The following is excerpted from “Smalls: 18 Well-designed, Easy Projects for an Afternoon in the Workshop,” which is now available! In addition to the projects, you’ll find chapters on the techniques you need to build them (which will, of course, come in handy for all sorts of projects – not just the 18 in this pocket book).
We used four types of nails in these projects: cut nails, square-shanked die-forged nails and nail-gun nails, both 18-gauge and 23-gauge.
The 18-gauge brads from a nail gun have rectangular heads, so the holes they make look a lot like traditional nail holes from cut nails – and they’re faster than cut nails or square-shanked nails, because no pilot holes are required. The 23-gauge pins leave just a tiny hole, and they don’t have much holding power – but for thin work that doesn’t have to hold much weight, they’re plenty strong.
Cut nails (made by Tremont, the only remaining maker of which we’re aware) come in a variety of types. We mostly used headless brads when we didn’t want the nail to show, and clout nails when we needed to hold on backs or bottoms (the large nail head keeps it from pulling through).
If you want to use nails as a design feature, though, reach for the square-shanked Rivierre nails. Not only do they hold better than the other nails discussed here, but they stand out thanks to their prominent, diamond-shaped heads.
Both cut nails and square-shanked nails require pilot holes. With cut nails, you can sometimes get away with no pilot hole…as long as you’re using white pine. But better safe than sorry; it doesn’t take that long to drill a hole.
Drill a pilot hole as deep as two-thirds the nail’s length; the black mark on the bit denotes the depth.
Select a bit diameter that matches the tip of the cut nail. (For the small nails used here, that’s likely to be the smallest bit in your index, which in ours is 1/16″. If that’s too big, you can buy micro bits.
For square-shanked nails, match the bit diameter to the width of the nail about a third of the way up from the bottom of the shaft. Drill pilot holes that are two-thirds the length of the nail; you want the nail itself to cut its own path for the final third of its journey – that’s where most of the holding power will result. A pilot hole that is the length of the nail will result in a weak joint. (Note: For screws, the pilot hole should match the length of the screw.)
Always make a test joint with the pilot hole in the same material, and at the same distance from the end or edge of the top board. If your pilot hole is too small, the test joint will split. Much better to find that out and make adjustments on scrap.
A final note about those pilot holes: If you’re not confident in your ability to drill straight, set up a square or ask a friend to guide you, especially on these thinner pieces of wood. It’s all too easy to drill out of square and come out the side of the work.
The cut nail on the right is inserted correctly, with the wide face in line with the grain. Insert it the other way (left) and the top board could split.
For cut nails, insert the nail into the pilot hole so that the wide side of the nail is in line with the grain; if you insert it so the wide side is across the grain, you’ll split your work. You needn’t be as careful when inserting the square-shanked nails; they can go in with either the corner or flat face in line with the grain.
On the left is a 16-ounce hammer with a faceted handle, which helps your hand know how to hold it. On the right is a 9.8-ounce hammer, with a peen that’s useful for starting small nails.
Drive the nails using a hammer. For smaller, lighter nails, we like an 8- to 10-ounce hammer, such as an Exeter hammer. Use the pointed end to set the nail, then use the striking face to sink it. For heavier, longer nails, a typical 16-ounce hammer is good. (We love vintage Plumb hammers – the faceted handles provide a comfy grip.)
While you don’t need pilot holes or hammers for air-driven 18-gauge brads or 23-gauge pins, if you don’t shoot straight, they can easily poke out the side of your work. (Sometimes they do that even if you do shoot straight. So if these nails are the belt to the suspenders of your glue, it’s OK to choose a slightly shorter nail if you run into trouble.) If you’re not confident, use a spotter or square here, too.
Hold the nail gun so that the width of the nose aligns with the grain of the top board. And note the square-shaped hole the nail makes; it looks a bit like the hole of a cut nail.
And just like it’s important to orient a cut nail properly, it helps to hold the nail gun perpendicular to the top board, so that the wide face of the nose is in line with the grain. That aligns the wider face of the nail head with the grain and cuts down on blowouts.
It needs some cleaning, paint and sprucing up. But the former picking floor of our warehouse should be a woodworking school by the end of the year.
