Our chore coats have arrived from the factory (except for nine medium-sized coats). John is packaging them up personally and they will ship out next week.
Just in time for summer!
They look fantastic and are extremely well-made. I think you will find them worth the wait. I plan to crank up the air conditioner in the shop and wear mine for a bit.
If your are one of the final nine people to order a size medium, we’ll be in touch to update you on the shipping delay. We hope it won’t be long.
‘Cut & Dried’ is Almost Here Speaking of delays, our printing plant was swamped with work in April and May, so “Cut & Dried: A Woodworker’s Guide to Timber Technology” by Richard Jones was delayed at the plant. It is supposed to ship to us next week.
As a result of this delay, there is still time or order the book and receive the pdf of the book for free. As soon as we receive the shipment of books in our warehouse, then the pdf will cost about $15 more.
Driving through Eastern Kentucky makes me homesick for the mountains of Arkansas.
Something about the contrast – intense natural beauty with equally intense poverty – reminds me of growing up in the Ozarks. And every conversation with the locals is salted with a long family history. Who owns what. And who is owed.
Today I took a long drive into a corner of Eastern Kentucky that has always been heavily wooded. Some of the trees there stood when settlers first picked their way through the Cumberland Gap. Our expedition today was an unlikely crew: Chris Williams (a chairmaker from Wales), Joss Agura (a nurse from Texas) and Brendan Gaffney (a woodworker from New York).
The goal of the day was to see some old-growth trees and get a taste of the world of chairmaker Chester Cornett (read more about Cornett here).
After a spirited hike through Blanton Forest, we made our way to Hazard, Ky., and then to Dwarf, Ky., where Cornett lived and worked for a time.
Many areas of Eastern Kentucky are organized in “hollows,” a word that is pronounced “hollers.” These deep ravines run between steep mountainsides. At the bottom of each ravine is typically a creek with houses perched to either side. The road in and out is one lane. So driver-beware.
Chester had lived up one such hollow in Dwarf. And as we pulled into the tiny town we saw a footbridge that Chester had been photographed on. We stopped and took photos. And then we plunged into a number of hollows off the main road.
The light changes in a hollow. The sky is a narrow slice of pie above, and the green foliage is overwhelming. You expect to see poverty in a hollow. And you’ll see it. But you will also see wealth – fine and tidy houses standing next to single-wide trailers. There’s no zoning out here. And people are just fine with it.
The people are also happy to talk with strangers. Brendan and Joss chatted up the locals to learn more about Chester Cornett, whom the locals called “Hairyman Cornett.”
We found the location of his home in Dwarf. It had been crushed by debris thrown into the hollow during strip mining. This discovery was disappointing in one way. We had hoped to find the building where Chester had lived before moving to Cincinnati.
But Chester’s work isn’t confined to a building, a town or even a country. There’s something almost magical about the work. It makes you drive hours and hours, climb mountains, talk to strangers and so on. So welcome to a very strange club.
This past week I taught a class at the Wood and Shop School on building a Shaker candle stand for the first time. The table we made is pretty much a dead copy of one I measured a few years back at Hancock Shaker Village.
photo by Joshua Farnsworth
I was surprised at how well everyone took to cutting the sliding dovetails that attach the legs to the spindle. The fit and and function of the joinery was top notch.
Mark Firley of The Furniture Record was not at all impressed with my machine gun pose.photo by J.F.photo by J.F.
I have written and done a video on building this table in the past; it is one of my all-time favorite projects. Building this wonderful table with all of its cool little details in a class with a great group students really brought the project full circle for me.
The story of returning John Brown’s “Welsh Stick Chairs” into print is a twisty one. And, despite my enormous enthusiasm for the project, my thickheadedness only slowed the process.
Here’s the quick version, for those who like to read about my missteps.
“Welsh Stick Chairs” has been out of print for some time. There are U.K. versions out there from the publisher Albercastle and Stobart Davies Ltd. Plus U.S. versions from Linden Publications and Lyons & Burford Publishers. (There might be other versions I am unaware of.)
Last year, John Brown’s family approached Lost Art Press about publishing a new version of the book that captured the charm of the first edition, which was published under the Albercastle imprint. Kara Gebhart and I dove in with gusto and started researching who held the rights to the book, plus looking for any original photographs.
We came up with nothing. (Personal note: This is typical and frustrating for authors. Buy me a beer if you want to know the whole story.)
And when we heard back from the U.K. publisher Stobart Davies Ltd., we got a piece of bad news. That company owned the rights and planned to reprint the book. So obviously, we couldn’t print it.
I put the brakes on our effort. That’s where I was badly mistaken.
What I didn’t comprehend was that Stobart Davies owned the U.K. and European rights, not the North American rights. I had scuttled the project because my neurons had failed to connect.
Luckily, one of John Brown’s sons, Matty Sears, kept pushing forward. He started researching what it would take to put out an edition himself. He figured out the rights situation where I, a publishing professional, could not.
After an enormous amount of work, Matty contacted me and set me straight: The North American rights were available, and would we be willing to take on the book?
We said yes. And for most of this year, I have been working with Matty and our prepress agency to get the book ready for press. We had to jump through a lot of technical hurdles with this project – it wasn’t a simple reprint. We had to rebuild the book from the ground up due to missing electronic files, missing photos and mystery fonts.
But we did it. And most of the credit belongs to Matty.
It is my hope that “Welsh Stick Chairs” will be in print for many years to come. It has been one of the most influential woodworking books in my life – much like the books of James Krenov, Sam Maloof and Jennie Alexander transformed the lives of other woodworkers. And I feel certain there are future generations (now lying in cradles or sitting before an XBox) who will take to the wisdom of this remarkable man.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. You can order a pre-publication copy of the book here. The book will ship in June 2018.
Note: I haven’t posted here in a while. But for those who haven’t read Making Things Work and will be visiting the Lost Art Press storefront this weekend (you lucky dogs; I am dying to meet Suzanne Ellison), you can buy the book there.
Guy and Poppy were a pair of retired business professors who had traveled the world. Judging by what I saw as they showed me around their home during my first visit, they’d brought a good bit of it back home with them.
They had been referred to me by a contractor who assured them I’d be ideal for their project. “We just bought a reproduction of a piece of sculpture,” Poppy wrote in her introductory email.
The first photo shows the original swan at the S. Museum, and the second is the reproduction in the museum shop, just like the one we have. We need to have a cabinet built to display the statue, ideally with a couple of doors in which we can store other items. Please give us a call if you’re interested in helping us with this.
It wasn’t the type of job I ordinarily do, but since they’d been referred to me by a professional whom I like and respect, I called Poppy and arranged a meeting.
Their house was stunning: a classic of modernist style, inside and out—not that I would have guessed as I pulled up to the windowless façade, a gray stone rectangle apparently modeled after a freight container. But no sooner had I set foot inside than the scales dropped from my eyes. All of the other exterior walls were glass, spectacular in the house’s wooded setting.
Works of art filled the interior. Here a Coptic embroidery flanked by a pair of Yoruba masks, there a threesome of prints by Warhol, Schiele, and Kandinsky. A sixteenth-century Japanese screen formed a movable divider between the living room and the kitchen, itself a perfectly preserved marvel of original Sixties design. Clearly these people had excellent taste and understood the value of art and craft. I made myself a mental note to send the contractor a letter of thanks for the referral.–Excerpted from Making Things Work by Nancy Hiller