The Peggy Shepherd Pottery Collection (at least, most of it) now lives in Nancy Hiller’s office. The whisk brush was made by Aspen Golann.
After a small flurry of emails this past weekend related to the dust jacket in which Nancy, Christopher, Megan and I discussed word choice, the number of lines, the space between “Shop” and “Tails” and more, “Shop Tails” is now at the printer.
Makers, whether of a dust jacket, a book, a spoon or a kitchen, tend to eschew materialism, or, at least certain types of materialism. And yet we make material goods. As Nancy writes below, the “things vs people” dichotomy can be false and destructive, and that holds true whether you’re talking about a person on a factory production line or someone working in a one-person workshop.
In this excerpt from Chapter 11, Winnie (1996-2010), Nancy addresses the concept of materialism, and suggests considering a new way of looking at objects – appreciating how things embody important characteristics of their makers, as well as memorialize others.
— Kara Gebhart Uhl
When Winnie, William, Lizzie, Tom and I officially moved into the house next to my shop in the winter of 2004-2005, I kept the dogs confined to the laundry room and kitchen instead of giving them free run of the house. Not only was I loath to see any repeat of the destruction at my bungalow in town; I had begun laying the hickory floors in my spare time, and it was an unimaginably slow job, done on my hands and knees.
Alan had kindly loaned me a flooring nailer. It was the manual type you whack with a dead-blow mallet. I tried it repeatedly, but the hickory was so hard it just bent the nails. Once a nail was bent, it was far more time-consuming to remove from the dense wood than it would have been to drive by hand. A pneumatic nailer might have done the trick, but I didn’t have one, so I bought several pounds of large finish nails and recalibrated my expectations. I had to pre-drill the tongue of each board about every 18 inches along its length to keep it from splitting. I drove the nails with a hammer and finished with a nail set. It took a week of spare time to lay the floor in the 13 x 18-foot living room, but as I watched the hickory spread slowly across the OSB subfloor, I was thrilled by the transformation in my surroundings.
After the living room I moved down the hall to the bedrooms, then hired my friend John Hewett to sand the floors. I applied two coats of Waterlox Original tung oil just before driving to Florida with a kitchen full of cabinets for Maggie and her husband – the tung oil was so heavy on the solvent that I didn’t want to be in the house while it cured.
Considering how much work the floors took, I was not about to see them scratched up by the dogs’ claws, so I decided to confine them to the kitchen and laundry room, rather than allowing them the run of the house.
***
Every so often someone complains that I’m too protective of material artifacts, whether the floors in my house, the top of our kitchen table or the quilt made by our friend Kim, a gift when Mark and I were married – “Use the delicate cycle! Those are Kim’s hand-sewn stitches!” These criticisms, which are often veiled, pit things against people (or things against dogs, in the case of my floors), implying that I value the former over the latter.
I get it. When I was around 10, Esse, gave me a melodica, a hybrid between a wind instrument and a keyboard. You blew into a mouthpiece, pressing keys to produce different notes. The resulting sound struck me as artificial, and the instrument itself was mostly made of plastic. It didn’t seem like a serious instrument. I had no idea back then that the melodica was good enough for the coolest of professional musicians, like Jon Batiste on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” I was touched that she’d bought it for me, but not that interested in learning to play it.
The gift of the melodica coincided with the influx of hippies living in our yard. From them I learned that attachment to material things was bad. “You gotta let it go, man. Free yourself,” they’d say – not about my melodica, but about other, grown-up things. Their happiness living with few possessions impressed me. I wanted to follow their example. So one Saturday morning, when a couple mentioned they were going to a swap meet to divest themselves of still more possessions, I asked if I could join them. It would be an exercise in renunciation.
I set the melodica down with a bunch of other people’s stuff on a fold-up table in a dusty parking lot cooked by the Florida sun. I think I priced it at $25. Eventually someone haggled me down to $8. The money wasn’t important; what mattered was that I was letting go of another object I didn’t use. I was training myself to avoid attachments. I overrode the pang of guilt as I took the cash – my dear grandma had given the instrument to me – and told myself to grow up. When I told my grandma, she was hurt. “I bought that for you,” she said. “It was a gift.” She wasn’t trying to make me feel bad; she was expressing how she felt. I’ve been troubled by my superficial take on the melodica ever since.
As I thought about that experience over subsequent years, I came to see “things versus people” as a dichotomy that’s false and destructive. You can’t even have things without people; we’re interdependent. People make things, whether they do so on a factory production line or in a one-person workshop. Then other people put them to use. Beyond this, things are more than mute material; they express their makers’ dreams and values. This connection between maker and made object is most visible in artifacts crafted by individual makers to their own designs, or designs they’ve adapted significantly – think Megan Fitzpatrick’s Dutch toolchests, or Danielle Rose Byrd’s bowls. But even anonymous workers on the production line at Toyota or General Electric are expressing their dreams of a good life, albeit less directly, as they cut, weld or assemble parts to other peoples’ designs using tools and equipment they don’t own.
Material artifacts are also repositories of memory. They keep people and places alive. In my office I have a Victorian bamboo étagère, its shelves filled with antique ceramics. The stand and all of its contents – a Dutch urn resembling an antique from Greece; two sugar-and-cream sets from Japan; pitchers and vases from Germany, Romania, England – once stood in the entryway of my friend Peggy’s house, a converted timber-frame barn. She’d bought the barn in pieces and made it into a home filled with character and natural light. I always coveted the pottery collection (and kicked myself for doing so, because it was hers). After Peggy died, her daughter held a barn sale. I bought the shelf and the ceramics – not only because I loved them, but to keep those things together as the Peggy Shepherd Pottery Collection. Peggy lives on in these artifacts, as well as many others in our home: the curvy black metal chair she gave me at Christmas in 1998, the funky painted cabinet a former boyfriend of hers had cobbled together, the beautifully upholstered chair she gave me after I built cabinets for her barn-house kitchen. “You didn’t charge me enough,” she said. “I want you to have this.”
The World War II-era sofa in our living room, which I bought from Peggy many years ago, reminds me to be thankful that we’re not hiding in bomb shelters while subsisting on tinned meat, chicory “coffee” and other rations. The salvaged leaded-glass window I built into our bathroom wall carries forward the legacy of a client’s family home that was demolished as part of an airport expansion. The ceramic model of a terraced house on my office bookshelves reminds me of my first woodworking boss, Raymond, who gave it to me when Patrick and I were married, adding “You’ve always said you want a house of your own.”
When we buy things from those who make them, we not only support those craftspeople, we also do our part to keep craft traditions alive. In the factory-made Arts & Crafts-style cabinet I bought tenth-hand from a back room in a Bloomington grocery store in 1995 lies a silver cheese knife made by Hart Silversmiths in Chipping Campden, England, the lone surviving enterprise from Charles Robert Ashbee’s Guild and School of Handicraft. Mixed in with blue-green ceramics bought at yard sales and junk shops is a vase bought for me by my former husband, Kent, and his wife, Mary, on a visit to the Van Briggle Pottery & Tile. There are small pieces by Ephraim Faience that I purchased at The Omni Grove Park Inn and a Granny Smith green cabinet vase I bought from Scott Draves of Door Pottery in 2015, when we were in neighboring booths at a show in Chicago.
Even mass-produced artifacts deserve more respect than we generally give them, at least in the States. We have a famously materialistic culture in which too few people have more than the most superficial, consumerist understanding of material objects. As Elaine Scarry pointed out in her 1985 book, “The Body in Pain,”
…anonymous, mass-produced objects contain a collective and equally extraordinary message: Whoever you are, and whether or not I personally like or even know you, in at least this one small way, be well…. Whether they reach someone in the extreme conditions of imprisonment or in the benign and ordinary conditions of everyday life, the handkerchief, blanket, and bucket of white paint contain within them the wish for well-being: ‘Don’t cry; be warm; watch now, in a few minutes even these constricting walls will look more spacious.’1
Instead of “things versus people,” it would be more fitting to appreciate how things embody important characteristics of their makers, as well as memorialize others.
The things we live with also shape us in ways we often don’t even see. They impose their own demands on our behavior: We have to learn how to use the new email platform, drain the compressor, grease the sander’s gears, prime the pump. Many things, from the humble kitchen whisk to the thickness planer, bicycle or car, become extensions of our bodies, magnifying our abilities, for better or worse, and sometimes leading us to imagine ourselves more powerful than we are. (All it takes to prove the validity of this statement is a power outage.)
Jennie Alexander was born John Alexander on Dec. 8, 1930. She has lived in row houses her entire life, and their vernacular architecture defines, in part, not only the city she has always called home, but also a more intimate part of herself.
A lifelong Baltimorean, Jennie was educated in the Baltimore school systems, which were quite good, she says. “I was a lonely child. I had a very, very busy father and my mother was rather reserved — a good mother, but rather reserved. After 32 years of AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) I have come to recognize that they did the best they could. And I’m starting to recognize that I’m doing the best I can, rather than reaching further, further, further.”
Those who know Jennie consider her a pioneer, instrumental in designing the now-iconic two-slat post-and-rung shaved chair, and responsible for the revolution of “greenwoodworking” (a word she coined, and spelled as one word, she insists, because “it sings.”). Her complex, twisty past in many ways resembles the sinuous shavings that once hooked over her right ear (one of her favorite stories, more on that later), and is essential to understanding how a jazz musician turned divorce lawyer became one of the most beloved chairmakers of our time.
And at 86 years old, Jennie wants to share her story – all of it.
“I had a sister, but we weren’t close,” Jennie says, delving into her childhood while drinking a hot cup of Throat Coat tea. “I was intelligent. I was anxious. I was inquiring. I read out the local library. I was a child of the alleys. There was a park also fairly close by where I could romp. I was a great walker.”
The Alexanders’ maid, Maggie, was Jennie’s “most interesting influence,” and it was Maggie who Jennie was around most as a child. “She knew children and we got along very well,” Jennie says. “I can remember her sitting me on the window sill of the second floor and holding me firmly, singing to me to teach me to climb without fear, to teach me tone. Songs were powerful spirits.”
Jennie’s father, a well-known lawyer, was an anxious man, she says. “My father and I never got along. He knew that when I was a child I wasn’t going to be manly, because I was little. And he sent me to the greatest doctors at Johns Hopkins. As a result, they hung a swing set in the passageway between the kitchen and dining room, and I was supposed to swing on it and stretch.”
This, Jennie says, led to lifelong anxiety and feelings of isolation.
“My mother wasn’t exactly touchy-feely. She was a good mother, and by the way, they both did the best they could, 100 percent. But that led to a lot of these incidents that got me to where I went.”
The incidents Jennie is referring to come later in her story – mostly key people in her life that prompted transformation, including a psychologist, Charles Hummel and Peter Follansbee.
Kindnesses and Recognizing ‘the Flash’
Jennie spent her childhood pounding away at the piano and later became a self-taught jazz musician who played professionally. “I enjoyed that very much, and I met some wonderful people,” she says. “I grew up in the time when New Orleans jazz was being revived and at the same time be-bop was being created. And it was very interesting that the two groups coincided. In other words, they knew each other. They hung out together. We got together and had a good time.”
