We now have Lost Art Press logo T-shirts for sale in our store in five colors and sizes ranging from XS to 3XL. These 100-percent cotton short-sleeve shirts are made and printed in the United States and ship worldwide.
The price includes domestic shipping; worldwide shipping has a small upcharge depending on where you live.
Please note that we don’t make much money from these shirts – about three dollars if I remember correctly. They are printed on demand and fulfilled by a third party. Also, please take a look at the sizing chart before you order. These shirts are made by American Apparel, and they run a bit slim.
Note: Disco Ty will not be attending the open day. Your spouse is safe.
As per our regular schedule, the Lost Art Press storefront will be open on Saturday, Nov. 12, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. We will have our complete line of books, plus T-shirts (lots of them), free posters, free stickers and blemished books for 50 percent off.
Our storefront is at 837 Willard St. in Covington, Ky. If you are coming in from out of town, I recommend you check out the newly opened Hotel Covington. It’s a 5-minute walk from our storefront and has a fantastic hotel restaurant, Coppin’s. (Try the corn fritters.)
Also, recently I got to eat at Inspirado, a restaurant across the street from Hotel Covington. I love the food – a global melange that totally works. Also new to our neighborhood (all located on Main Strasse around the corner from us):
Hail Dark Aesthetics: This is a vinyl record and skull store. OK, it’s more than that, but it’s filled with records and skulls. And bisected cats. My daughters love this place and it features the best one-eyed goat T-shirt I’ve ever seen.
Commonwealth Bistro: A restaurant that has been a couple years in the works. I’m dying to get in there and try the fried rabbit. Word on the street is the restaurant is very good.
Crafts and Vines: A new wine bar, tap room and charcuterie place. Very friendly place.
What will I be doing at the storefront next Saturday? Good question. I’m finishing up two chairs for a client and then I have a long list of things to build: a Danish modern drop-leaf table, a Campaign-style bookcase, a ladder (yes, a ladder, it’s my new obsession), and a dustpan to replace the crappy metal one from the home center.
I was 13 when I applied for the journalism program at my middle school. I was accepted (thank Jebus), and I remained a full-time student of the craft until I was 24 and released on the world to collect a generous four- and (eventually) five-figure salary in this trade.
I’m often asked by kids and grownups how to become a writer. What books should they read? What classes should they take? After a lifetime of study, here’s my answer:
Writing classes suck. During my 11 years of full-time training I never got much of value from a writing class. (Sorry Roger Boye and Dave Nelson.)
So how do you become a better writer? Easy. Take classes in editing. The three most important classes I took during my training were:
Copy editing. During this class I learned the rules of the road. These rules became tattooed on my brain through ritual abuse (that’s copy editing!). Once I knew the rules, I learned the consequences of bending or breaking them. The beautiful thing about becoming a copy editor is that you can churn out copy that a copy editor will love.
Magazine editing. During this class I learned to flush away my “self.” A good editor can become a stupid person who is reading a piece of writing for the first time. This “cloak of stupidity” allows you to see the giant holes in a story, the poor organization and the odd word choices. While I can use this skill on other people’s work, I also use it on my own writing. Though it’s difficult to edit your own work, once you don the “cloak of stupidity,” you can turn out writing that is easily understood by anyone.
Law and ethics. If you don’t have a moral groundwork for your writing, you will write things you don’t believe in (I’m talking here about the profession of public relations). A class such as this will teach you the limits of writing (what’s legal and not). It will give you the confidence to exercise your First Amendment rights (truth is a defense). And it will show you how the “appearance of impropriety” should color every decision you make as a writer.
So what the heck does this have to do with woodworking? Lots. If you want to become good at building casework, I think you should take a class in chairmaking.
I’ve taken a lot of classes on both casework and chairmaking. The casework classes have been forgettable. The chairmaking classes have made me a better woodworker. Why? It’s complicated. Chairmaking shows you several things you won’t get from a “build a box” class.
Assemblies are living systems. When you make a chair you try to use the least amount of wood to create the greatest strength. So you have to understand wood, how it moves and how it reacts to the tools. After taking chairmaking classes, I knew how to put assemblies in tension so they would resist certain forces. I knew how to better design for moisture exchange. I saw the benefit of green wood, dry wood and everything between.
Angles are meaningless. After you take a class in chairmaking you see that every angle is as valid as 90°. While machines like 90°, you don’t have to stick with that angle (or its cousin, 45°) to make good furniture.
Form is everything. While chairs can have intricate details, they are mostly a silhouette. And once you can see that silhouette, your casework will ricochet into new directions.
I don’t teach chairmaking classes (or any other classes these days), so I’m not trying to sell you anything. I can say that most woodworkers who do casework have deep trepidation about chairs. That should tell you something.
Forget the box for a minute. Try compound-angle joinery for a week and you’ll laugh at boxes afterward.
If you are looking for some light reading to add to your digital book wheel I have two short stories for you featuring woodworkers.
The first story, from 15th-century Italy, is “La novella del grasso legnajuolo” (The Story of the Fat Woodworker). The story was discovered by Andrea, a farmer and woodworker, from Cremona. In September he featured the story on his blog.
