Several people have asked how to make their own apron hooks out of common hardware-store S-hooks. There are a few ways to do it, including some methods that are insanely better than what is here. (They will be posted in the comments shortly, I’m sure.)
Get a cheap S-hook at the hardware store. This package of two cost less than $3. Then hammer one of the hooks closed to make a piece of hardware that has a hook and a loop.
With one string of the apron, tie a loop as shown.
Hold the apron to your body and figure out where the hook should be secured on the other apron string. Then make it a little tighter than you think it should be. Once you load up the apron with stuff, you will want it tighter.
You are done. Now you can hook the apron on and off your body with one quick hand motion. And you have a couple hooks that make it easy to hang the apron on a nail in the wall at the end of the work day.
After a long dry spell – the last book we sent to press was in December – we now have four books on press. (Actually, we have five books if you count the somewhat-cursed edition of Moxon’s “Mechanick Exercises” that has been on press for six months. More on that below.)
Today we finished our work on two books and won’t see them again until a semi backs up to the warehouse in 11 weeks. You can sign up to be notified when any of these books arrive in the warehouse on this page.
“The Belligerent Finisher” by John Porritt. This is our first book devoted to finishing, and it is a doozie. Porritt, a furniture restorer and chairmaker, shows many of the tricks he uses to add subtle (and beautiful) wear and age to a new piece. Porritt is not attempting to show you how to make fakes. He is trying to show you something deeper – how to add color and texture to a piece so its form matches its finish. Most of his processes use simple and common tools (a chainmail pot scrubber, a deer antler, a handheld propane torch, washing powder). The book walks you through all the steps for two backstools. Then there’s a gallery that shows how you can mix and match these techniques on other pieces. The book should arrive in our warehouse in September.
“Sharpen This” by Christopher Schwarz. I think of this book as a piece of historical fiction. What if someone wrote a book about how to sharpen, and that person wasn’t making sharpening equipment. And the internet didn’t exist. This is a pocket-book-sized treatise that boils down everything I know about sharpening media, steel and technique to give the reader a clear understanding of sharpening. The book embraces all the sharpening systems. But it focuses on how to work with a minimum amount of expensive gear. And how to work fast. This is a book I never wanted to write. But after teaching so many beginners who were so horribly confused, I decided to just lay it all out there. The book should arrive in our warehouse in September.
“Euclid’s Door” by George Walker and Jim Tolpin. Geometry lovers rejoice. Jim and George are back with a new book about how to make your own insanely accurate woodworking layout tools using simple hand tools and geometry that blew our minds. Honestly, both Megan and I had to step into the shop to confirm some of the geometric constructions really worked (they do). If you have been resisting geometry and whole-number ratios, this book will show you how to apply it directly to tools that you will use for the rest of your life. Really good stuff – and the book is entirely hand-illustrated by Barb Walker and Keith Mitchell. The book should arrive in our warehouse in late August.
The Stick Chair Journal No. 1. A crazy experiment. Can we make a beautiful journal about vernacular chairs and have it be slightly more successful than our money-losing posters? The first issue has techniques you can use, a tool review, folklore about a cursed chair and complete plans for a new vernacular chair design, which you are free to build and sell if you like. When you buy the journal you will also receive a download of the full-size patterns for the chair. The Journal should arrive in our warehouse in late August.
You can sign up to be notified when these books arrive in our store. It’s a simple process, and it is 100 percent not marketing. We are not trying to trick you into signing up for ads or some worthless newsletter. It’s a notification service that costs a lot of money to use. But we encourage you to please use it to make your life easier.
Oh, and about that cursed edition of Moxon’s “Mechanick Exercises.” That has been at the printer since December. Then the plant shut down because of COVID. Then it shut down because of ransomware. Then they printed one of the signatures with a missing page and had to redo the signature. The whole situation is almost laughable.
The plant told me they would ship those books on June 24. I’m not holding my breath.
If you’ve ever wondered how a successful corporation can fall completely apart in just a few years, read on. I’ve watched a few of them do this – from the inside.
Here at Lost Art Press we will soon wrap up the second financial quarter of 2022, and our financial sheet shows our revenue is down 21 percent compared to this time in 2021. Why? We haven’t put out as many books this year because we don’t have strict deadlines with our authors.
Do we care that we are down 21 percent? No. Are we freaked? Not at all. Are we taking any action at all? Nope.
Here’s how John and I look at the business. Are we eating? Yes. Are we doing what we want to do every day? Yes. Are the people we work with happy? Yes (they tell us). Are we happy with the books, tools and apparel we are making? Yes. And is this decline something that will right itself during the next five years? Absolutely yes.
However, in the corporate publishing world, here’s how this problem plays out.
