Lost Art Press

The Storefront is Open Today

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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I’m still in Germany, but Brendan Gaffney and Megan Fitzpatrick will open the Lost Art Press storefront to the public today from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The store is located at 837 Willard St. in Covington, Ky.

We’ll have our complete line-up of books available for sale, plus some blemished books (cash only on blems). As always, Brendan and Megan are happy to discuss any woodworking topic you might need help with, or to demonstrate a technique at the bench.

And if you want to talk smack about me, I won’t be there. So go nuts.

I’ll be back home on Sunday night and will definitely be in the store for the Nov. 10 and Dec. 8 open days. I hope you can visit.

— Christopher Schwarz

Class Registration Now Live

Posted on by fitz

IMG_7019 copyRegistration is now open for the following first-half 2019 Lost Art Press classes (do sign up for the waitlists if you don’t immediately make it in):

• Staked High Stool with Christopher Schwarz, Jan. 19 & 20
• Anarchist’s Tool Chest (full-sized English chest) with Megan Fitzpatrick, Jan. 21-25
• Starting with Staked Furniture with Brendan Gaffney (simple staked bench and chair), Feb. 4-8
• Staked High Stool with Christopher Schwarz, Feb. 16 & 17
• Dutch Tool Chest with Megan Fitzpatrick, Feb. 22-24
• Build a Staked Armchair with Christopher Schwarz, March 4-8
• Build a Shaker Hanging Cabinet with Megan Fitzpatrick, March 16 & 17
• Greenwood Post-and-rung Stool with Andy Glenn, March 23 & 24
• Høj Footstool with Brendan Gaffney, March 30 & 31
• Build a Boarded Bookshelf with Megan Fitzpatrick, April 6 & 7
• Make a Roubo Bookstand with Roy Underhill, April 12
• Make a Roubo Bookstand with Roy Underhill, April 14
• Saw Sharpening 101 with Matt Cianci, April 25 & 26
• Saw Sharpening 101 with Matt Cianci, April 27 & 28
• Carve the Acanthus Leaf with Mary May, May 4 & 5
• Build a Krenov-style Handplane with Brendan Gaffney, May 18 & 19
• Build a Welsh Stick Chair with Christopher Williams, May 20-24
• Build a Krenov-style Handplane with Brendan Gaffney, May 25 & 26
• Dutch Tool Chest with Megan Fitzpatrick, June 14-16
• Build a Traditional Plate Rack with Nancy Hiller, June 22 & 23

And if you have questions, please email me, not the LAP help email – my sig below is linked.

— Fitz

The Adventure of Living

Posted on by Kara Uhl
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Illustration from “The Boy Craftsman: Practical and Profitable Ideas for a Boy’s Leisure Hours (with more than 400 illustrations by the author and Norman P. Hall)” by A. Neely Hall (Boston, Lee & Shepard, 1905)

“Persistence and the courage that goes with persistence are needed, but as the work grows so does the interest. We end by finding ourselves entering upon a new and most illuminating heritage, illuminating because only by the intent, patient work demanded by a craft do we really discover ourselves, our possibilities, our strength, and our weaknesses. By committing ourselves to it we grasp a chance to develop as personalities, ready to act, to accept challenges and have a kind of endurance. We learn to reason our way out of the bad patches and with the help of a little ingenuity to rectify our blunders. Better still, we learn how to avoid them. Best of all, we discover the amount of quiet satisfaction that grows in us once our creative instincts have found an outlet. Fine furniture is always a joy to behold. It is a greater joy still to make it.”

— Charles Hayward, The Woodworker magazine, 1962

A Journey to Wales, Part 5, Enter the Hexagon

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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I’ve always used octagonal legs on my stick chairs because the geometry makes sense to my modern head. Cut the four-sided leg from a plank. Then plane down the four corners to create an octagon.

But when you study old chairs, hexagonal legs are far more common than octagons. I’ve given a lot of thought about how to create hexagonal legs at the bench, but it seemed more complicated than it should be. After talking it over with chairmaker Chris Williams in Wales, he arranged for a day in the workshop with Gareth Irwin, a Welsh chairmaker, turner and green woodworker. (His Instagram feed is definitely worth following.)

We met at Hugh B. Haley’s workshop, Phoenix Conservation, which is where Chris works when he isn’t building chairs in his garage. After Hugh made us some much-needed coffee, Gareth pulled his tools from his van. And in about 10 minutes, he made the process seem effortless and obvious.

The key to make it easy is to work with wood split from the tree – not sawn stock. Gareth brought along a section of fresh young field maple to demonstrate. The hexagon is derived from the natural pie-shaped sections from the log. Here’s a quick photo essay that shows the process.

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Here Gareth makes the first split across the pith of the log, splitting the log in half and then into fourths and eighths.

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He splits off the pith and some other heartwood that could be used for something else, leaving a section of the tree that, after a little hewing, is roughly hexagonal.

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At the shaving horse, Gareth refines this shape. Thanks to the hewing, there is always a flat section of the leg that rests on the stage of the shaving horse.

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Gareth tapers the hexagonal leg with a drawknife and then starts to make the tenon at the top of the leg. He stops when the tenon is oversized. Then the leg gets dried for three or four weeks inside before he forms the finished tenon.

The demonstration was brief, and so we all got to chat a lot about the craft (and drink more coffee). Gareth brought one of his chairs along. It sits and looks fantastic. In fact, a local stopped by and purchased the chair from Gareth under our very noses.

So a good day, all in all.

— Christopher Schwarz

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A Journey to Wales, Part 4: Chair 024

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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Though I’ve been happily married for 25 years, I’ve had a number of intense love affairs – the kind that make you want to write bad poetry and buy good lumber. These affairs are, of course, with pieces of furniture I’ve encountered through the years. And while the opening sentence above might seem a joke, it’s actually not.

When I get fixated on a piece of furniture, I daydream about it. As I drift off to sleep I think of its curves. When I drink my morning coffee I ponder its construction. During the day I build the piece in my head over and over. The only way to stop my obsession is to consummate the relationship by building the piece.

On Friday I visited St Fagans National Museum of History and met my latest dalliance – Chair 024, a three-stick chair in one of the public spaces in the museum. I won’t write a poem about the chair – I’ll leave the poetry duties to other bloggers. But I will share what attracts me to this form, and I will also apologize in advance because I’m likely to write quite a bit more about it in the future.

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First is the overall form. The chair has an armbow with a somewhat shallow curve, a bit like the low-back Cardiganshire chairs I discussed earlier. Yet it has a charming (and unusual) three-stick back with a simple and compact crest rail.

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Second is the seat shape. I’ve not encountered a seat in this shape before and don’t have a name for it. I love how the seat reflects the shape of the arm above and that the seat has extensions at each end that mimic the round hands of the armbow.

I love the beefy sticks. In North America, we tend to prefer thin and tapered sticks, which can lighten the look of a chair dramatically. This chair will have none of that. The sticks verge on 3/4” in diameter and have little or no taper to them.

I adore the hexagonal legs. I’ve been itching to make hexagonal legs because that shape is more common in the historical record than octagonal legs. I’ll write more about hexagons and how they were likely made in a future blog entry.

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Finally, I like the compact size of the chair. It’s not terribly wide or deep, and that characteristic has always been attractive to my eye.

I know that some (many?) of you might fail to see the beauty of this chair. You might even find it ugly, and that’s OK. Girls in my high school thought the same of me. It took only one woman – blinded by love, I suppose – to make me happy for the rest of my life. Except when we visit museums, and my wandering eye finds a shapely oaken leg….

— Christopher Schwarz

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