The Baltimore Jazz Trio, 2002
One of the more well-known jazz musicians at the time was a man named Benny, who Jennie said was very active on the be-bop side, when not in jail. The two never met until many years later, when Jennie was transitioning from male to female. It was 2007. The last job Jennie ever played as a male was with Benny on drums. The two were part of a trio playing at one of Jennie’s alma maters, St. John’s College.
“It was a wonderful job,” Jennie says. “I had driven Benny down from Baltimore and we drove back and I said, ‘Benny, would you like dinner?’ And he said, ‘Sure.’ And so I went upstairs, came back as a female and we went to dinner. We had a very pleasant dinner. He is just a nice, gentle person with a wonderful beat, by the way. And two-thirds of the way into dinner Benny looked and me and said, ‘John! You’ve really changed!’ And that was the nicest, from-the-heart little thing.”
Nothing more was said, and the two finished dinner. “It speaks to jazz, friendship and kindness,” Jennie says. “And those are such wonderful, wonderful aspects of life that I enjoy and, of course, friendship and kindness have much to do with woodworking, too.”
These days Jennie loves when a stranger calls, writes or visits, and she can tell that they’ve shaved wood and they know what that experience is like. “You can see it in their eyes,” she says, describing it as a flash. “It’s incredible. The beauty of that for me is this was given to me, greenwoodworking. And therefore my calling is to give it back. So if they call, I listen. I answer. I think. I’m willing to be called again. There is a spirit of shaving wood that fills a place in me that otherwise is not filled as a person, as a thinker, as a human being. It was given to me, so I give it back.”
Jennie has kept regular files of folks who have contacted her and responses, and every year a few stand out. “They become correspondents, students, critics, adventurers, and it’s such a blessing that that and music has sustained me,” she says.
Woodworking, never mind greenwoodworking, did not define Jennie until later in life. But the seed was always there.
From Student to Jazz Musician to Divorce Lawyer
As a teenager Jennie spent a lot of time taking down dead locust trees on her father’s country property. To do so, she would scrape out some dirt around the trees’ shallow roots and then simply push the trees down. “The problem,” she says, laughing, “you’ve got dead locust limbs up there. And we kids, we didn’t even have helmets on. Absolutely nuts. When we’d hear a crack, we’d run. And so we got the trees down, and I had a little experience with them.”
With both parents working, Jennie’s mother often left Jennie a to-do list, with the freedom to pick up any needed tools from Boulevard Hardware. Jennie says her mother told the owner, “If Johnny comes in and wants anything, you provide him with the best.” What Jennie’s mother didn’t say was that, as a child in Quincy, Mass., she was a student of the Educational Sloyd System, which provided training in the use of tools and materials, and, Jennie says, focused on proportion work.
“So Mother knew a little about wood and grain and so on, and she also had a post-and-rung rocking chair,” Jennie says. “But she never told me when I was growing up or when I was woodworking that I was doing it wrong or anything. Except that she told the hardware man to furnish me with any tool I needed.”
Jennie attended high school at Baltimore City Polytechnic Institute, which specialized in engineering. After graduating she enrolled at Johns Hopkins University as a sophomore to study engineering and was immediately bored. She says the only difference between college and high school at that point was they were teaching to four decimal points rather than two, so she had to get a better slide rule.
Jennie began singing and playing the piano in bars at night, and eventually dropped out of Johns Hopkins and worked for a while. She then attended St. John’s College in Annapolis, a participant in its “100 Great Books” program.
“I learned a lot, but not as much as I should have because in those four years, three of them were consumed with my relationship with Harlan James,” Jennie says. “He was a much better musician than I, but we were both students of traditional jazz, and we played duets for three years. He’s still in his 80s playing professionally in New York.”
The Baltimore Jazz Trio, 1952
After St. John’s Jennie began playing jazz professionally, up to five days a week, making a living. “But one morning I wake up and I have this hideous problem,” she says. “I’m not happy because I know that I’m a self-taught musician. And though I have worked things out – now I can play rather well, and in the style of traditional New Orleans music or blues – I know I’m never going to be a great musician.”
This, she says, was because she didn’t have the real fluidity of playing tone – improvisation. “I can do it, but I’m not free of it because I don’t have that much command, you see, of the keys and of the chords. And that’s very typical of self-taught musicians. Some of them go on to train themselves but that’s not going to happen with me, I know that. So I would love to be a musician but I want to be a very good musician and I’m close, but I won’t make it unless I study, and study isn’t in me for some reason.”
And then, while lying in bed another morning, Jennie hears a voice.
“Go to law school,” the voice said. “And I knew exactly who that voice was. The voice as the voice of Snowball, the imaginary voice of a banjo player who had played on local AM radio in Baltimore when I was 8, 10 years old – ‘Uncle Bill and Snowball.’ Snowball has come back, buried in me. So what do I do? I get up, eat breakfast, put on my best suit and walk to the law school. The University of Maryland is within walking distance.”
Jennie simply walked inside and asked, “May I see the dean?” The receptionist said yes.
“And the dean is an old gentleman, wearing the old library coat sometimes professors wore to keep their suits from getting dusty from books,” she says. “And he’s a Southern gentleman. And he says, ‘From what you tell me you graduated from Polytechnic Institute and from what you tell me you graduated from the Annapolis liberal arts schools, St. John’s. Those are excellent places to learn. You’re admitted.’ No background. No records. Nothing from other schools. And so on that day, probably the 12th of August, just before law school was starting, that’s what happened. Snowball and the dean sent me to law school.”
Jennie took night classes so she wouldn’t be tempted to play music. For each hour of class, she studied an hour, and at the end, came in first in the Maryland bar exam. “But that was also because of the approach I took,” she said.
Years before Jennie had spent a year working in her father’s law office. As a result, she answered her exam questions as if she was working back in that law office – if she didn’t know the answer, she said she didn’t know. “And the law examiner, he probably gave me an 8 or a 9 out of 10. He said, ‘You know, I like this kid because he doesn’t bullshit me. He doesn’t guess. Because when he’s going to work for me and gives me a guess, I’m dead.’ And I had figured that out working in my father’s office for a year. And that’s why I came in first.” That honesty extended into Jennie’s law career, and served her well.
To imagine Jennie as a lawyer, imagine her as she appeared in a magazine article that featured Maryland’s five best divorce lawyers: a 5’3” male wearing a three-piece suit with a vest, what she calls “Methodist minister’s shoes,” with little dots around them, and a red, white-dotted bowtie.
While being interviewed for that article, by the way, Jennie refused to share details about some of her more interesting cases. The journalist persisted but Jennie stood her ground, so as not to out and shame her clients. The journalist left and Jennie assumed she would be featured poorly. But she wasn’t. Twenty-five years later Jennie says she reread the article and realized love in a place she hadn’t seen it before. “I realized love appears in many, many, many places,” she says. “And it appears for me, also, when I’m shaving green wood. And in a piece of greenwoodworking.”
Like the sinuous fibers in a thin shaving, Jennie has come to realize that all of her experiences relate tenuously yet meaningfully, in a way that’s difficult to see until you reach the age of 86.
Her Moment
It was while lawyering that Jennie became interested in woodworking. By then Jennie, then John, was married to Joyce. “Joyce,” Jennie says, “my wife of years and years and years, who is now deceased, and a total sweet, blessed antidote to this very fast, very nervous, very jazzy, very anxious person.”
Jennie was reading books on woodworking and chairmaking, and had collected some tools. Her neighbor, Jack Goembel, let her use his shop. Later another woodworking friend, when he decided to stop woodworking to become a mail carrier, sold her his lathe, band saw and drill press. It was the first loan Jennie and Joyce ever took out and it was with Joyce’s insistence. “It was just so beautiful,” Jennie says.
Jennie and Joyce made several trips to Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community, where they met Sister Mildred. The first visit was to see the chairs. Sister Mildred said, “You know, it’s interesting. People think we’re chairs.” They visited a couple more times (to see the chairs, yes, but to also learn about the Shakers). Soon, Jennie decided that she wanted to build a Shaker one-slat dining chair.
Once home Jennie called a firewood man she found in the phone book and asked if he could deliver some 6’ hickory logs. He could, and did, and when he dropped them on the pavement out back, the whole house trembled.
Without a froe Jennie says she whacked them up into a somewhat cylindrical shape and put them on the lathe.
“Now the lathe had a 2-horsepower motor and the sticks were, let’s say, 4” in diameter and all bumpy and irregular,” she says. “The lathe danced across the cellar floor because of the lack of symmetry. So I danced along with them. And then, finally, I got down to the sapwood – and by the way, the wood is soaking wet, which is the other requirement I needed – and the sinuous shavings keep flying through the air and hooking on my right ear. They come off the gouge, hit my right ear and they’re soaking wet. I tell myself I will never go back to the lumberyard. That was my moment.”
And with that, Jennie made her first, rather clunky, she says, one-slat Shaker dining chair.
“I’m John, practicing lawyer, busier than the dickens, full of himself, and by the way I was a divorce trial lawyer, not just a settler,” she says, “which is about the worst profession for a human being that can be.” John spent a lot of his time listening to clients in crisis. Though successful, lawyering never had the flash that woodworking did.
It was around this time that Jennie became a member of the Early American Industries Association (EAIA). At an early meeting she met Charles Hummel, a curator at Winterthur. Charles was Jennie’s introduction to the academic side of woodworking.
Remember when Jennie was talking about that flash? Charles, she says, saw that flash in Jennie. “And his response was to show me, but never explain it,” she says.
Charles was often invited to museums a day before EAIA meetings to discuss complicated issues with staff regarding furniture and tools.
“Charles would often say, ‘John, would you like to go with me?’ And off we would go,” Jennie says. “So I would get exposed to the museum people, their problems, and the professional students. And I would get to listen. And some of these conversations took place down in what they call the Study Collection. Oh my goodness gracious. Here I am with my eyes popping, listening with one ear while looking at everything around me. And, of course, the beauty of what I’m looking at down there is it’s often broken up. And I’m a fiend for traditional joinery. And they were very generous, instructed me, gave me slides and all the information I needed.”
Charles knew what Jennie wanted to see and often, while walking around with a docent, Charles would purposefully lead the docent away, from, for example, a chair that interested Jennie. And while they’d be engaged in conversation, Jennie would be under the chair to get a better look.
“It was incredible,” she says. “We laughed together and we were very personable and I’m still dear friends with he and his wife and oodles of people because they, how should I put it? They loved me before I loved myself. And they treasured me. They sensed this little flame, you see, because they had this little flame. And sometimes, it was very interesting, it turned out I learned a little more about these things than they did. Particularly the construction.”
Jennie became an expert and her study of antique furniture grew into hours spent experimenting with theories on joinery. She decided to write a book (which later would be published as the revolutionary “Make a Chair from a Tree,” in 1978 by Taunton Press, and then later in 1999 in DVD form, directed by Anatol Polillo, a professional videographer and a former student).
However, just as the book was almost complete, yet another twist.
Inspiring a Movement
Jennie was slated to demonstrate at an EAIA event. A week before the event she got a call. “Oh, Mr. Alexander,” the caller said. “We’re terribly sorry but you can’t demonstrate.”
