Steve lines up the stick (taped to the drill) with the mortise location on the side stretcher.
I cut dovetails pretty much the exact same way I did 20 years ago. Same layout, same sawing, same chiseling, same fitting. But when it comes to my chairmaking, things seem to change every day.
I’ve been building stick chairs since 2003 (and frame chairs since 1997). So it’s not like I am new to the chairmaking craft. But for some reason, I am constantly finding new and usually small ways to make things easier.
When I wrote “The Stick Chair Book,” I thought I was pretty much settled in how I make my chairs. But by the time we had to reorder the second printing, I decided to revise the book. Not in major ways, but in many little minor ways. And I added a lot of little shortcuts I had discovered.
Now, about a year after releasing the revised edition of “The Stick Chair Book,” I’d like to revise it again for the next printing. Again, nothing major, just small things here and there that make it easier to drill and assemble things.
Even today, I came up with a stupid little trick that really helped. Here it is. When drilling the mortises for the stretchers, tape a stick or skewer or chopstick to the centerline seam of your drill. It helps immeasurably in lining up the drill between the mortises in the legs and between the mortises in the side stretchers.
I’ve seen lots of tricks that use rubber bands or lasers. But none is as simple as taping a scrap to the drill.
When the scrap is aligned with both mortises, Steve drills the mortise in the side stretcher.
As a chairmaker and author, I know I’m not alone in the way I feel about my past writings. Many other chairmakers are constantly finding new ways to make the process a little easier.
Why have we not created the “Unified Method of All Chairmaking?” Because there are at least 100 ways to make a chair. And 1,000 tricks that go with each method.
This is one of the things I love about woodworking – the constant discovery. But it can be frustrating both as an author and a reader.
Last week I walked into work to a brand-new Veritas spokeshave sitting on my bench. Chris had ordered several for students and kindly ordered an extra for me. (I’m spoiled, I know.)
Grateful, I took a picture of my new tool and posted it to my social media account, not thinking much of it.
The following day I received a comment: “Would you mind posting a video of how you file the throat (if you follow Chris’s approach)?”
Huh? File a throat?? This was news to me, but according to Chris, this is common practice when breaking in a new spokeshave.
He explained that in chairmaking, sometimes cuts that are ranker than the spokeshave will allow are needed. The solution? File the throat, just a hair or two to allow a thicker shaving to pass through.
So as asked, we created a video demonstrating the process. Next week’s chairmaking class will be the first to break the new spokeshaves in.
Well, back to work for me. I have two more spokeshaves to file.
This summer, the U.S. Postal Service released 12 stamps featuring photographs by Michael Freeman from six different preserved Shaker communities, commemorating the 250th anniversary of the first Shakers arriving in America. Freeman, along with June Sprigg and David Larkin, published “Shaker: Life, Work, and Art,” in 1991.
The stamps were designed by Postal Service Art Director Derry Noyes. Unhappy with the first design, which featured more detailed, close-up shots, Noyes put the project on hold for four years. Revisiting, she redesigned the stamps with a broader perspective. You can read more about her process here.
The pane selvage (the area around the collection of stamps) features a photo of Brother Ricardo Belden (1868–1958), taken by Samuel Kravitt, in 1935. Belden joined a Shaker community in Enfield, Connecticut, when he was 4 years old. Initially, he worked on the farm. In 1926, he joined the Hancock Shaker Village in Hancock and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and spent much of his time repairing clocks with wooden works.
The stamp’s First Day of Issue was June 20, 2024, at Hancock Shaker Village. If you’d like to know more about each individual stamp, check out this article.
Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill
One stamp features the beloved staircases at Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. Chris has visited and written about Shaker Village many times (including in 2006, which is this Saturday’s Earlywood post in American Peasant, free for anyone to read). His first visit was more than 30 years ago, and that experience sparked something new.
Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill
For John Wilson, it was Ejner Handberg’s “Shop Drawings of Shaker Furniture and Woodenware, Vol. 1.” In 1977, Wilson was offered a job to teach furniture making at Michigan’s Lansing Community College. He had two hours to prep for the class. He drove to the library, checked out Handberg’s book and taught his students how to make a dovetailed dining tray. Wilson, who died in 2023, built a life building Shaker oval boxes and producing copper tacks.
For Chris Becksvoort, it was a 1974 exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick gallery. “I went back to visit it five, six, seven times,” he says. Years later, Becksvoort would reproduce two of the gallery’s pieces in his shop.
For Jennie Alexender, it was several trips to Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community. There, she met Sister Mildred. Jennie wanted to see the chairs and remembers Sister Mildred quipping, “You know, it’s interesting. People think we’re chairs.” Several visits later, Jennie built her first Shaker one-slat dining chair.
Perhaps something as simple as these stamps will spark something for you, too.
