How can we begin to make sense of 18th-century ornament? To begin with, we must experience it. Yes, that sounds strange, but in order to gain real insight into these lines, figures, and shapes, we need to go beyond careful observation and recreate them through drawing. As soon as you put pencil to paper, a whole world of detail, previously unnoticed, reveals itself. Consequently, the same happens once you go from drawing to carving or to careful observation of original objects – the transition from two to three dimensions and from paper to wood is equally revealing. It’s not necessary to draw entire pieces from pattern books. In fact, it’s best not to at first. For more than a decade,...
Nearly all measurement systems (old and new) are rooted in the measurements of the body, known as anthropometric measures. The cause is obvious – when a craftsperson needed to carry a measurement from one piece to another, or remember a length for later use, comparison to a body part was the most accessible means of doing so. There are a few exceptions I know of to this fact. For one, the origins of the meter lie in the decimal-obsessed attempt to arrive at a measure based on the Earth’s dimensions. Cartographers and mathematicians arrived at the meter, which was roughly one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator, measured along the meridian that passed through Paris....
One example that often puzzled people is the three-legged turned chairs that we see frequently in Dutch genre paintings of the 17th century. There are many of these chairs surviving in English collections, some quite elaborate, some fairly simple. The principal feature is a board seat secured in grooves plowed in the seat rails. For this sort of seat to work, the rails have to be at the same height, unlike a woven chair seat in which the side and front rails are staggered. In the board-seated chairs, the seat rails intersect inside the chairs’ posts. Often there is a rectangular tenon that is pierced by a round turned tenon. Some chairs have large and small turned tenons. There are...
My 4 tooth-per-inch rip saw can move through 1″ pine at a rate of about 1″ per stroke. For the 3' rip cut I had to make, it took fewer than 40 rapid strokes to get my piece – about 30 seconds of work. I have found it much more efficient to stay a healthy 1/8″ off the line and cut very quickly rather than obsessing over accuracy. Slightly wandering lines can be leveled in only a couple passes of a heavily set fore plane. In my experience, this is much faster than ripping to precise tolerances. The adjoining short rail pieces were ripped as one long piece and, with the rear rail, were prepped in the same manner as the...
Upon returning from Europe, they began making plans. “We were ready to live somewhere different than the Bay Area,” says Drew. Thanks to advice from friends involved in the back-to-the-land movement of the time, Drew and Louise bought a van and trailer and drove cross-country to begin homesteading in western North Carolina. Handcraft culture was still an important part of the fabric of life there, and land was cheap. Their crystallizing vision involved working with like-minded homesteaders to create a community combining farming and art. The idea of starting a school was nowhere on the radar. Drew and Louise continued their education-by-doing in earnest on the homestead. Seeking the knowledge of those who had gone before, they quickly learned or...
Templates have been in use for a very long time, probably as long as people have been making things, simply because they are the best way to transfer shapes with repeatable accuracy. Wheelwrights used them to lay out curved wheel parts (felloes), coopers for shaping tapered barrel staves, and carpenters for anything from fancy stair trim to porch brackets. Even centuries ago, furniture makers used patterns as I do today: for laying out the shapely curves of a pleasing table leg or case foot, for chair legs, the serpentine curve of a tabletop, and more. An indication of how much patterns were relied upon – and just one of many examples – is in the unique shape of cabriole legs,...
The spring-pole lathe operates on a very simple principle. A cord is tied to the tip of a sapling fastened overhead, which connects to a treadle on the floor after wrapping around the workpiece. As the treadle is depressed, the work rotates toward the turner to engage cutting, also pulling the sapling down into tension. When the treadle is released, the sapling snaps the treadle back up into position, ready for another cut. This back-and-forth pumping enables the turner to cut 50 percent of the time. Although it’s not as efficient as a continuous-motion lathe, I wouldn’t call this work slow. It’s hard to do any hot-dogging with foot power, but a steady rhythm does get the job done. One...
When we take an idea and fashion it out of wood we endeavor to make the intangible tangible. More importantly, we try to make it useful. Shaker craftsmen held that “any thing may, with strict propriety, be called perfect, which perfectly answers the purpose for which it was designed.” Perfection, then, lies somewhere in the relationship between a thing and its purpose, between the idea and the end result. We can point to it even if it cannot be precisely defined. Perfection is suggested by the paint that is chipped away from the table leg by the feet of those who have eaten dinner there. –Jim McConnell, excerpt from “On Perfection: Both Practical & Practiced,” in The First Three Issues...
At looong last, The First Three Issues, our hardbound republication of Issues 1-3 has arrived from the printer, and holy smokes is it gorgeous. This thing is hefty… heftier than we even envisioned. And in a totally glorious way. The title and wax seal on the dustjacket are embossed (raised) and glossy and pop right off the cover photograph. But Mike C swears the die stamp on the cloth is even more beautiful. In my mind, it’s a toss-up. Either way, this thing is impressive. The book is nearly 500 pages in length and flipping through it is quite an experience. I have to confess that it overwhelmed me to see all that we were able to publish in...
Back in June, our massive hardbound republication of Issues One through Three went to the printer. The files were promptly approved, and the book went to the press without hitch. But behind the scenes of book manufacturing is always a complicated matter. There’s back and forth with our printer and the press team. We sometimes get pulled into their discussions about the optimal way to make our books, but most of the technical discussions are handled for us. On our end, for the most part, things feel pretty seamless. Then, in normal times, the books arrive at our storage facility six to eight weeks later via freight truck. These are not normal times. If you read the Lost Art Press...