Thanks to some tectonic shifts in our business at Lost Art Press, it looks like we will have a new woodworking school in Covington, Kentucky, that is literally in our back yard.
Last year we had to stop holding classes in our Willard Street workshop after our insurance carrier dumped us (it’s a long tale that does *not* involve anyone getting hurt. Basically, when you live above your business, things get weird).
In June, our Covington warehouse hit its maximum capacity while we had more than a dozen double-stacked pallets of books on the way. So we moved our warehouse operations a mile away to a building that was purpose-built for order fulfillment with a loading dock, a huge roll-up door and insane room for growth. We signed a seven-year lease.
As luck would have it, two of our favorite woodworkers were interested in opening an independent school. So unless our Covington building gets hit with a meteorite, it looks like their school will occupy the warehouse space attached to our storefront.
The school will be an independent business, but it will be closely aligned with Lost Art Press. Megan and I will teach there, as will a whole host of great instructors.
And our storefront and as-yet-to-be-named school will share space and facilities. Visitors to the storefront will see the school in action. Students who need a book or a tool can saunter a few steps to get what they need.
Students loved the urban atmosphere in Covington, and this new school will preserve that. The new school is even closer to Covington’s hotel district and is surrounded by hundreds of restaurants, bars, coffee shops, bookstores and places to buy freeze-dried ducklings.
Megan and I are planning new classes for 2027 at the school – classes we have never taught before. It’s all quite nice that this is working out for everyone: students, the owners of the new school and Lost Art Press. (And for Covington, too. The owners of Larry’s say they really miss all you guys, especially Scott.)
If all goes to plan, classes will begin in January 2027. We will let you know when the first class list will be released.
Katherine Schwarz was born in April 2001. She grew up in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, with her sister, Maddy (five years older), her mom, Lucy May, and her dad, Christopher Schwarz.
“Both of my parents have just been the best ever when it comes to raising us,” Katherine says. “My dad worked at the magazine for a while and those were long-ass days and so my mom, during the summer, she was the one who drove us to camp or whatever. She was just always there whenever we needed her. She’s always been the strong woman in my life.”
Katherine and her dad
Maddy (left), Lucy, Katherine and Chris
Formerly a print, TV and digital reporter, Lucy is now the host of “Cincinnati Edition” on 91.7, WVXU.
“She’s also very artistic,” Katherine says. “She sewed some rabbits for us and she would draw with us. I love her little drawings.”
Katherine says she’s always enjoyed art. Her favorite class in elementary school was art.
“My teacher, Ms. Mitchell, was kind of a badass,” Katherine says. “She’d yell at the other kids because they weren’t paying attention. But I was focused. I was like, ‘No, I need to do art.’ So she liked me.”
At home, Katherine enjoyed doing whatever her sister was doing.
Katherine (left) and her sister Maddy
“I looked up to her,” Katherine says. “We were really into Breyer Horses, these little plastic horses, and we’d make home movies with them. She would direct me and I would be the camera person. It was really fun. Being creative with her was a huge part of my childhood.”
Roy Underhill (left), Maddy and Katherine
She also has fond memories of working with her dad in his basement shop.
“I’d come down and be like, ‘What are you doing?’ and I’d drop a hammer on a piece of wood – definitely dented it – and he’d be like, ‘It’s fine.’ I think he enjoyed me being in the shop.”
Katherine working in her dad’s home shop in Fort Mitchell.
Chris never demanded or even asked Katherine or Maddy to help him in his home shop. Instead, he’d tell them what he was up to and let me know they were more than welcome to come down and learn.
Often, Katherine would take him up on the offer. She loved holding a saw at a young age. She carved a wax block into a duck (a duck her dad still has, all these years later). Her first dovetail was perfect.
“I remember him telling this story a couple times,” she says. “He’s like, ‘You cut a perfect dovetail the first time because you just weren’t nervous about it because you didn’t know it was something you should be nervous about.’”
Maddy (left), Chris and Katherine
In high school, Katherine took AP art classes, including painting and drawing, and a ceramics class. She loved working with clay, and took ceramics classes during the summer months, too.
“Pottery and clay traveled through high school with me,” she says.
She graduated in 2019.
Studying Art at Spalding
“To be honest, I did not want to go to college at all,” Katherine says. “But my parents, God bless them, helped me find Spalding.”