First, the publisher (me) is hauled before the suits (Bespokeus corruptus) and given two options: A) Resign or B) Hit your revenue target by the end of the fourth quarter (typically those targets are 20 percent higher than revenue from the previous year).
If I choose B, here is what I have to do:
Quickly boost revenue by selling inventory to bookstores at a discount. Here’s why that is a deathtrap. In corporate publishing, bookstores are allowed to return unsold inventory within two years for a full refund. So even if I boosted revenue this year (and saved my job), it could all fall apart in two years when bookstores start returning this discounted inventory (a very typical scenario).
In addition to boosting revenue, I need to cut costs to improve our profit margin. Why? If I don’t hit my revenue target but I do improve the profit margin, I could end up keeping my job because I brought in the same amount of money. How do I do this? The easy way is to slash production costs for books. One-third of our expenses are printing – let’s say that’s $1 million. If I moved printing to Korea, that would cut our printing costs to $500,000, and quality would actually stay the same or improve (Korea has a fantastic printing industry). If things get even worse, I can move printing to China and cut printing costs to $300,000 per year. Here’s the problem: There’s nowhere left to go after that. And you will never be able to afford to print in the U.S. again.
At my gauntlet session, the suits point out that our “point of sale” revenue is up a shocking 4,219 percent. (This is because we had an open day in the spring and we didn’t have any open days in 2021 because of the pandemic.) “Clearly this is where the growth is,” according to the suits. “Do more of that!” So we open the store every weekend, forcing me and Megan to work more hours and taking us away from making books. But it works! We double the “point of sale” revenue from $6,200 to $12,400 per year! In real terms, this money is meaningless to the total revenue picture.
[Megan’s Editor’s Note: At _my_ gauntlet session(s), the suits point out that I could stand to lose a staff member. That’s a huge savings! I refuse. A few months later, I’m the one who gets “lost.” Thank goodness. Now I’m found.]
As you can see, this is why I’d always choose A (resign) over B (gut the business). And then I’d start my own business (with a friend) that isn’t about growth. It’s about stability, making objects that are useful and that we are proud of. And it’s about living well.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. I’m not trying to get you to buy anything here – we are totally fine (I *wish* I were that clever of a marketer). Is it dumb to tell your readers your revenue is down? Probably. But I don’t care because we aren’t trying to sell the business or impress anyone.
Ever since I encountered an original copy of “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker,” I have been a little obsessed with little books.
These small folios – roughly 4” x 6-1/2” – can fit into your pocket. And when properly written, they are filled with ideas that can change your life. In 2020, we reissued “The Woodworker’s Pocket Book,” which is a gold mine of information on the craft, from finishing recipes to nails to identifying hardware and understanding furniture styles.
We’ve sold more than 20,000 copies of this book in the last two years. And in the spirit of this small but mighty book, we are working on two more pocket books that we hope will blow your mind (but not your wallet).
The first is a book called “Sharpen This.” It’s a book that woodworker Tim Henriksen told me 10 years ago that I should write. It’s a no-nonsense 120-page treatise on grinding, honing and polishing edges. It is what woodworkers need to know to get great edges regardless of the sharpening system they use. It’s the kind of instruction I got in 1993 when I learned to sharpen. Before the internet.
If you are a great sharpener, you probably don’t need this book. But your daughter or nephew might. In any case, it was huge fun to boil down everything I know about sharpening into 120 compact pages, plus 50 photos and hand-drawn illustrations. Every word in this book counts.
The third title in this series is a book that I cannot believe has never been written: “Workshop Wound Care” by Dr. Jeffrey Hill. If you think there is a lot of disinformation out there about sharpening and finishing, then wait until you cut yourself.
The first aid industry has filled our minds and shelves with products that we don’t really need. Including some that are less than helpful. Dr. Hill is an emergency room physician and a woodworker who cuts through the misinformation with a scalpel.
As Megan and I read his text we were shocked by all the things we were doing to treat wounds that were unnecessary or (worse) counter-productive. This is a book that I have personally longed for in our craft. You might think “Meh, I don’t need this. I can take care of my scratches.”
But if you take an afternoon to read it, you will most certainly become better at treating your scrapes, contusions and what-nots. And you will likely have a better outcome, which is where you are back to woodworking much faster.
These two new books will both be the same size and have the same high-quality manufacturing as “The Woodworker’s Pocket Book.” And they will be reasonably priced – about $16-$18. Look for “Sharpen This” in the fall and “Workshop Wound Care” soon after that.
And we have a couple more pocket books in the works for 2023.
