in a future blog post. The facing endpaper is Monsieur Roubo’s opinion of stick chairs. At the back of the book the endpaper is a scene of several creatures, unknowingly being followed by a shark, all of which were made from Roubo’s bench square. The waves are from Roubo’s waving machine. The bench square was also used to make the little horses that were used on a couple pages. The cat on the roof was originally going to be a weather vane, however the iron cat was a better fit. The iron cat was taken from the Black Cat of Riga and you can read about it on the Atlas Obscura site.
Color changes to the word panels were used to express a change in mood or circumstance. Once again, a song heard on the car radio found its way into the story. The visitor’s “the gathering gloom” and the idea of colors fading to grey and white as he looks at the house are drawn from The Moody Blues song, “Nights in White Satin.” The visitor’s panels changed from light blue to grays; the chairmaker’s from medium to darker blues. When the cats and chairmaker are reunited the word panel is a pale yellow for light and joy. Adding layers to certain features of an image provided dimension to otherwise flat paper. Architectural elements on the outside of the workshop and the whole house have three layers on columns, roof ridges and some decorative features. The house also has spacers to lift it from the page. Carved panels on the door to the wall of hand tools were also layered.
The Missing Last Page or The Epilogue -Part 2
I originally had a second page planned for the epilogue, but I cut it, preferring to leave the reader with the chairmaker literally bowled over to learn his cats can talk.
Here is the deleted second page:
Once they had boarded the visitor’s skiff the chairmaker and the cats settled themselves in the stern. On inquiring where they were headed the answer was, “West.” After a while, the visitor joined his passengers at the stern. The cats, snuggled on either side of the chairmaker, were sound asleep. Wally was sleeping belly up, while Bean rested his head on the chairmaker’s knee. Gesturing towards the cats the visitor said, “In all my centuries those two were the most insistent, bull-headed and toughest negotiators about refusing to leave.” The chairmaker chuckled, “Cats always get what they want.” “Oh no,” replied the visitor, “it wasn’t so much about what they wanted, they insisted it was what you needed.”
If you hear the chorus from a Rolling Stones song you aren’t mistaken.
Although there will only ever be one copy of the book, I thought it was important to affirm the originality of the story. On the wild chance it happened to sometimes maybe seem similar to certain people and cats, of course, it must be a coincidence. I used a portion of the painting, “La Bocca della Verità” (The Mouth of Truth, circa 1530) by Lucas Cranach to illustrate my affirmation.
After almost five weeks of writing, making illustrations, waiting for glue to dry and so on, it was time to send the book to the Stick Chair Badge Approval & Distribution Committee at Lost Art Press. I was reluctant and a bit teary-eyed to let it go and thought a proper farewell was in order. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 87 fit the bill:
Fairwell! thou art too dear for my possessing, And like enough thou knowest thy estimate. The Charter of thy worth gives thee releasing; My bonds in thee are all determinate.
An interior spread from “A Visitor Comes to Covington.”
Late last month, a package arrived from our researcher, Suzanne “Saucy Indexer” Ellison. I opened the package, saw it was a handmade book, and immediately set it aside. I was in the middle of teaching a chair class, plus my oldest daughter was about to arrive from Pittsburgh for her birthday.
After all the visitors – students, Maddy and her fiance – had left, I sat down with the book so I could give it my full attention. It is, of course, a fantastic document and a good story. It has everything: drinking, cats, a turtle and a mysterious visitor.
Suzanne kindly agreed to allow me to share the book with you via a video reading. If the video doesn’t appear in your mail reader, click this link to watch it.
I hope this story brightens your Sunday. Tomorrow, we’ll post Suzanne’s story about how she made the book, which is just as interesting as the book itself.