Spalding University, in Louisville, offered a class schedule Katherine liked – two classes for six weeks, then a week off, repeated. It was the only college Katherine applied to. During her senior year of high school, she got a call from Spalding in the middle of class. It was a personal call to let her know she had been accepted, with a scholarship.
Katherine took in this information and then asked, “Can I take a gap year?”
Surprised, the person on the phone told her they’d have to check. They called back and said yes.
“I told my parents that and they’re like, ‘What the hell?’ First, colleges never call you. That’s crazy. Second, you’re bold for asking for a gap year – you go, girl.’”
She didn’t take a gap year (“thank God,” she says). She accepted Spalding’s offer in 2019 with a major in art.
She lived in a dorm room during the week, and at her parents’ house on weekends. She met friends, people who she’s still close to today. She also navigated learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, which meant a year of only virtual classes, with professors mirroring their screens to teach drawing techniques and art critiques over Zoom.
Spalding’s art program is small, but she had professors who were smart and challenging.
“Josh was the one who challenged us the most and had deep conversations,” she says. “And then Sarah, she was awesome. She was an art history teacher and I actually hate history, but I learned from her because she made it interesting. She showed us so many controversial things in art.”
Documentaries, like the 1990 film “Paris Is Burning,” will stick with her for life, Katherine says.
“And then there was my painting and drawing teacher, Aaron. He was pretty cool. He was a really positive guy all the time, which was exhausting, but it was nice to be around that and he could still critique you while being a nice guy.’”
In 2023, Aaron convinced her to submit a painting for consideration in an exhibit at Spalding’s gallery. It was accepted. Chris and Lucy went to the exhibit and were surprised to find “Dad’s Work” – a still-life of some of Chris’s books, Crucible tools, and a Lost Art Press hat and apron. Today, the painting hangs in the Lost Art Press shop on Willard Street.
“For my senior year, I had to do a senior thesis that was a series of connected art pieces that you worked on for a whole year,” she says. “I did skeleton paintings on mirrors. It was really fun.”
This, too, was exhibited at Spalding.
“That was pretty crazy,” she says. “I had some friends that came. It felt like the real deal.”
Throughout college. Katherine earned money making, selling, packaging, labeling and shipping Soft Wax to Lost Art Press customers. Two batches would make about 60 jars of Soft Wax.
“That was something to keep me busy for sure,” she says. “But I’m glad it migrated into Lost Art Press because it was becoming a lot.”
She also began dating Gabe Gavre (who now works in the Lost Art Press warehouse along with Mark Gilsdorf). The two met on Tinder. At the time, he lived in Bradfordsville, Kentucky, about 2-1/2 hours south of Covington. She drove down to meet him, first at a local Walmart. Then they went fishing.
“It stuck,” she says.
And it has stuck, for the past six years. Today, Gabe lives in Covington with Katherine, along with Katherine’s two cats: Bean and Billy Butt Cheeks.
Gabe Gavre (right) and Mark Gilsdorf (left)
Working together hasn’t been an issue at all, she says.
“It’s really nice,” she says. “He’s such a goofball at home and quiet at work, but he’s slowly opening up at work.”
And yet, they never run out of things to talk about, she says, even if they spend time working together during the day.
Rookwood Pottery to Lost Art Press
After graduating from Spalding in 2023, Katherine moved out of her parents’ house and into her own place in Covington. She got a job at Rookwood Pottery, a Cincinnati ceramics company founded in 1880. (Her favorite tile is “Tree of Life.”)
“I was glad to get my hands back on clay,” she says.
She started in the press department, 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., pushing a button on a 30-ton machine that would press each tile. She’d remove the waste, slip a board underneath the tile and then press a pedal to release water in order to release the tile from the mold on the press.
Working at Rookwood Pottery
“It was so hot down there,” she says. “No AC. No fans because the clay comes first and fans would cause the clay to crack. Finally, I was like, ‘I can’t do it anymore.’”
She moved departments, cleaning up seam lines and fingerprints from pieces that hadn’t been fired yet. In the slip department, she’d pour liquid clay into molds, let it set, dump out the excess, let it dry and then take the mold apart.