The first of these two stools, (#59.537) is the stool that Alexander first studied in detail, leading the way into the lost craft of joinery. A table now at the Historical Society of Old Newbury (Massachusetts) is directly related to this stool in its construction and decoration. The table is believed to have been made by Stephen Jaques of Newbury, late in the 17th century. Thus the stool is attributed to him as well. It is clearly made of riven stock; the interior surfaces show evidence of riving and hewing, and in places retain their wedge-shaped cross-section. The pins securing the mortise-and-tenon joints are proud on the exterior and not trimmed on the inside at the apron height. These pins show their faceted shape on the inside. Layout lines struck with a marking gauge, fore-plane marks, hewing strokes and more are among the many traces of tool use Alexander found in abundance on this stool. This object literally paved the way for this book. Photo Courtesy of Winterthur Garden, Museum & Library
For more than two decades, this unlikely pair – an attorney in Baltimore and a joiner at Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts – pieced together how this early furniture was constructed using a handful of written sources, the tool marks on surviving examples and endless experimentation in their workshops.
The result of their labor was “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree: An Introduction to 17th-century Joinery.” This book starts in the woodlot, wedging open a piece of green oak, and it ends in the shop with mixing your own paint using pigment and linseed oil. It’s an almost-breathtaking journey because it covers aspects of the craft that most modern woodworkers would never consider. And yet Alexander and Follansbee cover every detail of construction with such clarity that even beginning woodworkers will have the confidence to build a joint stool, an iconic piece of furniture from the 17th century.
In 17th-century New England, joiners made chairs, tables, chests, stools, cupboards, wall paneling and various other products all based on a few basic principles. Their oak was split, or “riven,” from a freshly felled log, and worked up at the bench with a few simple hand tools. Although the configuration of the pieces varied, the essence was always the same: a frame joined at its corners with drawbored mortise-and-tenon joints fastened with wooden pins. Sometimes these frames had panels fitted into their inner edges, as in a chest; other times they were open, as in the stool that is the subject of this book.
Our work in studying joined furniture has its roots in the post-and-rung chairs made by John (now Jennie) Alexander, whose 1978 book Make a Chair from a Tree: An Introduction to Working Green Wood was pivotal in the revival of the traditional techniques regarding working wood riven or split from a log. This background became a key element in our study of 17th-century-style New England joinery.
The second Winterthur stool (#59.538) reinforces the things we learned from the first. In one sense, it is a better example than the Jaques stool, this one having even more of its original height. The aprons have two rows of moulding: a “crease” moulding, and one along the lower edge as well. The turnings are less detailed than those of the Jaques stool, but of a similar form. The two stools are both discussed and illustrated in Benno Forman’s American Seating Furniture 1630-1730 (Norton) pp. 180, 181. Photo Courtesy of Winterthur Garden, Museum & Library
Alexander’s experience from chairmaking was the necessary foundation that helped her recognize that the preparation of joinery stock was based upon the same green woodworking techniques as the chairs. In 1980, Charles Hummel of the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library showed Alexander the interior of a joined oak chest in the collection. It was immediately clear that the rear stiles had been riven, not sawn, and that the stiles were bookmatched sections split from each other. This commenced a journey into the lost craft of joinery. With the patient kindness of Hummel, Benno M. Forman, Robert St. George, Robert Trent and many others, Alexander was able to closely study examples of 17th-century New England joined furniture.
Also in 1980, I saw an advertisement for a week-long class in chairmaking being held at Drew Langsner’s craft school Country Workshops taught by Alexander. I didn’t drive at the time, had practically never been out of New England and I wasn’t much of a woodworker. Plus, I was terminally shy. Regardless, I wrote to the address, signed up for the class and made plans to get to western North Carolina.
This little joined stool is a partial survivor from the 17th century. The turnings, the moulding profiles on the aprons and stretchers, and the chisel-chopped dentil decoration all indicate a strong relationship between this stool and numerous other furniture pieces from the entire 17th century in Plymouth Colony. The frame, although refinished long ago, is intact and original. The seat/top board is an early replacement, having been pictured in Wallace Nutting’s books in the 1920s in essentially the same condition. The stool originally had turned feet below the stretchers, so adding perhaps 3″ or 4″ more to its height. There is very little “rake” or splay to the side frames of this stool. Some of the rails on this stool are riven so slim that the tenons are “scant” in places. This means that the tenons are not necessarily full thickness throughout. This stool is the first place we noted the inner chamfer on the stiles. It occurs throughout almost all other Plymouth Colony joined chairs and tables as well. Photo Courtesy of the Museum of Fine arts, Boston
After stumbling along on my own for a few years, I returned to Country Workshops in the mid-1980s, and was for the next five years or more a regular attendee at classes – timber framing, white oak basketry, spoon carving, and coopering, as well as post-and-rung chairs with Alexander and American-style Windsor chairs. Sometime about 1986, Alexander showed a class at Country Workshops a slide presentation about 17th-century oak furniture made in New England.
