Yes, my darlings, we will have a prize for the best entry submitted for this Caption Challenge.
Sharpen your wits and enter** as many times as you wish. The Challenge ends on January 1, 2019 at 1500 hours in my time zone (North America EST).
I will select the winner and the two-pronged prize is a Lost Art Press bandana and a Chester Cornett button (pictured below) and Chris Schwarz will send these anywhere in the world.
**Use Comments to make your caption entry.
— Suzanne Ellison
The Lost Art Press storefront is open today from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. And at 7 p.m. we are throwing a party for Christian Becksvoort to celebrate his new book “Shaker Inspiration.”
The event is free. We will have drinks and snacks. And Chris will give a presentation of his work, sign books and shake hands. Come visit a living woodworking legend in one of his few visits to the Midwest.
The storefront is at 837 Willard St., Covington, Ky 41011. We have our complete line of books for sale, plus some blemished books at 50 percent off. Come see Brendan working on his Chester Cornett rocker. Megan’s working on a Dutch tool chest and I’m working on two Welsh stick chairs.
— Christopher Schwarz
We will have three new sticker designs for sale next week. All three will be available through my daughter Madeline’s etsy store. The 100-percent vinyl stickers are $7 per set, and she ships overseas.
The three designs are, as usual, based on random stuff that has been floating through my head while working at the bench.
The first sticker, “Rest for the Weary,” features a silhouette of a Welsh stick chair from St Fagans that I built last year. It’s surrounded in a wreath made from (of course) oak branches. The wreath design is from an 1825 labor celebration held when the Erie Canal opened the connection between the Hudson River with the Great Lakes. (Thanks to Suzo for digging this up.)
The second sticker, “Wey Make Iney Thin Are Heit Cant B Made,” is the triumphant claim on chairmaker Chester Cornett’s handmade sign at his shop. We made a copy of this sign, which we love, for our shop. This sticker was designed by Brendan Gaffney as a button we give to students and fellow chairmakers.
The third sticker, “#NeverSponsored,” was inspired by the Jars family in Yakima, Wash. We use the hashtag #neversponsored on our posts that involve discussions of tools. The Jars family took the brilliant step of writing that hashtag on some masking tape and covering the brand names of the tools in their shop.
So we made a sticker to make that easier. We’ll be applying this sticker to some of our tools from companies with annoying social media presences.
My daughter sells these stickers to help make ends meet while working her first job on the Connecticut coast. She has recently discovered the folly of electrical baseboard heaters during a New England winter.
As soon as the stickers are available for purchase, we’ll post a note here on the blog.
— Christopher Schwarz
Editor’s note: This is the third Chair Chat with Rudy and Klaus where today we discuss not one but three chairs.
Please note that we don’t have much background information on today’s three chairs. We don’t know their countries of origin nor when they were built. And we only have one picture for each chair.
We don’t authenticate chairs – we just talk about what we like and don’t like based on the photos. One more note: A few of you asked why the second chair chat was more tame than the first. Answer: We’re still finding our groove. As always, salty talk follows. Don’t read any further if watching “Animal Planet” makes you blush.
Today Brendan Gaffney and I got a rare up-close look at one of Chester Cornett’s rockers during a preview for an antiques auction in Cincinnati.
The walnut rocking chair was one of Cornett’s later pieces. And after a close examination, Brendan and I suspect that the rocker was made during Cornett’s brief embrace of power tools.
The biography of Cornett, “Craftsman of the Cumberlands,” discusses a brief period of Cornett’s career when he purchased a table saw, drill press and router (among other machines) to speed his production of chairs as he became more well known.
It did not go well.
Though Cornett was skilled with hand tools, machines made him nervous, and the book recounts several serious injuries Cornett suffered while using them. The book also documents Cornett attempting to use a router to make the incised lines on the posts and rungs of his rockers.
Brendan and I suspect this rocker exhibits these routed details.
The V-shaped incisions were curved, irregular and even had chatter marks upon close inspection. Some of the incisions looked OK. Others looked like Cornett was having a heck of a time using the router freehand on a narrow octagonal post.
These wandering incisions looked nothing like the crisp incisions on other Cornett chairs we’ve inspected.
Part of me thought: Perhaps this is just one of Cornett’s lesser works. But that ignored all the fantastic handwork on the chair, from the shaped arms to the finials. Ah, the finials.
At the top of the posts are two gorgeous pieces of handwork – tapered and octagonal finials that are just perfect in every way. Crisp, evenly faceted and perfectly symmetrical – something no router would be capable of making. But they are doable with a drawknife.
So the piece, while still extraordinary, made me a little sad. The routed details reflected a man who was clearly uncomfortable with his electric tools, yet struggling mightily to control them. The mistakes didn’t ruin the piece, but they did lessen it.
— Christopher Schwarz