Working at Rookwood Pottery
More than a decade ago, Chris planted the seed of working at Lost Art Press, casually mentioning to Katherine and Maddy that they were always welcome to work for him.
But Maddy loved science, earned her Ph.D. and is now a virologist in Philadelphia. Katherine loved art, went to art school and found a job working with clay.
Occasionally, during those long, hot days Katherine worked at Rookwood Pottery, Chris would remind her that she could always work for him.
“It came to the point where I was like, ‘Yeah, I think I am ready for something new, and it’d be awesome to work with my dad.’”
Jumping back into woodworking was a difficult start, Katherine says.
“I felt like I didn’t know how to use any of the tools or how to adjust anything,” she says. “Kale and my dad and Megan were really patient with me, explaining things a couple times, but I still made myself nervous. Wood is so different from clay. I know how to form clay but wood – you can’t squish it into a ball, you have to carve the ball into it. So it was a huge learning curve.”
But her dad’s teaching style is exactly how she likes to be taught.
“Me and Kale talk about it a lot,” she says. “He’ll give you at most five instructions and then walk away. And then he waits for you to ask a question. I think it’s really efficient. He’s able to keep everyone on the same page. And he doesn’t give up on a student if they’re running behind. He’ll always wait for everyone to be ready for the next step, which I really like. It’s like how math class should have been – no one gets left behind.”
Katherine signed her apprenticeship papers a few months after beginning her new gig working full time at Lost Art Press. (You can read Katherine’s posts about being an apprentice on The Anarchist’s Apprentice Substack.)
Katherine signing her apprenticeship papers
Katherine’s first apprenticeship chair was an Irish lowback.
“It was hard,” she says. “I remember hating saddling the seat, but now that’s one of my favorite parts. I didn’t know where to put the energy in my body, so I was just getting worn out. And that’s how I felt with a lot of the steps. With each chair, it got easier and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I do know how to do that.’”
She built her second apprenticeship chair, the Lincolnshire, with her dad, Lee Runyan and Rudy Everts.
“I was building along with them, more experienced woodworkers, trying to get everything done that they were getting done and I ended up getting my chair all glued up. That was a really good experience. That chair is huge. It’s a monster, so it’s cool that I was able to build that.”
While working on her third chair, her dad handed her his book, “The Stick Chair Book.”
“He’s like, ‘You’re probably going to need this.’ And I did. I called the book “Book Dad.” I was like, ‘Oh, don’t worry – “Book Dad” got me.’ And I did build quite a lot on my own, which was awesome.”
Katherine still has one last chair to build as part of her apprenticeship.
“It has to be my own design,” she says. “I’ve been cooking up some stuff for sure. I’m excited to get started on it.”
Work outside of the apprenticeship differs every day. Katherine typically begins her day by checking email. Her dad keeps a list of tasks on a whiteboard. Random jobs may include cleaning an air filter, buying plywood to build a crate or creating a cutting list for a project Chris is building.
She and Kale make their “Hey Apprentices!” videos, which are silly and fun, she says, but can take a while to make.
“Kale’s awesome,” Katherine says. “We listen to each other’s music and laugh and talk about our weekends. It’s so nice catching up with Kale and I think it’s nice to have two young people in the shop who can be stupid together.”
Recently, Katherine and Kale built a clamshell bookcase for the storefront, a project they both loved. Around it, she painted “Collin the Colon Snake.” One of Katherine’s favorite things to do is paint the things she makes. Her Hare Chair is her favorite thing she’s ever made.
Katherine’s Hare Chair
A lot of people ask her what it’s like to work with her dad.
“I guess I was a little nervous, but I think I have a unique father-daughter relationship in that we’re both the quiet ones in the family,” she says. “So I’ve always gotten along with him. From what I can remember, him teaching me how to do stuff in the shop when I was younger, it was the least stressful thing ever. There’s absolutely zero issue working with him.”
A Full Circle
Katherine loves movies, especially thrillers. She loved John Carpenter’s “The Thing.” Art remains a constant in her life. She’s still taking pottery classes, now at Baker Hunt, which is within walking distance from where she lives.
Katherine is 25 years old. When asked about the future, she says that’s a question she’s hated her entire life.