“Why is that?” Jennie asked.
“It’s because you’re using a lathe in front of an audience and we were told by the insurance people that if the spindle flies out into the audience and perhaps injures someone …”
Jennie was devastated.
“I’m down in the basement kicking and cussing and Joyce is upstairs,” Jennie says.
“John?” Joyce says. “Would you like a cup of tea?”
“Yuh.”
Jennie says she went upstairs, the perfect picture of despair. After Jennie sips some tea Joyce says, “Look. You cut down a tree.Then you take your wedges and your mallet and you split it up. And then you split it into smaller pieces. And then you drawknife and you make a rather good cylindrical piece of wood because now you know how to do all that, not like before. So why don’t you just keep going and shave the entire chair?”
And Jennie did.
And when she returned from the EAIA meeting, she brought with her the shaved chair parts, and made her first entirely shaved two-slat post-and-rung chair.
Once finished, the publication of “Make a Chair from a Tree” was one-and-a-half months away. John Kelsey, then the editor of Fine Woodworking, at Jennie’s request, removed all references to the lathe and the reader was presented with a book about a shaved two-slat post-and-rung chair.
A side hatchet, which Jennie made from a standard double-bevel hatchet.
“Give them a mallet, give them a wedge, pay them a lot of attention, give them a froe, fine split it, give them a drawknife, give them a spokeshave, and they’ve got a chair,” she says.
By now it was 1978. “And I keep teaching and teaching and teaching and traveling there and traveling elsewhere,” she says. “So the shaving, really, made the existence of the post-and-rung chair a reality in this country.” People from all over the country were becoming more interested in hand tools, traditional woodworking, greenwoodworking and chairmaking. Jennie’s classes at Country Workshops in North Carolina were filled with experts in the field of traditional furniture, folks like Robert Trent.
And Jennie says, over and over, that it was thanks to Joyce, and a cup of tea.
In addition to the traveling, teaching, demonstrating and chairmaking, Jennie was still visiting her beloved museums. And eventually, she was given permission to carefully disassemble the door of an unusual wall cabinet, which was located in Winterthur’s Study Collection. So she popped out the pins of the drawbored mortise-and-tenon joint and, “It was fascinating,” she says. “Totally fascinating and a large tribute to an incredible piece of joinery. Here I am, this divorce lawyer (and I think I might have been diddling with gin still then, which led to a 32-year career with AA, which has been a wonderful journey) and I take this thing apart and it’s unbelievable. There is no literature on this. There is no written thing to my knowledge of anybody describing the joint.”
Why?
“The museum people are fascinated by 17th-century woodworking so much that they want to distribute it and show it to the world,” Jennie says. “And so what they do is they glue it together. It’s creaky, it’s bumpy, so it’s bye-bye joint.” Most academics were more interested in who made the furniture and where it was from versus how it was constructed, Jennie says. “And then they met this untutored person, who now they’re quite familiar with, and they let me go down there and take the sucker apart.”
Another story: One day Charles took Jennie up to a little room filled with 17th century items upstairs at Winterthur. They come upon a chest covered with a rug. And on top of the rug, about $25,000 worth of trinkets — a small cup, a little brass spoon, etc.
“And Charles – I’ll never forget this scene – takes his necktie, droops it over each little item, holds it to the necktie and carries it to the top of the next chest so he can open this one,” Jennie says. “Not saying a word! And so I figured if Charles is not saying a word, I’ll shut up, which is rare for me.”
After all the trinkets were carefully removed, Charles threw open the chest.
“He doesn’t say a damn word,” Jennie says. “And this chest has two back posts, which are both terrible looking. They have knots. They have hatchet slashes. So there I am staring at these two back posts and all of a sudden it strikes me that these two posts are the faded, scratched mirror image of each other. That is if one has a bump, the other has a crevice. In other words, these two posts were rived. They were split.”
At this point Jennie was teaching at Drew Langsner’s Country Workshops. Drew and his wife, Louise, were instrumental in Jennie’s evolution as a chairmaker, particularly in the support they offered by providing a place for Jennie to teach, and bringing in students from all over the world which still, to this day, amazes Jennie.
Peter Follansbee and Jennie at Country Workshops.
While Jennie was teaching at Country Workshops, Peter was taking classes.
And the two, as Jennie says, “just hit it off.” They would often talk about joinery, these majestic chests made out of rived wood and the disassembled drawbored mortise-and-tenon joint Jennie discovered at Winterthur. And, as this was before computers, they would look at slides.
While Peter says he saw the slides of the disassembled cupboard door at Country Workshops, Jennie insists it was at her house, in Baltimore. But the where doesn’t matter. What matters is the resulting six books of correspondence sitting in three-ring binders upstairs in Jennie’s row house – page after page of ideas, arguments, drawings and questions between Peter and Jennie, which ultimately resulted in an article on the construction of 17th-century mortise-and-tenon joinery and “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree” (Lost Art Press).
Jennie describes it as a “wonderful explosion” and says Peter simply rocketed off. “It was just incredible to watch,” she says. And while Peter “zoomed off into space,” Jennie says, she, “somehow for some reason or another, said, it’s time to go back to making two-slat post-and-rung chairs. And that’s what I’ve done since.”
And she’s done so, “realizing with gratitude the kindnesses to a very precocious, young, unstudied man, from the academics and also from the really accomplished joiners in North Carolina and New England, Maine and Delaware. And it has been a tremendous blessing. A tremendous blessing.”
And Jennie’s comfortable with having stuck to two-slat post-and-rung chairs. (Her health is such that she no longer builds them today.) Many consider her design, which is not from an artist’s or designer’s perspective, she says, but rather a nod to the lumbar spine, the body, perfection.
Despite being responsible for revolutionizing the world of chairmaking, Jennie says “the wonderful thing about this is it has so little to do with me. It’s almost as I’ve been led step by step by step. It was like someone was pulling me by my nose – here we go, you little funny man with the hat.”
Mentorship and Happy Incidents
So who is Jennie today?
“First of all, I’m much, much better,” she says. “At 77 years of age it was suggested that I transgendered by my wonderful therapist who I see every fall when I get depressed.” In the fall of 2007 Jennie visited her therapist, as she does every year, and Jennie shared her “old sad stories with no new data.” The therapist listened, looked at her and simply said, “Are you ready to be a woman?”
“Now, obviously, I had a lot of indications along the way that I wasn’t exactly the full, red-blooded male, but I had never really considered it,” Jennie says. “My wife had died, god bless her, in ’96, my children (Jennie has three daughters) were up in age. I had never even thought about it. And she says, ‘Are you ready to be a woman?’ Seven words. I said, ‘Certainly!’ So we laid out a little course.”
And while transgendering helped Jennie, woodworking, she says, has always been the ultimate cure to years of anxiety and feelings of isolation. “That’s the place where I can be myself,” she says. “That was where I could express my creativity.”
Woodworking, and also playing music. If Jennie could be summed up in two words, it would be “greenwoodworker” and “musician.”
And, I would add, mentor.
Jennie talks a lot about the kindnesses that she has been given, the happy accidents and run-ins and introductions that have led to new discoveries, opportunities and lifelong friends. But in addition to the many students she has taught and corresponded with over the years, several stick out, including Evangelos Courpas, Nathaniel Krause and, of course, Peter.
Jennie taught Peter greendwoodworking, chairmaking, and introduced him to 17th century joinery. “He and I were co-apprentices, whatever that would be, for quite a while, all the way through the stool book,” Jennie says. “And we wrote back and forth and it was a most exciting time. And then he was just rocketing off in space and he is No. 1. He is a better carver. He is a better craftsman. There is no question about that. So I went back to making two-slat post-and-rung chairs, which is really where I belonged for a lot of reasons.”
Evangelos Courpas (left) had a five-year informal apprenticeship with Jennie.
Evangelos, who Jennie calls Geli, was born in Baltimore in 1960. He was 13 years old when he began a five-year informal apprenticeship in greenwoodworking with Jennie, which took place during the period Jennie was writing “Make a Chair from a Tree.”
Geli lived a few doors down the street from Jennie, and simply began hanging around Jennie’s shop. Eventually Jennie gave him a key. “The interesting thing was, and I don’t know why this ever happened, but I never told him anything,” Jennie says. “I never used words. He watched, you know I might go a little slower on something I was doing, and he watched and he watched and he watched. And after a long time I went to the basement one more morning and there was Geli, putting his chair together. He must have been doing this in the early mornings because I had never seen him making one. At this point, he was shaving rungs for me, or so I thought. And here was a darn, daggone chair. And I’ll never forget the shy, little smile on his face. He was making his first chair.”
But what Jennie found most interesting about Geli’s chair was that it wasn’t a copy. Geli’s back post-and-rung slats, which Jennie says are the most dramatic thing about her chairs, had been shaved just a little bit differently. “He had come up with a feeling for the back posts, which was his,” she says. “You could tell a Geli chair.”
After graduating with a studio art degree from Oberlin College in 1984, Geli began making art and furniture. He spent years building and creating, while also earning more degrees in things like ceramics and electronic integrated arts. In 2013, Jennie gifted Geli tools and a workbench, and since then Geli has gone back to his roots, opening up a woodworking studio in Liberty, S.C.
And then there’s Nathaniel Krause. When Nathaniel was a young teenager, Jennie received a phone call from a school in West Virginia where she was slated to teach a chairmaking class. “Mr. Alexander?” the caller said. “We have a young man here would like to take your chairmaking class and he’s a very nice young man.” He was a young teenager. Jennie said, “Certainly.”
It was clear from the start that Nathaniel was a good student. At one point, when the students were up to their hips in shavings, Nathaniel, who had finished all his parts, simply picked up a broom and started sweeping – something Jennie still remembers to this day.
When Nathaniel’s parents came to pick him up from that class, Jennie shaved and put on a clean shirt. She explained to his parents the importance of the youth in America being involved in traditional woodworking. “They seemed impressed,” Jennie says.
“And so Nathaniel expressed an interest to come to Baltimore in the summer and would you believe his parents drove him from West Virginia and he stayed six weeks, maybe eight weeks,” Jennie says. “And then he started to learn all kinds of things because I was playing with joint stools then, and joinery and chairmaking. And we just had a whale of a time. He is an excellent craftsman.”
The next summer, Nathaniel took the train to Baltimore and again, spent six weeks with Jennie. The summer after that, Nathaniel had his driver’s license and drove to Baltimore for another six weeks.
Nathaniel earned a civil engineering degree from West Virginia University and a masters in civil engineering from Virginia Tech. These days he’s an engineer in Baltimore City Department of Public Works’ Office of Compliance and Laboratories (and was recently named the 2017 Young Engineer of the Year by the Engineering Society of Baltimore).
Once Nathaniel stopped spending his summers with Jennie, for the next 10 years Jennie would still call him, asking him where a tool was – and Nathaniel would tell her. They still have dinner together most Thursday nights.