The cabinet I made in pippy (also known as burly) white oak with shop-made walnut-and-maple beading and hardware in walnut, based on Gimson’s original 1919 design for a sideboard for Guy de Gruchy in “Ernest Gimson: Arts & Crafts Designer and Architect.”
Nancy Hiller’s “Shop Tails,” a companion book of essays to “Making Things Work.” “Shop Tails” is different from “Making Things Work” in that it is structured around the animals that came in and out of Nancy’s life, with each chapter focusing on a different one (or several different ones). The animal tales are sandwiched between some serious existential and biographical content provoked by her diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, and all of it is interwoven with true stories about non-human animals, in addition to reflections on how much they taught her about life, love, illness, expectations, parenting, and death.
I continued to run up against the crucial big-picture question that so many books and articles told me I had to answer: What was I living for? What gave me joy? I still had no satisfactory response. Looking back over my life while fitting doors and discussing next steps with my oncologist from the top of a ladder as I painted cubbies for sheet music and CDs, I realized that I had rarely been motivated by a vision or a dream. I could recall few well-defined goals or desires. Sure, I had a basic three-fold vision: Do good work, make a home, have a happy partnership. But this was just an outline that would take a lot of filling-in. Why was I so vague about what I wanted?
In part, I realized, it was because I was raised not to want, but to be grateful for what already was. I worked at being happy, whatever situation I faced, and went from one situation to another without any real plan. When my mother told 8-year-old me that wanting things would make me unhappy, she was probably not referring to the important stuff, but to the latest toys we saw advertised on TV. But you can’t really predict what a kid will do with the Buddha’s First and Second Noble Truths, which, in a nutshell, see all life as suffering, and suffering as a product of selfish desire. I don’t recall any discussion about the need to envision my future, let alone plan my studies around my need to earn a living. Sometimes I was happy. Sometimes I was miserable. But eventually something would change and things got better. Only in my 30s, when I was reading Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in graduate school, did it dawn on me that desire can be among the most powerful motivations for good; what matters are the nature of that desire and its goal.
In place of motivation by well-founded desire, I had spent my life in search of validation that I didn’t get at home. Growing up, it seemed my sister and I were constantly being urged to be other than we were: Hold in your stomach, don’t slouch, don’t whine, get off your backside and do your chores – much of it the typical, benign work of training Baby Boomers for adulthood. The critical messages far outweighed any expressions of approbation.
My sense of never doing or being enough was only worsened by the father figures introduced to our household in the aftermath of our parents’ split. When I was 14, our mother’s boyfriend, George, told me I had a naturally down-turned mouth and should make an effort to smile, lest my face put others off. He said I was getting fat (I wasn’t) and should go on a diet, so I ran with that and developed an eating disorder. He told me I knew nothing – true, relatively speaking, but how does angrily hurling “You know nothing!” at a teenager really help matters? (Answer: It doesn’t. There are more precise and effective ways to make the point about youthful over-confidence versus lack of life experience.) His general demeanor was that of a smug, entitled guy who had put his degree from Oxford to profitable use by getting a job in law or finance in London and resented the intrusion of his girlfriend’s teenage daughters on what would otherwise have been his uninterrupted “me time.” I recognized his bitterness as evidence of his own unhappiness, but his words had lasting effects.
So when this arrogant man who arrived at our doorstep a few times a week, only to be ushered into a comfortable chair and handed a drink to enjoy while he read the evening paper, promised me 5 pounds for every A I got in my O-Level exams, I happily stuck it to him. I’d already experienced the satisfaction of earning good grades in middle school and realized I had the power to view my teachers less as unreasonably demanding authority figures than as partners in my education; I would do my best for them, as well as myself, not least because at the slightest imposition of real discipline, most of my fellow students complained. It had to be tough, being a teacher.
I lived by my As and A-pluses, my 10s-out-of-10. With every one, I felt better about myself and hoped that my teachers felt better about themselves, too. I worked hard to get into the University of Cambridge, only to discover, once accepted, that I had no idea why I was really there, even though I loved the day-to-day life of a scholar. What mattered most to me, I’m embarrassed to say, is that I got in – and with an honorary scholarship. No one could ever again call me lame-brained, even though my stepfather would do his best to prove my intellectual inferiority to his own sophistication in argument and repeatedly called me “useless” to my face. The same went for university after I returned to the States. I was determined to graduate Phi Beta Kappa, as my mother had. And I did. But again, in grad school, I was struck by the realization that I really had no idea why I was there, beyond my awareness that I enjoyed learning, having my mind lit on fire by new perspectives, and proving my ability to excel. In the end I did not want the life of a professional academic. And the most oft-cited alternatives for those with a doctorate in ethics, which I had planned to pursue, were nothing I wanted, either; I had no interest in being an ethics advisor to some big corporation, a job that too often means circumventing profit-diminishing foundational moral stances through arguments on behalf of ethical exceptions. What I wanted, for 50 years, was to prove that people were wrong about me, to exceed their low expectations. When people mentally translated my work as a furniture maker to “She makes ‘furniture’ out of pallets or fruit crates and decorates her work with cut-outs of ducks and bunnies – you know, because that’s what women like,” I would show them my take on an Edwardian hallstand with a perfectly fitted door and drawer and a cornice of compound bevels. Anyone who assumed that, as a tradesperson, I would be less intellectually curious and articulate than someone who works in an office (any kind of office would do; this is a matter of longstanding prejudice against “manual” and “blue-collar” workers) would have to square that assumption with a growing body of published essays and books in which I brought my academic training in Classical languages, history and ethics to bear on the social and economic significance of commonplace things such as kitchen furnishings. I did my best to illustrate the ways in which a house, typically thought of as “property,” could fulfill many of the roles we usually associate with a human partner. In response to the critics who might deride my ways of putting cabinets together, I would point out that there really are as many ways to build a cabinet as there are cabinetmakers, not to mention that the cabinets I build, however simple their construction, are far stronger than most that are commercially made.
