People who make things are the best people I know. And that’s why I’m a fierce believer that the best way to help our craft is to unlock or open doors for anyone – anyone – who wants to step through.
Recently a friend alerted me to a new Instagram account that highlights the work of transgender craftspeople – transcraftsociety. Even if you aren’t transgender, I encourage you to follow their efforts and add their feed to the images you consume every day. Embracing beauty in all forms will make you a better designer (and person).
Example: Though I’m a rabid advocate for vernacular furniture – peasant pieces – my feeds are filled with brutalist architecture, Soviet bus stops and decay aesthetics. I am a better woodworker and designer thanks to the unfamiliar.
One of the members of the Society of Trans Craftspeople explained their mission to me this way:
“The Society of Trans Craftspeople was started by a trans furniture maker who wanted to connect with fellow artisans who shared similar life experiences. What started as personal social project due to Covid isolation has grown into a project that promotes and supports Transgender and Non-Binary artists in craft and art media. We aim to increase visibility for queer craftspeople who are often forgotten or overlooked and strive for equity in the craft and art world. In addition to continuing bi weekly posts, class promotions and community building we hope to eventually grow into or work with equity based non-profit or non profit adjacent organizations (such as chairmakers toolbox – a workshop of our own, etc.) in order to provide funding, class seats and other financial, emotional, and communal support. That being said, our main goal is to remind people we exist and to show off some beautiful work.”
Check it out. The worst thing that can happen is you’ll see some things you haven’t seen before.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Don’t bother posting hateful or negative comments. They will be deleted.
Today Bob Mould is 62. That simple fact brings me great joy.
As someone who has tried to remain creative into middle age, I am constantly worried that I will one day wake up and have nothing else to write. Nothing new to build. No areas of the craft or furniture left that I want to explore.
Yet somehow every day I am eager to pick up the tools, read a new (or old) book and try something I haven’t done before. Will this urge leave me?
Maybe. But maybe not. And so I put Bob Mould’s latest album, “Blue Hearts,” and sit down with the LP’s lyric sheet in the library. I’ve been listening to Mould since I was 18 when I first heard “Flip Your Wig” thundering down the hallway of my dorm freshman year.
Mould’s band, Husker Du, were like nothing I had ever heard in Arkansas. And I would argue that he single-handedly changed the course of rock music while he was in his 20s.
Out of debt to this man, I bought every one of his albums when they came out. When he slipped into electronica and dance music in the early 2000s I was almost done with him. But something on every album – maybe just one song – kept me adding the CDs to my collection.
In 2012, Mould changed gears – he downshifted back into first gear, and the noise was incredible. The album “Silver Age” rejected the drum machine and brought back the loud and distorted guitar that is the sonorous background noise in my skull. The album was as good as anything Mould had written in his 20s. And his following four albums each exceeded the previous one.
I have played his 2020 album “Blue Hearts” so many times I might wear through the 180-gram vinyl.
So anytime I worry about remaining creative into my late 50s and 60s, I remind myself that it’s possible to still stoke the ashes and find the same fire is burning hot below.
Late last night as I was lying in bed, the topic and structure for my next book came into perfect focus. I scribbled a few words in a notepad on my nightstand. (I think you’ll be happy to hear those words weren’t “chair” or “workbench.”) And I rolled over to sleep like a log.
And today Bob Mould is 62. And that fact brings me great joy.
Back by request: Three sticker designs for your tool chest, nail cabinet or wall. These are available from my daughter Katherine’s etsy store. They are sold as a set, and yes, she ships internationally. Here are the stickers in this set.
‘Sharpen This’ Book Sticker If you have the “Sharpen This” book and would like to add 20 percent more rudeness, this is the sticker for you. It is designed and sized to stick to the cover of the book over the book’s diestamp. The sticker features a 1,000-grit sharpening stone emblazoned with a bony and and slightly rude gesture.
Nail Size Chart Here’s a sticker that is actually useful. The sticker features the four most common size furniture nails (4d to 8d) in full size. So you can hold up any nail to the sticker and know what size the nail is. The sticker also tells you what size wood the nail is designed to fasten.
Tony Konovaloff Sticker This sticker features one of my favorite quotes from Tony Konovaloff, a West coast furniture maker. The quote is emblazoned over a carving by David Bignell, a local carver and furniture maker.
These are high-quality 100-percent vinyl stickers, which are weatherproof. Made in the USA by Stickermule. You can buy the stickers here.
“I do not get your weird chairs,” exclaim about a dozen messages or comments every year.
I understand your bewilderment.
I remember being a prospective student at Northwestern University in 1985 where I had been paired up with freshmen journalism students. We were supposed to sleep in their dorm rooms and see what university life was like.
My two hosts sat me down on a bed and thrust a Budweiser in my hands.
“Drink it,” they said. “And you’re drinking 10 more. You are getting drunk. Maybe we’ll drag you outside naked.”
Up until that point in my life I had taken one sip of beer. It had been my dad’s Coors Light, which had been poured over ice at the beach during a vacation. It was memorably disgusting.
I took a sip of the Budweiser, and I can still remember the metallic and bitter liquid spreading through my mouth and snaking down my gullet.
Beer is objectively nasty stuff. It’s basically watery bread. Fermented starch. And flavored with a bitter plant (hops) or worse.
I did not “get” this weird drink, and I took about four sips of it that night, each one warmer and worse than the previous. I did not end up naked and drunk in the quad.