Jennie’s love of greenwoodworking is infectious. Another example: Jennie still lives at home, alone, and it was suggested that someone visit her five days a week to check on her and provide assistance when needed. Enter Jennie Boyd. In addition to helping Jennie Alexander with daily tasks, Jennie Alexander has been teaching Jennie Boyd greenwoodworking, which Jennie Boyd has fallen in love with – specifically spoon carving. Without much effort, Jennie Alexander has sparked the flash in yet someone else.
In many ways, Jennie attributes her success to others, and “happy incidents.” But the story of her life clearly paints a different picture. It’s the story of an intelligent, anxiety-ridden child who fell in love with music, put herself through law school, immersed herself into the world of traditional woodworking, revitalized shaved chairmaking, coined “greenwoodworking” and “two-slat shaved post-and-rung chair,” mentored many, and rediscovered herself at 77.
“I couldn’t be more fortunate,” she says. “I’m going to die happy, not unfulfilled.”
To end, “You Are My Sunshine,” sung and played on the piano by Jennie, as part of the Baltimore Jazz Trio. You may listen to it here.
Derek (right) and his business partner, Nick, posing for some promo pics for a magazine article circa1996. “I was best man at his wedding,” notes Derek. “We were just reminiscing the other day.”
Most woodworkers familiar with Derek Jones know him as longtime editor of the UK periodical Furniture & Cabinetmaking, a position he held for ten years. Those who follow Derek on Instagram will also know him as a maker of hardwood marking gauges and occasional instructor of furniture making and French polishing, most notably at Robinson House Studio in southeast England. But few of those who aren’t personally close to Derek are aware that, had he not gone into woodworking, he might well have become a chef.
There are many parallels between the kitchen and the workshop, he notes. Both are workspaces filled with dedicated tools, many of them sharp. Both require a commitment to cultivate deep, embodied knowledge of materials and processes while keeping your wits about you lest you curdle a custard or find you’ve created a drawer shaped like the letter Z.
Derek’s culinary interest sprang from his experience as a teenager, when he worked in pubs and restaurants managed by his father, but his dad advised him not to go into the hospitality field because of its “unsociable hours.” He chuckles at his dad’s caveat today; being a self-employed woodworker often comes with similar encroachments on what might otherwise be personal time.
After Derek left school at the age of 17, he took off for the south of France, where he spent a couple of years. There he developed an interest in French peasant food – “good, wholesome stuff,” such as a casserole he still makes today with pork belly or sausage (“quite robust sausage, such as chorizo”), butter beans, cabbage, mushrooms and leeks. “The cabbage goes on last. As soon as it goes to a vibrant green, out it comes, and you’ve got this steaming-hot plate of goodness. It’s heaven. I’d eat it all day every day,” though the rest of his family – his longtime partner, Tracey, and younger daughter, Mahli, who still lives at home – don’t share his enthusiasm for the dish.
“Me and my mum somewhere in the south of France in 1984.”
While in France he worked in bars, restaurants and camp sites – and also as a tour guide on coaches (buses, in the States) bound for Monaco and St. Tropez: “You’d have this little script you’d read out” while pointing out landmarks.
The mansion block in Widley Road, Maida Vale, London W9, where Derek was born in 1964.
Derek was born in greater Paddington, West London, in 1964. His mother has always been a dancer; she spent years on stage as a chorus girl in theaters on London’s West End. Early on, his father worked in property management for a private landlord who had mansion blocks around Maida Vale, north of Paddington. The family left London for Brighton, a city on the coast in southeast England, when Derek was still young. His parents split when he was 10 or 11.
Derek had this “battered and bruised 6-string on loan… [I]t looked like [*&^] but sounded better than any acoustic I’ve played.”
That was when his father got into the business of managing pubs and restaurants. Today, management is widely considered a hardcore skill taught by business schools. But Derek understands that what really makes a good manager is the ability to relate to other people – to understand what matters to them, and provide it in the most satisfying way. Far from being primarily a number cruncher, Derek says, “my dad’s a wandering minstrel, really. Very congenial,” which made him invaluable to the owners of pubs and restaurants where he worked. He’d optimize each operation, then turn it over to other managers. Derek lived with his mother and worked part-time for his dad.
Derek’s father on Derek’s 21st birthday, in one of the restaurants he managed. “Hardly ever saw him without a shirt and tie,” says Derek. “We celebrated his 90th last month and he’s just as dapper now.”
Derek on his 21st birthday.
Today, Derek and Tracey live in the port town of Newhaven, about 12 miles east of Brighton. When they started to look for a place to buy, they couldn’t find anything in Lewes (pronounced “Lewis”), where they were living at the time. But in Newhaven, which Derek calls “the poor relation to Brighton,” they found a 1930s house with a garden and parking for two cars. He has a “tiny little shed” in back that serves as a shop. He insulated the structure, added electrical wiring and moved in his Roubo bench, along with hand tools, a drill press, router and Festool Domino. It’s a set-up that works well; while his “little workshop” is at the end of the garden, he has access to a full suite of tools “at the school.”
Derek with his eldest daughter circa 1990. He was doing more French polishing than furniture making back then, which is how he came to meet Paul Richardson.
“The school” he’s referring to is the London Design & Engineering University Technical College, which operates in partnership with the University of East London Design and Technical College. Although Derek’s teaching currently focuses on engineering, rather than woodworking, his career as an instructor grew out of a venture when he was working as editor of Furniture & Cabinetmaking. In 2014 Derek arranged to bring Chris Schwarz to the U.K. to deliver two classes, the Anarchist’s Toolchest and Dutch Toolchest, at Warwickshire College. The classes were structured to allow young students to take part in sessions that would otherwise be beyond their means. The pieces made by the instructor were filled with hand tools donated by makers from both sides of the pond, including Lee Valley, Sterling Tool Works, Bad Axe, Texas Heritage Tool Works, Walke Moore Tools and Karl Holtey. The fully equipped chests were then auctioned off with the proceeds going back to the host college to support their full-time students. The following year the lineup included Roy Underhill, Tom Fidgen, Peter Follansbee and David Barron and covered two locations over two weeks.
An attendee at one of these classes, Geoffrey Fowler, approached Derek to run and teach at a similar event at a school he was planning to build in London. Derek wasn’t enthusiastic, in part because he was working full-time as editor of the magazine, but the two of them struck up a friendship. Instead of organizing more such classes and events, Derek offered his services to spec out the woodworking shops with tools and equipment that reflected those found in a professional shop. Changes at the magazine coincided with circumstances at the school which meant that Derek was able “come and lend a hand” for one day a week. He’d stand back and watch instructors who, he says, were doing a fine job of teaching but hadn’t necessarily had much, if any, experience in commercial work – i.e., earning a living from work in the field, as distinct from delivering what we know today as “content.” “D’you know what?” he wanted to say; “that’s not actually how we do it commercially.” He realized that he had real-world experience he could contribute to the curriculum. One thing led to another, and before long he was doing a lot more teaching.
Gradually, his teaching shifted to the subject of engineering: the principles of marking things out and making components to fit. The methodology is similar, whether you’re working in wood or metal, and these days he’s teaching more metalwork than woodwork. “It’s not a huge leap, is it, really?” he asks. “We’re still taking small amounts of material off. The vocabulary is very similar; the necessary skills to be able to generate drawings that other people can read, they’re identical.” And even though it’s 2021, he’s still teaching students to draw by hand. “They hate it!” he says. “But I won’t let them go anywhere near software until they can draw on paper. It’s the same with hand tools. I don’t let them go anywhere near a machine unless they can use a file and a saw.” Here he takes a moment to share an anecdote about a student who recently asked if he could use “the long metal sandpaper,” to which Derek replied, “You mean the file?”
Early days
20 Church Street, Brighton. This is where Derek worked as a “Saturday boy” from the age of 15, then on and off for the next four years. “I still have lunch with my old boss, John Hartnett, now,” he adds.
Derek got his start in the trade as a “Saturday boy” around the age of 15, when he had a job restoring antiques. In those relatively dark days, restoration meant stripping, followed by French polishing; there was still scant respect for the patina that develops with use. He also learned to repair furniture, which entailed replicating parts. “I don’t think there’s a better training ground…than to take things apart to find out how all the parts go together,” he remarks. “You learn about joints intimately. You learn about proportions – without realizing you’re soaking up all this information.” His boss, John, taught him to look closely at the subtle differences between Victorian and Georgian furniture. You’d expect Georgian, being older, to be more clunky, he thinks. But it was just the opposite. Anyone familiar with the history of furniture will appreciate why.
“An early morning window cleaning round financed the purchase of a lot of my tools in the early ’80s,” Derek writes. “That’s my mate Steve’s dad’s Morris Marina.” (A Morris Marina is a make and model of car.)
On completion of his “French Sabbatical” in his later teens, Derek returned to John’s emporium to complete his training as a cabinetmaker, supplementing his income with an early-morning window cleaning round in the city center so he could save up money to buy woodworking tools. He got his own shop, a garage behind Hove Station, at “the posher end of Brighton,” and restored pieces to ship by the container-load to the North American market. Brighton is full of antique dealers, he notes, and he was constantly hunting through secondhand shops and auctions for pieces with potential. The city was also home to a thriving furniture making trade; in one square mile he could find French polishers, upholsterers, gilders, carvers and more – all the areas of specialization that make up the traditional furniture industry. An American dealer purchased everything Derek made or had bought for resale, then arranged to receive the container when it reached the United States.
“The first workshop I shared with Paul Richardson and Anthony Bailey early ’90s. It was a wooden hut built for temporary hospital accommodation during the war. Boiling hot in the summer, freezing in the winter.” (Note the v-shapred arm supporting a sliding table on the tablesaw, a standard feature in English shops in the early 1980s.)
After a couple of years, the booming interest in “brown furniture,” as Victorian, Georgian and Regency furniture is often disparagingly known, waned. So Derek turned to smaller items, producing one-off pieces and sometimes replicating others, such as when he bought a pair of chairs and made two more to match, then sold them as a set.
Derek and his Corolla outside his workshop behind Hove station.(Someone pick up that crisp packet, please.)
Derek says he loved this van. The business was A & D because A appears first in the Yellow Pages. “All that antiquing in the ’80s came in handy in the ’90s” is Derek’s understated caption for this grand set of bedroom furniture.
Reception desks were the bread and butter of Derek’s work in the ’90s
In his late 20s Derek embarked on a two-year degree in 3-D design at Northbrook College in the coastal town of Worthing. After graduating, he rented workshop space, this time with a couple of other craftspersons, Paul Richardson (who became editor of The Woodworker magazine and would go on to launch Furniture & Cabinetmaking magazine) and Anthony Bailey (editor of Woodworking Crafts magazine). By now he’d expanded his knowledge from period to contemporary furniture, in addition to having learned to draw and design. He built up the business, which grew to seven people. They built conference tables and other high-end office furniture for corporate clients based in London, such as the Bank of Canada. But “two events you’d never think would impact a rural Sussex shop” dealt his business a critical blow – first, 9/11, then the Enron scandal. Both events “just wiped our business out,” he says – their work was for the kind of clients who’d been based in the Twin Towers and operated internationally. And after Enron, shareholders became a lot more cautious about how the businesses they invested in were spending money.