No ducks and bunnies. Edwardian Hallstand, circa 2002. Curly white oak with locally quarried limestone counters. (Photo: Spectrum Creative Group.)
Throughout all of this, I now saw, I had moved forward in reaction to others. I was dangerously dependent on outside forces, people who expressed their opposition, no less than their approval. It suddenly felt deeply exhausting. I let my awareness of that exhaustion sink in. Whatever might happen with the course of my cancer, I was not going back to my old ways of living.
To be fair, those other-influenced decisions always reflected something of me – a love of houses, gardens and animals; an intellectual fascination with the endless ways in which people make meaning out of the seemingly random circumstances into which we are born; a desire to make myself a home. But viewing the span of my working life as a whole, I was staggered by a deep, yet vague sense that I had always been running away. What was I running away from – the person I was not, but was too often taken to be?
A friend recently took a furniture design course taught by a guy I’ll call Mr. Famous Furniture Maker. During the class there were lectures, field trips to find inspiration, drawing lessons, scale model-making and critiques.
“Well,” I asked my friend, “how was the class?”
“Great,” he replied. “Now I know how to design furniture that looks exactly like Mr. Famous Furniture Maker’s pieces.”
This is, of course, one way to learn design. But not everyone wants to become a Junior Sam Maloof or James Krenov the VIII. Some woodworkers just want to make a side table, dry sink or tater bin that is well-proportioned and pleasing to look at.
One excellent path to learn design has been blazed by Jim Tolpin and George Walker, who have written a series of books that teach design using artisan geometry and whole-number ratios. During the last 11 years, we’ve edited all of Tolpin and Walker’s books for Lost Art Press and deeply appreciate that their approach is style-agnostic and crystal-clear.
This book, “Principles of Design,” is an excellent and complementary approach to Tolpin and Walker. It was first published in 1916 under the title “Industrial Arts Design” and written by William H. Varnum (1878-1946). We renamed it “Principles of Design,” which is a far more apt title.
Varnum, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, was the author of two important design books, plus some other works on setting up a curriculum for shop teachers.
I own copies of all his works, but this one is my favorite. The book was written to teach shop teachers how to teach furniture design. And the book reads like the syllabus for an excellent college-level course in the fundamentals of furniture design.
Varnum lays out a series of step-by-step rules to guide the reader through the process of designing furniture, pottery and metalwork. It begins with function and form, of course. But it then delves into common-sense rules for dividing up a form both horizontally and vertically. These rules work. And once you read them and see the accompanying illustrations, I think you’ll say: “Of course.”
Varnum explains how to “enrich” the shape or contours of a design. Then how to enrich the surfaces. And there is an excellent section on using color.
Many of these rules have been embedded in buildings and furniture for centuries. Many of us know the rules innately. But Varnum puts them to paper in ways that allow us to use them to create new works.
“Principles of Design” was written during the waning years of the American Arts & Crafts movement, so the examples used in the book are gorgeous Craftsman designs and earlier traditional forms. Varnum’s rules apply to all furniture forms, but the austerity of the Arts & Crafts pieces in the book help make the use of his rules easy to comprehend and digest.
Bright paper plus stochastic printing make this book a pleasure to read.
Mechanical Specifications
The original printing of this book was gorgeous, so we sought to equal or exceed its specifications. The book is 7″ x 9-5/8″ and printed on #80 matte coated paper, which is a close match to the original. Because some of the details in the photos are dark, we chose a press that could do stochastic printing, which gives sharper detail. The book’s signatures are sewn together, backed with fiber tape and wrapped with heavy boards. The covers are wrapped in cotton cloth and printed in gold foil.
Like all our books, “Principles of Design” is printed in the United States. It is $41 plus shipping. We will offer this book to all our retailers worldwide, but it is up to them to carry it or not.
Note: We have printed only 3,000 copies of this historical text. Because space at our warehouse is at a premium, we do not plan on any future press runs of “Principles of Design.”
