We just received word that Christian Becksvoort’s new book “Shaker Inspiration” has shipped from the Tennessee printing plant and is en route to our Indiana warehouse. This means two things:
We will begin shipping these as soon as possible. I don’t know what date that will be – it depends on the warehouse’s schedule. Please do not bombard poor Meghan with questions about when your book will ship. She doesn’t know. No one (yet) knows, I’m afraid.
As soon as the books arrive in the warehouse, we stop offering the free pdf download with every order. Right now you can get the book and the pdf for $43. After the book hits the warehouse, the book and pdf will cost $53.75. So act now if you want the free pdf.
We also have more news about Christian to announce soon. Keep Jan. 11-12 open on your calendar.
Sew Valley in the West End of Cincinnati is hard at work on its first batch of 100 chore coats in the new bull denim material, and so I crossed the Ohio River this afternoon to take a quick look at the process.
Sew Valley is located in the floor below The National Flag Co., which has been in business for more than 140 years. It’s a gorgeous brick factory with expansive windows and lots of room for machines and cutting tables.
Founded by Rosie Kovacs (above) and Shailah Maynard, Sew Valley seeks to nurture industry in this area by bringing back sewing skills. So short production runs, such as our chore coat, is part of what the company does.
Today production was in full swing on the chore coats, with components neatly laid out and labeled all over the shop. And four people (including Rosie) were setting up machines (both old and new) to assemble the coats.
As always with production, there is a fire somewhere. Today Rosie informed me that she had been shipped only about 40 buttons for the 100 coats. Hmmm. Probably not enough. A text to Tom Bonamici, our designer, got her an answer. The buttons were on their way from New York.
I don’t have a date as to when the coats will be ready. But when they are, I think you’ll be pleased. The sample that Sew Valley made for us is excellent. And even though we’re using a small contract shop, we’re going to be able to keep the price at $185, a small miracle that is the result of both the low overhead and the work ethic at Sew Valley.
One of the things I love about how chairmaker Chris Williams works is that he tries – at every turn – to reduce the tools and contrivances needed to build a chair. One of the big things he offers is that you don’t need a shavehorse to make sticks, stretchers or legs.
Instead, you use a small block of wood in your vise and a block plane to do all the shaving.
I have 100 percent embraced this method from Chris (and John Brown), and I encourage you to give it a try.
Of course, I had to tweak the process a bit for my own liking. Instead of a flat block of wood, I plowed a V-groove in mine, which helps prevent the stick from wandering as you rotate it.
My V-block, which projects about 3/8″ from my leg vise.
Honestly, you don’t need the V-groove to make this work, but it is nice.
We have a batch of chore coats up for sale in our store, just in time for the holidays. These American-made coats are the last ones we’ll be offering in the Japanese cotton. Our next batches will be in American bull denim. (The price, color and sizes will all be the same).
This is the coat I wear every day in the shop and adore. It breathes and moves quite well. And it takes a beating. Mine is starting accumulate the dust and scuffs a working garment earns. And this coat can take it.
Custom buttons.
Plus, the details on this coat are great – the Lost Art Press buttons and the embroidered interior patch are subtle touches.
Order now – this isn’t a big batch. And we concede that we’re kind of nuts for offering this coat at this price. An American-made coat with these details is typically $200 more.
English oak coffer; 16th century. (Image from Wiki Commons, public domain.)
The once ubiquitous coffer (from the Greek “kophinos” – a basket; later from the French “coffre” – a chest) was also referred to as a “strong box” – because it was. (Later the term coffer would refer to an institution’s financial reserves.) This stout, often highly ornamented, chest reached its pinnacle of design and construction in the mid 1600s and was likely the first, and perhaps the only, piece of furniture that a commoner family might own. Likely used every day as a bench, its primary purpose was to keep the family’s valuables safe and private. Its thick oak walls and lid could often even keep its contents safe from a fire.
Accurate drawing of a similar 17th century English chest (by John Hurrell, published in 1903).