A boardroom table for the KPMG and Microsoft headquarters, installed in the mid ’90s.
“It was a disaster,” he remembers. To stay afloat, he and his partners had to turn on a dime. But pivot they did, this time to the custom kitchen market, a potentially lucrative business at a time when property values were rising dramatically, particularly in the south of England. Here, though, Derek found, “clients faff about over the color, the handles, everything. All the successful bespoke kitchen makers had a swanky brochure and showroom.” He and his partners couldn’t effectively break into the market, so they sold their business.
Derek calls this “a Regency-esque chaise.” It was part of a suite of furniture for a villa in Portugal.
One of Derek’s kitchen jobs.
Another kitchen.
And…third time’s a charm.
Furniture & Cabinetmaking
This time, Derek turned to drawing and drafting. “I was a freelancer, carrying out site surveys for high-end bespoke fit-outs [installations, in the U.S.], drawing up designs and running the project.” Every now and then he’d rent space in a workshop run by Marc Fish of Robinson House Studio in Newhaven, to build the odd project. Marc showed him a copy of Furniture & Cabinetmaking magazine. “I was horrified,” Derek says. “Good grief, what’s going on here?” he wondered; nothing in the publication related to his real-world experience. “Everything seemed so twee and out of step with current trends and processes. I was used to having my work represented in a magazine format where the style, layout and content compl[e]mented each other. Woodworking magazines at that time were lacking in all respects.” Marc mentioned that the publishers were on the hunt for a new editor. Derek briefly considered applying, then dismissed the idea. A year later the publishers were still looking for an editor, so he applied. “I’d never written anything longer than a postcard before then,” he adds. He told them that while he had no background in publishing, he knew the topic well. Between his appointment to the post and starting at the magazine, Paul Richardson, the founder of F&C and onetime bench mate, had been killed in a traffic accident. “Paul had moved away from F&C by this time to launch several other titles. We hadn’t spoken in years but I was really looking forward to working with him again. It wasn’t to be, though, and as we hadn’t exactly parted on good terms. I felt that maybe I owed him one last favor to restore his creation back to its former self.”
This stationery box by Derek was featured on the cover of The Woodworker in 1995. It was one of the first of a few articles hehad published in that long-running periodical.
He ended up staying in that position for ten years. Throughout that time, the world of print publishing was in trouble. Circulation was in decline; the length of the magazine was getting shorter. When he first took the job as editor, Derek and his colleagues had access to a workshop the publishers provided, which allowed them to generate significant content of their own, but after about 6 years the publishers decided to pay outsiders to produce content instead. The decision grated on Derek. “If you’re teaching, it feels wrong to be teaching a subject you’re not actively pursuing. I teach, and I make stuff. If you’re editing a woodworking magazine, not to be doing any woodworking is just wrong.” In addition, as a seasoned professional woodworker, Derek knew that writing an article and getting the photos and other illustrations took a lot of time, and what the publishers were willing to pay professional woodworkers was far from fair compensation. He had a hard time breaking the low rate to woodworkers who were interested in writing for the magazine – so hard that this challenge, above all others, finally convinced him to change course, which is how he came to his current teaching position.
Marking gauges and cricket tables
Marking gauges.
Derek started making marking gauges when he was editor at Furniture & Cabinetmaking. During his professional career he’d always made things in batches, so he did the same with marking gauges, gradually developing processes that minimized the need for handwork, which took far more time. “I’m at that point now where I’ve refined them and can do a batch of 20 or 30 quite quickly,” he says. “Quickly is a relative term, I rarely have consistent back-to-back days to work on any project these days so I don’t really count the hours. As long as it’s quicker than the time before, I know I’m making progress.” Finishing is the slowest part. “I start off using a couple brush coats of diluted shellac, not to fill the grain (although that’s a happy coincidence), but to raise it so that when I apply a shop-made hard wax paste, the surface is dead smooth. I aim to have the best finish with the least amount of product. It’s a long way from my French polishing background but something I probably wouldn’t have thought about without that knowledge.” He figures once he’s got the process so streamlined that it’s profitable, he’ll lose interest.
Cricket table.
His current focus outside of teaching engineering is on cricket tables. Having started out with antiques in the laissez-faire Wild West that was England in the 1980s, he understood that the cognoscenti looked down on Victorian furniture, much of which had been manufactured in factories for a mass market. Back then, the pieces of greatest interest were Georgian (dating from the early 18th through early-19th centuries) and Regency (a short period in the early-19th century that followed directly afterward). But “you could take Victorian furniture and convert it with different hardware to change its style.” Sic transit gloria mundi. He apologizes for the deceit but acknowledges “that was the market.”
No one here but us crickets.
At the time, he had no interest in anything earlier than Georgian furniture. So it should come as no surprise that years later, when he saw Peter Follansbee and others making traditional English furniture from the 17th century, “I thought it was a bit wacky, not proper.” His opinion about these earlier furniture forms changed when he went to an auction a few years ago and saw “a cute little table” – symmetrical from one angle, but not from others. It was “so different to anything usually on my radar, it stuck out.” He loved it – and put in a maximum bid of £90. It eventually went to another bidder for £900. So began his obsession with the cricket table.
Along with marking gauges, cricket tables have been the focus of his production ever since. Explaining their development, he says “they go right back to being stick tables, and at some point they go over to being joined furniture.” He started with a couple that were “quite rough” but kept at it, learning from each one. The clamps we use today didn’t exist when cricket tables were originally made, he points out, but the tables still hold together. “That blows my mind.” These days he’s perfecting the techniques and familiarizing himself with the geometry. “I spent so many years making square boxes. You suddenly think, oh my god, I’ve got to make something that’s 60 degrees!”
His interest in cricket tables led to a book contract with Lost Art Press. He anticipates it will likely be published early in 2023.
These days Derek teaches engineering in London four days a week. On Fridays he works from home – grading, planning lessons, etc. – “terribly dull stuff that goes with being a teacher.” He spends most weekends and evenings on the book, though the last couple of weeks he’s been making some chopping boards, a tray, cutlery inserts and spice racks for a bespoke kitchen company, stuff he calls “bread and butter work.”
I asked Derek what advice he’d give to a would-be furniture maker. “I’d probably advise them to have an interest in something niche,” he replied. “If you’re doing something niche, it’s a small market, but the people in it will be loyal and tend to value what you can deliver, because they find it hard to find people who do what you can do.”
Many of Derek’s clients come to him because they can’t find anyone else to do what he does well, or within their time frame, a situation that helps make it possible for him to charge what he needs to for his work. Three of his customers have been with him for 30 years; they even stayed with him through a strange period during the late ’80s when he chucked woodworking for a job at Gatwick Airport, where he worked in the Dispatch Office coordinating the turnround of civil aircraft and calculating optimal weight and balance so that planes could take off when they reached the end of the runway. But even that professional diversion contributes to what he does now – it taught him about timekeeping, which is essential in the business of aviation.
He expands on his point. These longstanding customers “never query your price. They’re happy with your lead times. They never question your ability to do stuff. They pay on time. In the commercial world, you send someone an invoice and they pay you in 30 days, maybe 60 days. They may go bust [in which case you may not get paid at all]. You learn the value in those relationships. It’s a business relationship, but it goes deeper. You need to nurture those relationships and those customers because they’re the ones keeping the roof over your head, ultimately.”
Why Lowfat Roubo?
Finally, those familiar with Derek’s Instagram account may wonder why he goes by @lowfatroubo. Here’s the backstory.
When I was at [Furniture & Cabinetmaking], I commissioned a series of articles from David Barron about benches that were scheduled to run back to back. The first was a Scandinavian bench, the second a Roubo. We trailered the Roubo at the end of the first article – standard practice. David submitted his copy and pics on time, then left for the U.S. to attended Handwerks. We subbed the text, paid an illustrator for the plans and started work on the layout. Unfortunately David had sent all low-res images – totally useless for print. He’d erased the high-res files from his camera. With just two weeks in the schedule I decided to ‘reconstruct’ the bench with pine 2x4s (not the solid beech he used). I only intended making a short bench top and maybe two legs just for the photo sequence, but it was going so well I made the full version. The coverline was something like ‘Avoid the heavy lifting and build a Lowfat Roubo.’ About a week after it went on sale, I needed a name for my online accounts in a hurry and liked the sound of Lowfat Roubo. It fits in well with my ethos – trimming down the excess but keeping things authentic.
When the magazine closed the workshop, I brought the bench home, cut a foot off each end and installed it in my home shop. It’s what I work on now. I’ll never part with it.
Screwing around with the vise screw (U.S. spelling) for his Lowfat Roubo.
The first magazine article George Walker ever published appeared in AstronomyMagazine. At the time, he was working a lot of hours as the midnight shift supervisor at The Timken Company, a Canton, Ohio, factory that engineers and manufactures bearings and mechanical power transmission components.
“There was a hole in the middle of this building where they had a transformer that was open to the sky,” George says. “And I’d go out there at two in the morning, and I’d look up through these wires and cables and superstructure and watch Orion pass across the night sky. And I wrote this article about observing the stars amongst the smokestacks.”
No matter how ordinary the circumstances, George is regularly struck by the majesty and wonder of life, the way millions of colorful warblers gather at “a little spit of cottonwoods right on the edge of the lake” (Magee Marsh), as they have for millions of years, to rest and eat before their migration across Lake Erie. Or the way a medieval drawing found in an old monastery can inform his work through the understanding of geometry, even though he can’t read the text, as it’s written in Renaissance Italian or Spanish. Or the way he can now build a beautiful piece of furniture, without plans or a tape measure, using instead a stick, a piece of string and dividers.
George was born in western Iowa, his father, a farmer. His father left farming in the early 1960s and the family moved to northeast Ohio. George grew up in a small suburban neighborhood and spent much of his childhood outdoors, running around the woods, fishing, “being a little bit of a Tom Sawyer.” He had a good friend who lived on a property with a lake, a couple miles away, and the two often could be found in a boat trying to catch turtles. George enjoyed exploring and making things, which ranged from tree houses to electric motors. He enjoyed camping and scouting, and his interest in the outdoors led to lifelong loves of botany, astronomy and birding.
An avid reader ,George did pretty well in school, although he hated English. “My English teachers would flop over dead if they knew that I’ve become a writer,” he says. (His writing includes many magazine articles and two books co-authored with Jim Tolpin: “By Hand & Eye” and “By Hound & Eye,” both from Lost Art Press.)
“I had a high school English teacher who gave me a D just because she didn’t want to see me again,” George says. “She said, ‘I’d give you an F, but then I’d be stuck with you next year. I’ll give you a D so I don’t have to look at you.’ I should track her down and send her a book. It would blow her mind.”
English grades aside, George enjoyed historical fiction, “and like any kid I liked the kind of adventurous whatever, the swashbuckling stuff there was to read as I kid,” anything that had a little bit of truth to it mixed with adventure.
The hat and lariat George used as a cowboy in Montana.
In 1975 George graduated from high school and decided that he couldn’t bear to live in Ohio another minute. So he headed out west to work as a cowboy on a 17,000-acre ranch near Phillipsburg, Montana. “Most of my time was spent on a tractor or driving around in a beat-up 1963 red Studebaker Lark station wagon,” he says. “I did learn how to ride and rope well enough to not embarrass myself.”
