Katherine has just completed another batch of soft wax, which is available in for sale in her etsy store. Soft wax is great for the interiors of your projects. We use it on our lump hammers. And one customer really likes it on his shoes as a polish.
However you use it, don’t put it on your beard. It contains turpentine, which is an irritant.
Katherine cooks up the wax in our basement using a waterless process and puts it in heavy glass jars with metal lids. The interior of the lids are coated with a plastic to prevent any rust from forming.
And then Bean the three-legged cat swoops in to steal all the attention.
One of my favorite stickers we’ve printed is from a 1905 billhead from Bittner, Hunsicker & Co. The Allentown, Pa., company made hoisery, knit goods and overalls. I own two of the original billheads and have done some high-resolution scanning and digital cleaning to produce an image that is suitable for a T-shirt.
As this was a sticker for my daughter’s etsy store, I decided to let her sell the T-shirt as well. Not only is this fair, it is necessary. Madeline is returning to school. This fall she will enroll at the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health to pursue a PhD in Infectious Diseases and Microbiology.
And so she will be dirt poor again. So stickers and T-shirts to the rescue.
The “Never Despair – Nothing Without Labour” shirt is printed on a 100 percent cotton American Apparel shirt that is made in California. The T-shirt is short sleeved, asphalt colored and available in sizes from small to 4X. The shirt is $25 (with a $2 upcharge for 2X and larger) plus shipping. The shirt is available worldwide.
If you experience trouble (you shouldn’t), please do not email Lost Art Press – they can’t help you. Contact Maddy through her etsy store and she will take care of you.
I clock my screws, meaning I orient the slot in the screw heads so they are all vertical or horizontal. But I don’t think it’s a mark of superior aesthetics. It’s just something I do, like lining up the silverware on the dining table just so. I can’t help it.
Some people who don’t clock their screws, however, take perverse glee in sending me photos of beautiful antiques with their screws un-clocked. And the images come with a note saying something like: “I guess James Krenov was a moron and didn’t clock his screws, you elitist meat wrapper.”
Yesterday I took a drive to Columbus, Ind., one of the country’s repositories of excellent post-war architecture. Check out the Wikipedia page. Or the NPR story on the town. Or the great Kogonada-directed movie, “Columbus.”
My favorite building we toured was the First Christian Church, designed by Eliel Saarinen. Considered one of the first modern church structures in America, the building offers nod after nod to the cathedrals and churches of Europe. Yet the building, completed during World War II, is a complete break with the Old World. Even after 75 years, the church feels a beacon of hope, optimism and light.
One of the prominent features of the interiors is the extensive wooden lattice work, which is affixed with tens of thousands of perfectly clocked screws.
One of the women on our tour gasped when this was pointed out. “How,” she asked, “did they do this?”
I opened my mouth for a second and then shut it.
Clocking screws is not a matter of over-torquing or under-torquing screw heads. It’s a simple matter of thinking about the problem for two seconds and devising a simple solution.
Screws are mass-manufactured items. The slot and the worm of a batch of screws are consistent across all the screws in a box. Now add to the equation a pilot hole (or counterbore) that is the same diameter every time. How can we use these consistencies to clock the screw?
If you don’t know the answer yet, try this experiment. Drill a pilot hole in a scrap of wood. Start a screw in the pilot with the slot facing 12 o’clock and 6 o’clock. Screw it down until it is snug. Note where the slot ends up. Let’s say it ends up at 1 o’clock and 7 o’clock.
What would happen if you started the next screw with the slot pointing to 11 o’clock and 5 o’clock?
It doesn’t matter if you’ve been woodworking every day for 23 years, failure will find you on a regular basis.
It doesn’t matter if you make a dozen drawings. Build a half-scale model. Remake the seat twice. Remake the legs twice. Or do a careful dry-fit.
All that is not enough.
Above is the latest failed prototype stool for the expanded edition of “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” Like my design for the armchair for this book, the stool design is fighting me every step of the way.