Brunelleschi & Donatello
“The Story of the Fat Woodworker” involves the antics of Renaissance luminaries Brunelleschi, Donatello and the unfortunate Manetto Ammanatini, known as Il Grasso. I prefer to call him merely robusto.
Manetto Ammanatini
Andrea was able to locate several copies of the story published between 1485 and 1856 and, as he pointed out, the 1485 copy has a nice woodcut with a low workbench.
If you would like to read the 1820 Italian version featuring the illustration of Manetto clicca qui.
There is also an English translation from UC-Santa Barbara, about 20 pages long, and you can find it here.
The second short story is about the chairmaker Gilbert Nickerson, known as the Old Chairmaker, of Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia.
Gilbert Nickerson
“The Old Chairmaker” was written by Evelyn M. Richardson and was published in the Dalhousie Review, Volume 27, Issue 1 in 1947. You can find the story here and it is 8 pages long.
To visit Andrea’s blog, L’angolo di spoglia inferior, and read his comments in Italian and English, clicca qui.
This is an excerpt from “Chairmaker’s Notebook” written and illustrated by Peter Galbert.
When I set out to make my first chair, there were parts of the process that I did not even know existed. But there was one part that I knew I wanted to do: carve the seat.
I got into woodworking for this kind of fun. Watching the shavings fly as the seat shape comes into focus is hypnotic and thrilling. Making a chair should begin with the various green wood parts so that they will be dry when the seat carving is done, but I suspect that most folks head right to the seat carving and build the rest of the chair around it. And when I started out, I was no exception. I couldn’t even wait to build an actual chair, so I glued up a bunch of 2x4s and used a gouge and a bent piece of steel to hog out a crude seat.
Beyond referring to a seat as oval-, D- or shield- shaped, it actually is an “un-nameable” shape. While it has hollows and humps that follow a distinct logic, there is no simple way to describe it. I think of it as a landscape, full of hills and valleys. To arrive at this complex shape in a consistent and timely way requires a set of steps, each one paving the way for the next. No single step is ambiguous; in the end, the overall shape, while tough to describe, is consistent and clear.
Carving the seat affects just about every surface of the workpiece, so being able to hold the seat in a number of positions is critical. I always leave the extra material adjoining the back of the seat in place until the last step of carving the underside at the back. This way, I can always clamp the waste area without dinging the soft pine, and when I clamp it to the corner of my bench, I can easily move around the seat to come in from the desired direction.
Clamping the work to carve the seat.
Before I carve under the front edge of the seat, I can clamp the seat between the vise’s dog and a bench dog because the material being compressed gets carved away later. For the initial adze work, I clamp the seat to my shavehorse, which puts the blank at a comfortable height to use the small hand adze that I prefer.
I’ve also had great success using a podium-type support that sits on my bench. This is great when using the small hand adze because you can flip the seat in various orientations without having to move clamps, plus the force of the blows is countered by the lip at the bottom of the holding platform.
When Steel Meets Wood –Tips for Clean Cuts
Once you’ve begun to envision the wood as a bundle of fibers and understand how a tool is configured to cut them, it’s time to put these two bits of knowledge together to get proper results. Regardless of which type of tool you are using, it’s important to know there is always a technique that can deliver clean, controlled cuts.
Clean results when carving are usually achieved by moving or pointing the tool in a specific direction. Cutting in the wrong direction usually leads to rough and uncontrollable results as the tool slips between the fibers and causes the wood to split in advance of the cutter.
In the chapter Shaving & Shaping Parts, I introduced shaving, which is like controlled splitting, but for now, let’s focus on achieving clean cuts when cutting across the fibers.
Looking back to the structure of the wood, it’s important to note that any time you see a surface pattern other than long strips running perfectly from one end of the board to the other, you are looking at exposed end grain. This is the common “cathedral” patterning seen on the surface of most sawn boards. Because the surface has exposed end grain, a specific direction of cut will yield good results.
Learn to read the bers of boards. Anywhere that the lines on the surface curve or angle in relation to the surfaces, there is exposed end grain. Cutting into exposed end grain can cause a split to run beneath the surface.
Most folks encounter this concept when deciding which direction to plane a board. I think of planing a board as a form of carving because the same rules of grain direction apply – you are simply “carving” a flat shape.
When planing a board, the direction that the fibers ascend from the lower face determines the best direction to plane the surface. This is usually referred to as cutting “downhill.”
When pushed “uphill,” the cutting edge slides between the fibers, follows them and causes a splitting action to occur ahead of the cutter. The damage is limited by the depth of cut, the sole and the chipbreaker, but the increased effort and diminished surface quality are not desirable.
How to plane “downhill” (bottom image) by following the fibers in a board.
A favorite comparison when contemplating planing is to think of petting a cat or dog. If you stroke the fur from head to tail, it lies down smoothly and your hand never slips down to the skin. If you pet from tail to head, your hand slides under the fur, causing the fibers to stand up and the animal to get annoyed. I’m pretty sure we’ve all had a cat and board glare back at us after such a transgression.
While you can determine the direction of cut based on the orientation of the growth rings and the pattern on the faces and edges of the board, this can lead to confusion because boards from twisted or bowed logs can have multiple direction changes on each surface. In such cases a few light cuts are best to help determine the best cutting direction for each area.