Although George had worked on farms while growing up, and he had an understanding of farm life, he was fairly unfamiliar with horses. And on his second day at the ranch he was put on a horse – all day. “That was pretty interesting,” he says. “But it was a quick learning curve.”
George had a brother who, after spending some time in Vietnam, decided he wanted to be a cowboy. “He kind of lived out that dream for a few years and he took me along with it for a little while,” George says. Two of George’s brothers live in Montana now, although neither are cowboys, rather “happy Montanans.” George enjoys visiting them and hiking in Glacier National Park. “I enjoy that country but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the cowboy’s lifestyle,” he says. “It was for the rugged individual, looking at it now. It was fun for a time.”
While working in Montana as a cowboy George met a gun builder who made expensive rifles, and George decided that he wanted to learn the trade from him. The gun builder knew George was from Ohio and had had some vocational training in the machine trades. “But he said, ‘Kid, if you want to learn how to do this, go back to Ohio, get an apprenticeship, learn how to be a machinist and then come back and I’ll teach you something.’”
So, George did. But he never returned to the gun builder in Montana.
Instead he entered a traditional apprenticeship in Canton, Ohio. It was the mid-1970s and the experience, he says, affected his whole approach to craft.
“This was an old-school apprenticeship made up of a shop full of ethnic journeymen machinists, old-timers,” George says. “They were Jews, Greeks, Italians, Poles and Hungarians, a lot of them second-generation immigrants. This was before CNC, this was before OSHA. Everybody smoked a pipe or a cigar or a cigarette. They had a pecking order. If you were an apprentice, they would abuse you mercilessly.”
And then, after a while, after George had taken enough abuse, one of them called George over to his bench and handed him a cracker. On it was a little slice of onion, some sardines and Limburger cheese – it was clear he had to eat it. “And then,” he says, “they would take you under their wing and start showing you things. And these guys were really fantastic craftsmen, and could really do unbelievable work.”
George soon became aware of when he was being tested. “They’d watch you struggle, and they would give you a little tip, something as simple as, ‘Use a brass hammer on this, not a steel hammer, a brass hammer would work better for what you’re trying to do there.’ And if you listened to them, they’d offer you more tips, and if you’d ignore them, they would let you drown in your own suffering. You wouldn’t get any information from them.”
As a result, George says he grew great respect for experienced artisans who learned hard lessons. “Later on, while I was exploring old design literature, I would look for these little tips and instructions in old books, and whenever I would see them I would take them seriously,” he says.
George didn’t just read what they were saying, rather if given a piece of advice, he’d take it. “That’s what really started me on this learning curve of understanding design,” he says. “And that made all the difference.”
As an apprentice, George worked with “hundreds of different journeymen of all shapes and sizes and characters and quirks.” For the first four years, “basically they had you do all the dirty work and in the process, you learned. And then in the last two years of the apprenticeship they took you in the office and said, ‘OK, you learned the basics, now you have to learn to work fast.’” That mentality also has affected George’s approach to craft.
After six years George became a Class A Journeyman. He worked with 200 to 300 fellow machinists at The Timken Co., doing everything from repairing machinery to making tooling to scale. He worked on parts as small as a sunflower seed to gears 9′ in diameter.
George worked as a machinist for 10 years before transitioning to management. His years as a machinist heavily influenced his preference for hand tools. “As a machinist I’m running a lathe all day, it’s noisy and hot, chips are flying and there’s smoke,” he says. “When I got into woodworking I decided right away I wasn’t going to get a bunch of woodworking machines, because I did that all day. So I started woodworking with hand tools. This was back in the 70s, when that wasn’t that popular to do. Everybody who was in woodworking would go to Sears and get a router table and a table saw, and I started with hand tools mostly because I just didn’t want to spend all day bent over a machine, and then in my evenings be bent over [another] noisy and dusty machine.”
George initially began woodworking out of necessity. He and his wife, Barb, didn’t have much money, and they needed furniture. Barb’s father did some woodworking, and he had a neighbor, a WWI veteran, who was a great hand-tool woodworker. “I visited him and he loaded up a box of hand planes, saws and chisels, gave me a little bit of instruction and said, ‘You can do this.’”
George spent 33 years at The Timken Co. Like many professions he had a love/hate relationship with progressing to the role of manager. “It was a lot more fun being a machinist than being the boss,” he says.
But once in management, George’s woodworking took off. “It was a stress relieving thing and it was a creative outlet,” he says. “So I started really woodworking in earnest then, and also started writing somewhere around that time.”
With no formal training in writing George simply wrote about topics that interested him, including astronomy, backpacking and later, at Barb’s suggestion, woodworking (which landed him in Fine Woodworking and Popular Woodworking Magazine, among others). “I’d write articles and submit them to magazines,” he says. “I had a lot of rejections, but eventually I figured out how you can actually write for a magazine and get things accepted. It was a learning process. But if I was passionate about something, I just loved to write about it.”
After writing about half a dozen articles for several different woodworking magazines, the editor of Society of American Period Furniture Makers (SAPFM) asked George to write an article for its yearly journal. George asked what he should write about and the editor said, “Whatever you want to write about.”
At the time George had begun researching design. “I was real curious: How did these artisans back in the 18th century design stuff?” Not knowing the answer, he decided to research this question some more, and write about that, simply because he thought it would be a fun topic. “That research led to everything else that followed and it was like a really deep pool that I fell into that I’ve never felt the bottom of yet,” he says.
George wrote his article and then spoke to several groups about the topic. “Everywhere I spoke, people were like, ‘Wow, this is fantastic information.’ Nobody had ever heard this before, it hadn’t been presented like this.” He approached Lie-Nielsen Toolworks with a proposal to do a video series on the topic (they said yes) and around the same time Christopher Schwarz, then editor of Popular Woodworking Magazine, asked him to start writing a column (Design Matters).
And then, George met Jim Tolpin at a Woodworking in America conference in Chicago. “I was doing this keynote speech in an auditorium,” George says. “He was sitting down front and I didn’t know him from Adam. They had this question-and-answer session at the end and he raised his hand and asked me three different questions. I didn’t know the answer to any of them and I thought: Those are fantastic questions.”
Afterwards, George introduced himself and the next day he attended Jim’s session and realized immediately they were researching the same thing, but completely unaware of each other. “He was researching how the human body relates to proportions and design, and I was researching classical architecture, which uses the human body as a standard proportion,” George says. “I was looking at it more from an architectural standpoint than he was but still, we knew right away we were doing the same thing so that’s what started a pretty wonderful writing partnership.”
The economy had crashed some years earlier and George had left The Timken Co. in 2008. But he still needed a way to keep his family afloat. So he was serving as his own boss, working as a full-time consultant (something he still does to this day). His evenings, though, were (and are) dedicated to researching and writing.
When Jim and George first talked about writing a book together, Jim told George that the worst way to ruin a friendship is to write a book together. But oddly enough, George says, the partnership has only deepened their friendship.
“Our conversations can go all over the place because this exploration we’ve been doing has taken us into architecture, philosophy, history, theology – I mean, it’s something that’s embedded in Western civilization, and design and architecture was an expression of that, so there’s so much to explore and understand.”
Everything Jim and George are doing, George says, goes back to Euclid and his understanding of simple geometry.
So how has their relationship stayed intact after two books with a third, “From Truths to Tools,” forthcoming? “I don’t think either of us has much of an ego or an agenda,” George says. “We’re both interested in what is the truest thing we can learn. And both of us are able to correct the other one, and say, ‘You know what? I think you need to dig deeper on that, I think this could be better.’ And we actually can do that without feeling threatened. I know if he tells me something can be better he’s just trying to help me do better work and likewise, I can comment on something he does and he realizes that I’m just trying to help him do better work, and that’s a really, really rare thing. It’s really hard to find someone who you can be critical with, and positive with, and it still works.”
George spends three to four hours a night writing and researching, in addition to his full-time consultant work. And much of it boils down to simple Latin words that are part of our modern language, words no one ever thinks about.
“If you take a string and you attach a lead weight to it, it becomes a smart string, a 2.0 string because it does something,” he says. “And actually, the word we use for ‘plumb,’ to make something plumb, straight up and down, well that comes from the Latin word ‘plumbum,’ which is metal lead. So if you take a piece of lead and tie it to a string it becomes a plumb bob and with that you can find a vertical surface. So all the words that are involved in our craft and all the tools have all this ancient knowledge, ancient language tied to them. And that’s some of the work we’re doing right now. It’s pretty fun to cover.”
For George, research involves two things: reading and trying things out. While he can’t actually read many of the old Renaissance texts, which are written in different languages, he can study the old drawings and engravings, pulling out and considering the geometry behind them.
“But the other big piece of it is actually trying it out,” he says. “I’m not interested in just book knowledge. If they’re showing how to do a layout, how to figure out how to do something with what Jim and I call ‘artisan geometry,’ it’s not something [that involves] a bunch of formulas. It’s about practical knowledge, about how to lay out a foundation for a barn, or how to do any kind of layout in space. We’re taking these ideas from these old books and trying them. We put away our tape measures and our rulers and started using a stick and a string and a pair of dividers to figure stuff out. And that’s where you really learn. That’s a lot of the research: Actually trying it out at the workbench, finding out what works and what doesn’t work.”
There was a time, George says, when he thought building something without plans would have been really scary. These days, he builds things not only without plans, but also without a ruler, or a tape measure.
While George’s days are full, he values time with family. George and Barb married in the late 1970s and had one son. They now have a 6-year-old grandson who enjoys spending time in George’s shop, banging hammers and mallets, making messes and having fun. George’s son is just now getting interested in woodworking. Last year George helped him build a Nicholson bench and the two plan to attend Handworks together in May.
Barb enjoys plein air painting (you can see her work here). Together they’ll set up their workspaces outside, Barb standing and painting, George sitting next to her with his laptop. They’ll paint, research and write, go out for lunch and then go home.
Home is a two-story traditional suburban house filled with furniture George has built. George has an appreciation for stripped-down Early American furniture, typically walnut or cherry, without much ornamentation. While drawn to contemporary work he carries strong, traditional tendencies. For George, the hallmarks of good work are strength, functionality and beauty. He has a basement workshop filled with hand tools and a table saw primarily used as a place to eat lunch.
George and Barb enjoy hiking and birding. “If you’re a birder you understand the season by which birds are here now,” he says. “It starts in February with the swans coming in and the waterfowl and the sandhill cranes, and then you move into the redwing blackbirds and the white-crowned sparrows, and then, coming up on Mother’s Day, the neotropicals move in, those are warblers, little colorful birds that eat insects and they come in by the millions.”
He talks about Magee Marsh, just a couple hours away from Canton, Ohio, where thousands of birders congregate from all over the world to see the warbler spectacle. “The birds fly up the Mississippi Valley and they stop [at Magee Marsh] and they rest and they eat and they gain weight so they can fly across the lake,” he says. “Sometimes you hit it right and the trees look like Christmas trees, covered with colorful birds, red, blue, green and orange – it’s quite the spectacle.”