This design failed both mechanically and visually. Mechanical failure: The seat cracked a tad in two places during assembly. This is the result of the undercarriage being too complex for a small structure. All 20 mortises were drilled by eye (no drill press). And the combined slight imperfections stacked up to make the undercarriage difficult to assemble and slightly twisted. And if I have trouble assembling this stool, imagine the problems a new woodworker might have who has never built one.
Visually, the rung positions of the stool leave me flat. The lower rungs are positioned so both short people and tall people can use the stool comfortably. The different rung heights accommodate popliteal heights at different ends of the bell curve of people. And by that measure, the stool works quite well.
The top rungs were positioned so you could easily pick up the stool with one hand to move it around. That idea nearly worked. The problem is that the stool swings toward you when you pick it up and might bark your shins.
By focusing on those functional bits, I made myself a stool that’s a bit visually boring.
It’s not a total loss. We’ll use this stool at the storefront until the cracks in the seat get worse (they might not). Then we’ll use it to make a bonfire and roast some weenies.
Back to the drawing board. Luckily, I have about four more stool sketches to explore.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Comments are disabled because I’ve beat myself up enough with this project and don’t need the help of the internet.
Then the stress starts building. This is important. You are a professional; you need to be able to do this creative stuff on a wet Wednesday when the muse is fast asleep in her pretty little bed. The stress is part of turning up the heat to make you work better. We need a little stress now and again. I have given a delivery date to the client. I have told them I will be with them with drawings that do not yet exist. Next week! I must deliver, or I lose all chance of getting the work. I plan for three days of studio work – no phone, no interruptions and no other jobs in that time frame.
My goal, by the end of day one, is to have one set of presentation drawings done and ready to go. That morning, before tea time, is downloading time. I go through a routine – an important routine. (This is mine; you choose your own.) It sets the tone, and it gets my head ready for this special work.
I sharpen five pencils – not six or four, but five nice cedar pencils. I turn off the phone, I make a cup of coffee, I unplug all the digital things that Ping. I put on a playlist of creative music, stuff with no language that I can understand. Opera is good; I don’t speak Italian. A nice cup of coffee, the dog sitting quietly under the desk and I am ready to roll. All this is “Othering” – doing anything other than sitting down to do the damn drawing. But it’s very valuable, as it signals to a part of the head that Special Creative Work is coming, and there is a guy back there – I call him George – who needs waking up. Get Ready to Rock n’ Roll, George!
So, you sit and doodle (well, that term is rather pejorative; this is a kind of drawing that allows the mind to run free). It’s drawing without too much direction. Watch carefully what comes off the end of the pencil. Do not be critical; note it and move on. This is fluid thinking time. Artist Paul Klee famously called it “taking a line for a walk.”
When I do this, I tend to use a book with a very fine 5mm grid on the page. I get these from a supermarket that imports them from France, where they are used in French schools. The grid helps me to quickly draw in proportion by counting off the squares. It also helps me keep verticals vertical and horizontals …well, you get it. Sometimes, I use a technical .05mm pen instead of a pencil. Pens are great, as they make you draw very deliberately. I almost never use an eraser at this stage.
Writer and comedian John Cleese, when talking about creativity, described how he wrote the scripts for “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” He was surprised he always had more ideas than his fellow writers, but he found he dug deeper past the first idea.
“I would ideally go into a room with no distractions, that is most important, and sit with a pad and paper. Forty minutes would be a good span. The problem, in my case the requirement for next week’s script, would be there. It would sit alongside me, not confronting me, but be there with me in the room.”
The first ideas that pop out of the pencil are the ones from the front of the head. They are the conscious images, the ideas that you have had before and are reheating for this solution. This is old stuff – and it may be fine. Your client likes you for what you have already done, so a version of that may suit the job in hand. Keep drawing, though – you might get past the obvious first idea to another then another. This is good. Remember, this is non-critical and non-celebratory drawing; just dump the stuff on the damn page. Draw fast and free. Fill a page with quick scribbly images, download and move on.
After about a half-hour I start to find myself repeating things. This is when it’s good to go back, review, find the best sketch and take a break. There is no point going on, breaking yourself over this problem. Note when you are done and stop. This kind of work – this downloading – is exhausting, even to the young and strong.
This is an excerpt from “