For George Walker and me, what is truly fascinating about these coffers is that they clearly demonstrate the traditional, artisan design process we have described in excruciating detail in “By Hand and Eye” (and decidedly less excruciatingly in “By Hound and Eye”).
For those unfamiliar with this process, here it is in a nutshell: Unlike modern builders who think primarily in terms of measurements to an external standard such as inches or centimeters, pre-industrial artisans took their cues from the builders of antiquity and thought more in terms of proportions. They would start by selecting a simple rectangle of harmonic proportions (literally from the audible harmonic musical scale) to govern the overall form. For example, the front elevation of height-to-length were commonly ratioed at 1:2 (an octave); 2:3 (a perfect fifth); 3:4 (a perfect fourth) or 3:5 (a perfect sixth). Within this rectangle they would select the span of some prominent element of the structure to act as a module (an internal index measurement often based on a element of the human body) and then tie all the other details proportionally to it.
The coffer is a perfect example of this ancient design process: a straightforward layout based on the geometry of a cuboid defined by simple whole number ratios of height, width and depth. Like the proportions embedded in the design of Grecian columns (which deeply influenced the design methodology of the joiners and cabinetmakers of the 17th and 18th centuries) the designer of this coffer clearly used the width of the chest’s leg in the front elevation as the “module” for the design. (The Greeks used the diameter of the base of a support column’s shaft, which happens to be the span of the human body, as the module for all the other elements of the temple.) We encourage you to print out the above drawing by Hurrell, take a sharp pair of dividers, set it to span the width of the leg (we label it “M”) and go exploring with us:
The first thing we’ll discover is that the height of the leg (to the underside of the lid) is exactly seven times its width (again, the module for this design). By eye, it looks like the length of the chest may be twice its height. When we step the module between the outside of the legs, however, we don’t come up with that nice whole-number ratio. On our second shot at it, we discover the lid from edge to edge is a precise 14 modules long. So there’s our 7:14 ratio – or to simplify 1:2. Which is a perfect octave harmonic, and a common choice for the coffers of this era (and later for highboys in their vertical extension).
Further exploration reveals that the mid-stiles and bottom rail are also a module wide, as is the height of the carved inscription of the date 1689. If you continue poking around, you’ll unearth all manner of modular-indexed relationships buried in the intricate geometric carvings. Be aware that the spans and radii, if not exactly a module-length, will be a whole number fraction above or below that length. For example, the module (plus a third of the module) serves as the spacing for the positioning of the lower rail from the baseline as well as the width of the top rail.
As in the ancient temples of Greece, every single element of this coffer enjoys a whole-number relationship with each other – and with the overall geometric form. As such, you can scale this piece of furniture up or down by simple changing the span of the module – no measuring to numerical dimensions is necessary – just an adherence to the ratios.
Now let’s explore the design of this coffer’s frame-and-panel lid. We were excited to discover how some anonymous 17th-century artisan made clever use of the module to add subtle, eye-pleasing asymmetry to the layout. Before you see how they did it (below), try to discover it for yourself. We find this sort of thing fun, and we bet you will too.
So here’s what we found: The module is utilized in four different ways: For the middle frames, it defines its overall width; for the hinge-side frame it defines its width, but it does not include the lid edging; for the end frame it does include the edging; and for the latch-side frame the module defines its width from the inside of the edging to the edge of the bevel next to the panel. Subtle, but just enough to make the design lively to the eye.
For your further entertainment, below are a couple more of Hurrell’s drawings of 17th-century English coffers for you to print out and explore. To see what we unpacked with our dividers, check out our blog at www.byhandandeye.com. One hint/reminder: The module for each of these designs is the width of the leg.
To learn more about the construction and carved ornamentation of these traditional coffers (also called a “joined chest” in America), you can do no better than to watch Peter Follensbee’s video “Joined Chest” available from Lie-Nielsen here or to read “The Artisan of Ipswich” by Robert Tarule, available from John Hopkins University Press here.