George’s ability to see beauty in stars, warblers and proportion, to even the most seemingly ordinary bits of life, allows him to “live out every moment.”
“I’m very thankful for the life I have,” he says. “I have a spiritual dimension to my life. I am a Christian so for that reason I’m thankful for every day, every part of living. And for that reason I believe God is part of every moment in my life, every breath. All the work that I do, waking, sleeping, everything is filled with his majesty. And life is about living out that wonder, being thankful for every moment that is. As humans we’re lousy at living out every moment. A lot of moments in life seem like drudgery. At my best I’m absorbing that wonder of creation and what it’s all about.”
George says through his journey with Jim, the two have tied together how the Greeks saw that wonder. They talk about quantum physics and how the universe got its start and everything, George says, is tied together. “Everything is an exploration of being alive.”
“If there are physical laws governing the universe, like gravity, and there’s a law governing the spiritual universe, I guess I’d call that the law of giving,” he says. “And if you live a life of giving, your life expands and grows. And if you live a life of trying to hold onto things, your life shrinks and becomes small and has less meaning. If life is about giving, it grows. And it’s more fun.”
It’s something George strives for, daily.
“I think there is so much more I’d like to learn,” he says. Both about design and giving, dimensions he hasn’t yet explored. “When I give, my life gets bigger.”
A few weeks ago Peter Follansbee participated in a panel discussion titled “Looking Forward, Looking Back: Traditional Crafts and Contemporary Makers” at the Fuller Craft Museum as part of the opening reception for Living Traditions: The Handwork of Plymouth CRAFT. Peter was asked an either/or question: “When you’re making things, is the process of doing that just for you or for the community?”
Feeling put on the spot, he answered: “I’m doing this ’cause that is what I want to do.”
But that’s not completely true.
“Afterwards I was thinking of their use of the word ‘community’ and through all of this woodworking, from back in my early museum days all the way up to today, I’ve met so many people who are just fabulous, and many have become lifelong friends, just great, great folks, both students and other instructors and other woodworkers.”
With community comes commonality.
“I can find commonality with people that otherwise I would walk right past them, and they would walk right past me,” Peter says. “We share nothing in common except for this interest in and this desire in making things out of wood, and that is unlike what I said on the panel discussion. That is important to me. I can’t imagine a different life. So I’ve been lucky to kind of stumble into this one, and it was all through woodworking.”
And in a way Peter did stumble into this life, in a story that involves the death of his father at a young age, splitting logs for firewood, waffling between art painting and woodworking, and an unexpected 25-mile walk to Drew Langsner’s Country Workshops school in North Carolina.
In the end, it was the community he sought, the community that accepted him, and the community he now serves that helped form his life, which reflects a quote by William Coperthwaite on an axe handle Peter recently carved: “I want to live in a society where people are intoxicated with the joy of making things.”
‘Without Love in the Dream it will Never Come True’ The youngest of five, Peter was born in 1957 in Weymouth, Mass., a suburb of Boston. His father worked at A.J. Wilkinson & Co., “back when a hardware store was a hardware store,” Peter says. The day after he graduated high school, Peter’s father walked into Wilkinson’s and applied for a job. He worked there until he died, at the age of 51 in 1975.
A widow, Peter’s mother had to reinvent herself and started working at a law firm in Boston. As an 18-year-old, Peter says he didn’t recognize what a big deal that was for his mother during the mid-1970s. “Later, some perspective really shown a light on it.”
Peter’s father had a basement woodshop filled with Delta and Powermatic tools: a lathe, table saw, jointer, drill press, circular saw. His father built furnishings to outfit the house. “I don’t remember anyone talking about it, and I certainly didn’t think about it,” Peter says. “You just sort of took it for granted that he made stuff. You make stuff.”
Peter was into art. He took art lessons as a child and, moving from crayons and pencils to pastels and paints, he essentially majored in art in high school — by grade 10 he was studying art history and knew art school was in his future.
And it was. He attended the Massachusetts College of Art and Design for a year. And then he dropped out. “It was a lot of scruffy 20-year-olds expressing themselves and doing wild and crazy stuff,” Peter says. “I wanted to learn under-glazing and classic painting, and I had no way to put that into words or to search out how I was going to get that so I just bagged it instead. … It was sort of funny. What I was looking for in painting I ultimately found in woodworking.”
But first there was, as Peter says, a whole lot of floundering. “Keep in mind that this was the mid-70s, so there was this whole dope culture, too. And I was reasonably involved in that. I wasn’t into hard drugs, but I kept pretty high all the time. So that clouded a lot of judgment.”
Upon his father’s death, Peter inherited a basement full of tools. And because he was an artist, he began making picture frames. “I started dabbling in framing my canvases while I was painting, and little by little I started to learn more about woodworking – not in any orderly fashion. So for many years I kind of divided my time between painting and making stuff out of wood.” This included a Shaker rocking chair, with almost no instruction.
“I failed miserably,” he says.
Then, a friend showed him a copy of Fine Woodworkingmagazine. Peter subscribed.
Peter’s copy of Drew Langsner’s “Country Woodcraft.”
Peter was living with his mother and their house was close to a power line. To keep trees from tangling the line, the power company came out and cut them, but also left behind what they had cut. The energy crisis had hit, and folks were burning firewood regularly. So Peter taught himself how to split wood. He also wanted to make a chair. The September 1978 issue of Fine Woodworking arrived, and in it was an advertisement for the book “Make a Chair from a Tree” by John (now Jennie) Alexander and an excerpt from Drew Langsner’s book, “Country Woodcraft,” about splitting logs. “It was aimed right at me,” Peter says.
Peter finally convinced himself his years of waffling between painting and woodworking were over – he had to choose, for the sake of focus. “So I stopped painting,” he says. “Which is a good thing.”
In 1980, Peter signed up to take a class at Country Workshops. He didn’t have a driver’s license and he had never flown – in fact, he had never been out of New England. “I got on a plane, and then two buses,” he says. “I was too shy to call Drew and say, ‘How do I get from the bus stop to your place?’ and not having any experience in rural America, I saw that his address was Marshall, N.C. The bus went to Marshall so I thought, I’ll just walk! And it was a 25-mile walk. I made it in time for dinner, and then pitched my tent and fell right asleep. It was really out of character for me, but it was one of those moments where the stars lined up and look at what it did.”
Of course, it wasn’t immediate.
“I was the worst possible student,” Peter says. “Drew will tell you. I was terrible. I was awful. Years later I would learn that Alexander would have 10, 12 students, and would watch for who was going to be the ‘destructor,’ the one you have to watch, the one who was going to ruin everything. And it was me. I was still a pothead, and I was still just a novice.”
A coopering class at Country Workshops, around 1989.
But skill, of course, is separate from passion. “Oh man, it changed my life,” Peter says. “I flipped out, I loved it, I was just over the moon. It was great. So then I went home and made more chairs. By 1982 I was done with dope, and shortly after that I went back down to Drew’s, and then I would go twice a year every year. In 1988 I was an intern and stayed there for five months. By then I was getting serious and a little more coherent and semi-skilled.”
A woodenware class at Country Workshops, early 1990s.
Throughout these years Peter continued to live with his mother, so his needs were few. He sold some chairs and, after learning how to make split baskets at Langsner’s, he sold those as part of a craft cooperative. “It sort of validated what I was doing,” Peter says. He realized he could make things. And people would buy them.
‘Once in a While, You get Shown the Light, in the Strangest of Places, if You Look at it Right’ In the late 1980s, Peter and Alexander were spending a week, along with some other folks, on improvements to Langsner’s facility – it was called volunteer week, and it was a way to support the school. One evening Alexander showed a series of slides of a disassembled cupboard door, then at Winterthur, made about 1660 in Braintree, Mass. “It was split out of a log, like the chair parts were, but instead of then going to a shavehorse and a drawknife, you went to a bench with a plane,” Peter says. “And then instead of boring the mortise with a brace and bit, you chopped it with a chisel. So it was similar to what we were doing with chairmaking, but different.” Only Peter shared in Alexander’s enthusiasm.
So the two began a correspondence, roping in furniture historian Robert Trent. Their letters included questions, sketches, diagrams and theories. Throughout the correspondence Alexander told Peter to refer to out-of-print books and visit the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. So, Peter did. At the time Jonathan Leo Fairbanks was curator and Ned Cooke was assistant curator.
“Those guys would let me come in stone cold off the street and study the objects in the collection,” Peter says. “I had no academic affiliation, no credentials, no references, nothing. I just showed up with a question and some curiosity, and they gave me access to stuff. It was fabulous.”
Around that time Trent was lecturing up in Boston. Alexander called Peter and said, “You’ve got to go hear Trent.” Peter called the lecture host and was told that in order to hear Trent, he’d have to buy a ticket to the entire lecture series. Peter hung up, called Alexander and said he wasn’t going to be able to go. Later that day Peter got a phone call from Trent. “He just went on a rant about what idiots they were and he put me on the list so I could go to the lecture. And that’s how I met Bob.”
As Peter’s community grew, so did his knowledge of 17th-century woodworking. In the mid-1990s Peter sneaked into a lecture by Trent at Plimoth Plantation. After the lecture a mutual friend introduced Peter to Joel Pontz, who worked at the museum. “Joel had seen a newspaper article about me,” Peter says. “I had a Delta lathe [his father’s] that I had thrown the motor away and hooked up a spring pole to it so it made for a curious article. Joel had seen that and said, ‘Wow, would you like to work here?’ And I said, ‘Yeah!’ And he said, ‘We don’t have a job for you.’”
But Pontz and Peter became friends, getting together one night a month for “shop night.”
Eventually Pontz left Plimoth, creating a space for Peter. “There was a woman running that program, called the Craft Center,” Peter says. “It was me, potters, textile artists and a few other things. I was hanging around visiting there and they said, ‘Go talk to this woman, we’ve got a part-time job [available].’ And later on she told me she went to her boss and said, ‘Who is this guy? Should we check up on him? Get references?’ And they just said, ‘Oh, Joel said he’s OK. Just hire him.’ And that woman is now my wife. I love to tell that story.”
(Peter and his wife, Maureen, married in 2003 and now have twins – Rose and Daniel.)
Peter demonstrating at his 16′ x 30′ shop at Plimoth Plantation.
Peter worked as a joiner at Plimoth Plantation for 20 years. “And for probably 14 of those years, I’m making up a number but it’s close, it was the greatest job a woodworker could have,” he says. “Absolutely fabulous. Because I had to go to work every day and go in and make stuff with wood I didn’t have to pay for, and all I had to do was talk to people about it. There was almost never a deadline. I didn’t have to worry – is it going to sell? – all I had to do was make it. And talk to people. And I got to do the research behind it.”
Research involved trips to England and around the country, visiting museums and attending symposiums and lectures. “I got to hobnob with all the people who could help me learn my craft and the history of it better and just talk, talk, talk, talk,” he says. “And what woodworker doesn’t want to show you want they’re doing?”