“One time, my grandma asked me and I was like, ‘I just want to be alive in five years,’” she says. “Seriously. I just want to be alive. And I still want to be alive three, five, 10 years.”
She says she hopes to have her life together a little bit more.
“I think traveling more would be really fun,” she says. “Learning new skills. I want to keep up with my pottery. It would be awesome to find a way to have a wheel studio or something like that in my house.”
Katherine says she’s never seen herself as a teacher. But people she admires, including her dad, think she’d be great at it. Aaron, one of her art professors at Spalding, once said, “You, Katy, you’re going to be a great teacher. You’re good at teaching people.”
“That was nice,” Katherine says. “He made me talk about one of my painting techniques to my fellow students. I think I could see myself teaching some classes after seeing how my dad does it.”
Katherine went through a period of depression and anxiety that was pretty harsh, she says.
“But now I know it’s OK,” she says. “If I saw younger Katy, I’d be like, ‘Don’t worry. It’s OK.’”
And in the past five years, she says she’s started to stand up for herself.
“The world’s been crazy the past five years,” she says. “Everyone went a little cuckoo in lockdown. But I don’t know. I got really comfortable in my skin. I’ve learned to be fine with myself.”
An excerpt from a blog post Chris wrote in June 2009:
I’m just about ready to assemble a drawer, so my daughter Katy lays down her saw and heads to the pickle bucket below the drill press. She dumps the cool water down the drain outside the shop door and refills the bucket with hot.
She drops the liquid hide glue bottle into the bucket then comes over to the bench, where I’m paring out the last little bit of the floor of my half-blind dovetails. I’m using a fishtail chisel, which she’s never seen before, so Katy asks if she can give it a try. I show her how I hold the tool to wiggle it into the acute corners, then I put the tool in her hands.
After a couple shavings we knock the drawer side into the dovetail sockets. It fits fine, so Katy shakes the glue bottle and fetches the deadblow mallet. I hold the drawer front and Katy paints the sockets with hide glue using an artist’s paintbrush I’ve owned since college.
I show her how I drive the joint together with a block of wood by spreading out the blows all along the joint line. Two taps. Move the mallet. After the first joint is home, Katy takes over gluing and assembly. We put the assembled drawer on the table saw and check it for square. We press the corners of the assembly against the rip fence until the box is square.
Then Katy goes back to the small bench I’ve rigged up for her and lines up the two handplanes on the end of the bench. She asks when she can start cleaning up the shop.
It’s at that moment that I realize I’m living in a book. It feels a bit like the time I visited Graceland and descended the stairwell to Elvis’s basement. Both walls are completely mirrored and the thousand reflections of your every move are both familiar and disorienting.
Katy has been working alongside me through most of the chest of drawers. When I don’t need her help, she’s off doing her own thing, trying out the different saws, messing with the planes and asking me questions. Such as this one she asked on father’s day:
“Dad, when I grow up, do you think I’ll be a woodworker?”
I’ve always loved clamshell bookcases – fold-up bookcases that allow you to transport your personal library to a lighthouse, campsite or war zone. I started building them while working on my book “Campaign Furniture” (a free pdf download for everyone).
They can be simple (such as the one shown above), or as complex as the one I built about 12 years ago (shown below).
Earlier this spring, I designed the simple version for Kale and Katherine to build in order to sharpen up their dovetailing skills while I was teaching in Tennessee, Maine and who knows where. After giving them the construction drawings and cutting lists, I showed them where my pile of Eastern white pine was.
“Take it from here,” I said.
And they did.
After they assembled the finished case, Katherine asked how they should finish the piece.
“It’s up to you,” I said.
And it was.
Katherine has a love (and a deft hand) for folk-art painting. And so she designed a snake that roamed all over the case. It is not random. It is carefully planned. Then Kale and Katherine spent about a week painting the bookcase between other editorial tasks.
We call the snake “Colin the Semi-colon Snake.” He’s winking.
The cabinet is designed to hold our pocket books on the two top shelves and our 6″ x 9″ books on the lower shelves. This cabinet looks great on top of a chest of drawers. Or a sideboard. And it doesn’t take all that long to build – especially if you have Kale and Katherine doing the work.
The pdf below includes all the construction drawings you need, plus a cutting list.