Now 37 years after that fall evening, I have changed my mind about beer. I am endlessly curious about the different forms of the drink and enjoy learning about its role in our culture and history. After listening to a podcast about beer in Biblical times, I was struck by the parallels between the history of the beverage and of the vernacular stick chairs I have been studying and building for many years.
I suppose these parallels shouldn’t have been a surprise. The stories of many good things in our world have a similar arc. And the turning point in the story’s third act is always the Industrial Revolution.
But it’s a good story, and it helps explain my love for both hops and these funky chairs that are “a smidgen off being ugly,” according to chairmaker Chris Williams.
For most of human history, beer was something you made at home. Everyone was a brewer. Beer was a source of nutrition and hydration. But ancient beer was unlikely to taste like the stuff you buy today. For a long time the role of yeast wasn’t understood. And hops – the most common added flavor today – weren’t always used. Honey and other spices were common.
Commercial production of beer might have been an innovation of the Ancient Egyptians (you can read a history of beer and business here, which is where much of the following business data comes from). But up until the mid-19th century, most brewers were local businesses. There were no national or international brands of beer.
The rapid industrialization of the West allowed beer to be produced on a large scale and homogenized. Prohibition wiped out most of the local and regional brewers. And by the 1970s, 75 percent of all the beer in the United States was produced by only four monster corporations.
The product also kind of sucked. Coors Light over ice?
And while those macro brewers still exist (and are still growing through acquisition and consolidation), there has been a remarkable renaissance in small- and mid-sized brewers. In 1980, there were only 92 breweries in the U.S. As of 2021, there were 9,247 breweries. A hundredfold increase.
Plus beer as a beverage is far more interesting and diverse these days.
The history of stick chairs is not as long as the history of brewing (as far as we know). But it also has some wild twists and turns.
The first image of a stick chair that I know of is from a Welsh book of laws from the 12th or 13th century called “Laws of Hywel Dda.” There are two images of stick chairs shown in this particular Latin translation. My favorite one shows a judge in the stick chair, and he’s pointing with one hand. His other hand holds what is likely a book (but which I prefer to think of as a cup of beer for the purposes of this story).
Stick chairs have been around for hundreds of years before mass manufacturing. We suspect that most were made by farmers in the off-season, so it was a household enterprise, much like making beer. Judging from the surviving examples, they were made by crafty individuals who likely made the chairs for their nuclear or extended family. Or for people in their village.
Because each stick chair is unique – I’ve never seen two that are identical – we can conclude that they were likely made one-by-one. Or in small sets at most. There are variations in the chairs that can place them in certain time periods or in certain regions. But there’s little to no evidence that these chairs were even a highly organized commercial endeavor. (Irish Gibson chairs might be the exception.)
These vernacular chairs show up in many countries throughout Scandinavia and the UK. And stick chairs could be the ancient ancestor of Forest chairs (aka Windsor chairs).
Regardless of the shape or strength of that family tree, Windsor chairs appeared in the early 18th century and rapidly became a commercial enterprise that employed hundreds and then thousands of people. The city of High Wycombe became Britain’s primary chairmaking region. But the chairs were manufactured all over the UK and were a major export for the country.
The Windsor chair became so successful that today it is widely regarded as the most common form of chair.
“It’s been said that half of all wooden chairs on the planet are either Windsors or are directly descended from the style,” according to the Magazine Antiques.
While there are exceptions, most mass-produced Windsor chairs are unremarkable firewood and share little or nothing with their ancient ancestors – except for a name.
Evidence: All of the broken chairs that have been dragged across my doorstep have been factory-made Windsors. (I decline all chair-repair requests from customers – not because I am a jerk, but because chair repair could easily consume all of my waking hours.)
These factory-made Windsors are the Coors Light of the woodworking world.
Just like with the world of beer, however, things began to improve for the world of handmade chairs in the 1970s and 80s. Mike Dunbar and Dave Sawyer began exploring Windsor forms, and both began teaching others, planting the seeds for thousands of other chairmakers. John Brown self-published his “Welsh Stick Chairs” book, which began to sketch in the early history of chairs from his part of the world.
And now we have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to chairmaking instruction and tools. Well-made Windsor chairs and stick chairs are much easier to find. And the chairs are available at a variety of price points.
Plus there are now a lot of talented chairmakers out there that I have never heard of – and I try to keep up.
I get the same feeling when I visit my local beer store. The shelves are brimming with interesting beers from all over the country. I’ve heard of maybe 10 percent of them. There is so much good stuff out there to try.
It’s quite amazing, really. Well, that is until I look across the aisle of the store and see the mountains and mountains of Coors Light there, too.
During the last 25 years, all my sharpening processes have become simpler. And use much less gear. This has made me faster, and my edges are just as excellent.
This evolution is most evident in the way I sharpen scrapers. I was taught the first step was to file the edge at a perfect 90°. Then stone away the scratches. This is completely unnecessary (unless you tried to scrape concrete with your tool). Instead, you can simply use a burnisher to turn the hook vertical and stone it away.
The second huge change also involves the burnisher. I was taught to polish both faces of the scraper to create a durable tool. This is also totally unnecessary. You can use your burnish to polish the face – right up where it needs to be polished.
Both of these tips are shown in this quick video.
My new video “Sharpen This (the Video)” is filled with small tips and tricks such as these that (I hope) will get you back to work a little faster.