Because the audience would change every 10 to 30 minutes, Peter became a master at capturing their attention. “You instantly find out if this joke or this trick fails and that sort of thing, and I loved to do it.” He was not taught this. But through previous demonstrations at craft fairs and practice, he quickly learned that big crowds mean big movements, but little crowds mean small movements. With families, he says, you focus on the kids.
“It was great,” he says. “It was great fun and people came from all over the world, all kinds of people – you never knew who was going to walk through the door.” One day he was making a brace for a brace and a bit, and a British couple walked up and started talking knowledgeably about tools. Turns out it was Jane Rees and Mark Rees, authors of many important books about early tools and their makers.
There were questions that were asked, repeatedly. “It got old right away and then you had to learn what to do,” Peter says. “Some people learn how to deal with it and some people don’t. And the ones who don’t are bitter, nasty little people who shouldn’t be doing that job. So the question you get the most, no matter what you’re doing is, ‘How long does it take?’ I saw co-workers find all kinds of ways to fight that question and I thought, ‘Well, that’s stupid because that’s what they want to know.’ So you tell them that and then you can move on and tell them what you want to tell them.”
In order to do this, Peter actually timed his various operations so he always knew the answer to that question. “The repetition is annoying for me, but it isn’t repetition for the people asking,” Peter says. “It’s new to them.”
Peter says he misses that part of it, talking to people. He left Plimoth in 2014. In the end, there were some difficult years involving a change of directors and general bureaucracy. In 2008, friends of Peter’s, including his then boss and his wife, were let go.
Peter wanted to leave, but he needed to make money. Now he was the sole earner in his family and he had two children to support. So he stayed, all the while building up a following through his blog, Joiner’s Notes, planning for a future in which he could make it on the outside. “I stayed for many years,” Peter says. “It took a long time.” Christopher Schwarz stepped in, helping him find teaching gigs and, through Lost Art Press, publishing “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree” with Jennie Alexander in 2012.
“Then it was just kind of floundering for a few years, and not having the nerve to pull the trigger,” Peter says. “One day I said to Maureen – our kids were then in school, they were in the second grade, going to public schools and we didn’t like that either – every day three of us go out the door to something you and I don’t believe in,” Peter says. “We should stop doing that. So we home-school our kids, and I quit my job.”
Immediately following a blog post about leaving Plimoth, Megan Fitzpatrick, editor of Popular WoodworkingMagazine, offered Peter a column. “It was really a godsend,” Peter says. “I greatly appreciated it.” And then Marc Adams called, asking him to teach. He teamed up with Lie-Nielsen Toolworks (check out his DVDs for sale here) and Roy Underhill. Peter says he booked too many teaching gigs that first year, worried about income.
After years of giving to the woodworking community – and the general public – the woodworking community gave back.
‘Hang it up and See what Tomorrow Brings’ Teaching, Peter says, is totally different from demonstrating. “I don’t get to do as much woodworking when I’m teaching. At the old job, all the attention was on me.” He laughs. “And I like teaching. It’s fun, it’s interesting, you get that group dynamic and some groups are duds and some groups are really great. A lot of students have become friends of mine.”
These days, Peter is still waiting for a “typical” year. He spent the last year building his shop. “I read on the Web one day, ‘He’s not doing much woodworking these days,’ and I thought, ‘I’m building this freaking shop by hand! That’s all woodworking!’ But what they meant was that I wasn’t doing much furniture, and I hadn’t.”
Parts to a headboard of a bedstead Peter is currently building for a client.
Now that his shop is built, Peter’s hoping for some normalcy. “If I’m not traveling and I’m not teaching, it’s going to be out in the shop building things,” he says. “I have some custom work that I’m way behind on, and I’m starting to get going on that now. So I have some big carved chairs, and a bedstead and a chest of drawers to make. I’m trying to get in a rhythm that I used to use at the museum. In the morning, I’ll split logs and make boards. I’ll do real physical work for a few hours, and then kind of switch gears and maybe do joinery and carving later in the day. I’m just trying to pace myself so I’m not beating myself up. I usually work several projects at a time, and try to leapfrog them to the finish line altogether.”
The river in Peter’s backyard.
Peter and his family live in a little town near Plymouth, Mass., on the way to Cape Cod, on a small piece of property, maybe three-quarters of an acre. In the backyard is a river with a marsh behind it.
At the same panel discussion mentioned above, someone asked Peter if he’s more interested in the process or the finished product. Peter said, “Oh no, I can’t stand the finished product because when I finish them I don’t want to see them again.” Tim Manney, a chairmaker and toolmaker in Maine, was in the audience and called his bluff. “You’re lying,” Manney said. “Your house is full of your stuff!”
Peter admits that there may be two or three pieces of furniture in his house that he didn’t make.
A new kitchen cabinet panel, in process.
When Maureen, Peter’s wife, was pregnant she ended up on bed rest for 11 weeks. While she was upstairs, Peter spent 11 weeks at Plimoth, building and carving new fronts to their kitchen cabinets. “So she came down after 11 weeks and saw that,” he says. “She had never seen it. There are probably seven or eight kitchen cabinets that are all carved.”
Peter’s shop.
Building his shop was a lifelong dream. It’s 12’ x 16’ with 15 windows. “It’s like being outdoors when I’m indoors,” Peter says. “It’s where I want to be.”
A friend helped. He’d come by Peter’s for one or two days a week, lay out some stuff, show Peter how to cut it, and then leave. “I’d cut for a few days and then I’d call him up and say, ‘OK, I’m ready for the next step….’ I don’t want to do it again.”
He lost some woodworking time this winter, due to not having a stove. But a former student gave him a little stove and this summer he plans to hook it up.
In addition to building and teaching, Peter enjoys making spoons. “Spoons are taking over the world you know,” he says. “And why is that? Why are they making all these spoons?” At England’s Spoonfest last year Peter served as the keynote speaker for the opening night. “I told them all, ‘We checked and that’s enough spoons. We don’t need to make anymore.’ And they started to boo and throw things at me.”
A sampling of Peter’s spoons.
Peter began making spoons in the 1980s. In 1988, during his intern year, he took a course taught by Jogge Sundqvist and was hooked. While at Plimoth he carved spoons that “were really ugly,” 17th-century English spoons, “and there’s nothing interesting about them.” Throughout the years Peter would carve spoons on his own and post pictures on his blog. One day somebody asked if he would sell one. “The thought never occurred to me,” Peter says. “I couldn’t imagine someone would buy one of those. I used to make them, and use them at home and give them as gifts.”
So why is everyone making spoons? Peter says he carves them because the ones he likes best form a natural, crooked shape – the curve of the spoon mimics the curve of the tree. “They’re a nice design challenge, and a functional sculpture sort of thing, a real good exercise in knife work and just an all-around interesting item.” But he says he’s also carving them because he wants more handmade stuff in the world.
“I think our culture has moved so far away, other than Lost Art Press readers and readers of these various blogs and things, just in general, our culture is really pretty far removed from that.”
One of Peter’s big influences in woodworking is Daniel O’Hagan, a man he met through Langsner many years ago. “I remember Daniel once writing to me and using the phrase ‘plastic and confused culture.’” O’Hagan lived outside of culture, Peter says. In 1958 he went back to the land and moved to eastern Pennsylvania. He built a log house with no electricity or running water, and he and his wife lived that way until he died in 2000.
“I don’t necessarily want to live that way,” Peter says. “I like running water. I like having a computer that connects me to all around the world and stuff but I like to sort of blend some of these two mindsets. So it’s places like Drew’s and Daniel’s where I first was in a handmade building filled with handmade stuff. And it speaks to me, there’s something about it.”
Peter’s own home is now filled with woodenware and wooden furniture. Maureen is a potter and knitter (you can view, and buy, her fiber arts here), so they have many handmade items in their house. “That’s important to me,” Peter says. “Especially once we had the kids. People would say, ‘Do you want the kids to do what you do?’ and no. I don’t want them to do what I do. I want them to know that you can make things with your hands, that people make things, but I want them to be happy. I want them to do what makes them happy. I’m doing what makes me happy but that doesn’t mean that’s what would make them happy.”
A red-breasted merganser, taking off on Peter’s property.
Peter doesn’t subscribe to American culture. He hasn’t owned a TV in years. He enjoys bird watching. He likes to be out in nature. He likes to be home but recognizes the joy in traveling. “There aren’t many other parts of my life,” he says. “I can sit here if I had the time, I could just sit here and just watch the river as the tide comes in and goes out, comes in and goes out, and just keeps changing. I’m fine with that. That could be my entertainment. I don’t really need entertainment, but that could be my amusement. It could hold my attention.”
Peter’s not entirely sure what his future will look like but for now it’s something along the lines of “broke but happy.” “I wake up every morning perfectly happy, but I do need to generate income better than I do,” he says. In order to spur this along, he’s planning on teaching students in his home shop. He can only fit one at a time (if teaching spoon carving classes, two). He already has a few folks on schedule. “And if that works, that will help me because I’m home,” he says. “There isn’t a lot of demand for my carved oak furniture. There’s some, but not enough to pay all the bills. So there has to be teaching. I have a new book under way with Chris and Megan [through Lost Art Press], so those bits and pieces will hopefully add up to something. I want to stay healthy, so I can keep going. That’s as far ahead as I’ve looked.”
A while ago Peter did a piece for Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. They had the bottom half of a two-part cabinet made in about 1680 and they hired Peter to make the conjectural top. Their conservation department guided him in coloring it. Color is intriguing to Peter. On a trip to Sweden he visited the Nordic Museum and spent six hours studying thousands of pieces in the museum’s storehouse. “It was just stunning, beautiful, beautiful stuff all highly decorated, almost always painted, very reminiscent of what we often term, inappropriately, Pennsylvania Dutch furniture.”
And while he doesn’t plan to veer too far from carved oak furniture – he’s invested, now, and he’s good at it – he still wishes for more hours in the day. “There’s a fellow from Hungary who wrote to me from his blog whose building chests out of riven beech with tools that we’ve never seen and making them all by hand the way they were made 500 years ago,” Peter says. “I’d love to go and see his work and see him do it and do it with him.”
‘Inspiration, Move me Brightly’ Now that it’s spring, and the birds’ songs come early, Peter finds himself in his shop quite early. He says he hopes to hit his stride. And although he’s currently figuring things out, he still considers himself extremely lucky. There’s community behind that sentiment.
“I try to remember to always thank my students in [my classes],” he says. “I try to make them understand that I appreciate them dedicating the time and the resources to come and take that class because if they don’t do it, they won’t hire me anymore if I can’t get students. So I always appreciate that. I had classes two years in a row where it was one weekend a month for five months. They laid out a lot of cash to do that, they set out a lot of time, and that’s the thing nobody has any to give up. Everybody is running low on time, so I always appreciate that kind of stuff.”
There’s community behind most of Peter’s sentiments, even if he failed to acknowledge that at the panel discussion a few weeks ago. And for those looking in, the flip side is more than apparent: Both the general public (visitors to Plimoth) and the woodworking community have benefited greatly from Peter, who is incredibly smart yet humble, honest and easy-going, a skilled teacher, demonstrator and entertainer, and a man who has surrounded himself with beautiful things, most of his own making. That society of people who is intoxicated with the joy of making things? We’re closer, because of him.