Thus I was caught, and Alexander and I began an informal study together, yet we were 500 miles apart. Alexander lived and worked in Baltimore, Md., and I lived at the time in Hingham, Mass. Our “work” together consisted of lengthy correspondence and weekly phone calls. We would each spend some time studying original artifacts at Winterthur’s museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. We’d take numerous slides and notes, compile these and send them off to each other in the mail. We would each work in our shops, experimenting with our ideas based on what we had seen on the surviving furniture. It was a cumbersome undertaking by today’s standards, but one benefit was that the need to write it down forced a sense of clarity upon our thinking. Each year we spent a week or two together, both in the workshop and at times studying artifacts.
This joined stool is worn, but intact; it has been repaired and re-pinned at some point. The one-board seat is cracked along its length and has been reinforced. Originally, it was pinned only into the stiles. Like the MFA stool, the joiner planed a chamfer on the inner corner of the stiles. The crease moulding used here is one of our favorites – a wide convex moulding flanked by two pointed fillets. We used it on several of our reproductions. It also is found on a large group of joined chests from Braintree, Mass., that we wrote about in American Furniture in 1996. In that article, we even linked the stool to the chests, based on the moulding, the stock preparation and joinery. These days, we’d be more cautious about making such an attribution. See Frances Gruber Safford’s American Furniture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Metropolitan Museum of Art) for a detailed discussion of this stool. Photo Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Our artifact study was supplemented by the study of the tool history, as well as the documentary study of the period. To learn about the tool kit of the 17th century, we started with Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises: Or the Doctrine of Handy-works Applied to the Arts of Smithing, Joinery, Carpentry, Turning, Bricklaying. This book was published in serial form between 1678 and 1683 in London, and the chapters on joinery and turning were a critical first step in our study of tool history. (For more on the sources we used for tool research, see “The Historical Evidence for Tool Selection and Use” on page 25.)
Additionally, we studied probate inventories in great detail for craftsmen’s tools. Learning of the period tool kit and understanding the traditional use of bench tools such as planes, saws, chisels and carving tools helped us to see that to assemble a tool kit that functioned like a 17th-century kit was not that difficult. The forms and functions of hand tools have not changed much over time.
Throughout our studies, our friendship with Robert Trent, the leading American scholar on 17th-century furniture, was a great benefit. Trent led us through the process of researching the artifacts, their histories and the formation of an attribution for a group of furniture. This amounted to a private internship, though quite informal. The first results of this collaboration with Trent were published as “Seventeenth-Century Joinery from Braintree, Massachusetts: The Savell Shop Tradition” in the 1996 edition of the journal American Furniture. (1)
This joined stool [above] and form [below]share a decorative element that is simple and effective. Instead of turned decoration between the joinery on the stiles, the maker shaved stopped chamfers. In the case of the form – an elongated joined stool, stretched out to bench-length – the “stops” form a pattern often now called a “lamb’s tongue.” Similar treatments are commonly found on the interior parts of 17th-century New England framed houses. Note also the breakthrough on the upper corner of one front stile. Here the mortise for the end apron was chopped just a little too deep in one spot, leaving a hole in the face of the stile. It has still held up for the past 350 years or so. Photos Courtesy of Sotheby’s
In the end, what we learned was a discipline in two related crafts: that of the joiner/turner in the shop, and that of the furniture historian, using artifacts, archives and documents to better understand these 17th-century trades.
Early on, we decided to focus on the joint stool as an introductory project that encompasses most of the basics of joinery. The stool requires only short lengths of timber, and except for the seat board, narrow dimensioned stock. This makes it easy enough to acquire the necessary timber, without a great expenditure of time and effort. The principle elements of joinery – riving and working the stock directly from the log, and cutting and fitting the drawbored mortise-and-tenon joints – are well represented in this project. After a few stools, the progression to more involved joinery featuring paneled work is not a huge leap.
This stool was bought at auction in 2011, with no known history. It certainly appears to be a New England joined stool, although it is hard to link it to known works at this time. All its rails are riven and wedge-shaped; some are hewn, others are just as they came from the log. The pine seat is no doubt a replacement, but like several of the museum pieces here, the stool retains much of its turned feet. The shape of these feet differs from the top of the stiles’ turnings; usually the feet repeat what happens above. The stretchers are planed with the same crease moulding as the aprons, but the aprons have the additional run of an edge moulding also. The stool has been stripped of its finish, but traces of red paint remain throughout. Private collection
(1) Peter Follansbee and John Alexander, “Seventeenth-Century Joinery from Braintree, Massachusetts: the Savell Shop Tradition” in American Furniture, ed., Luke Beckerdite, (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1996) pp. 81-104.
