Closing the Shop

Closing the garage workshop for a few days and a break for Christmas family time is always a point of reflection. I finished up a few things, tidied away, swept the floor and thought about many serious issues surrounding the past year. In a time of such unprecedented extremes, we must all keep hoping for changes that will bring us closer to one another so that we can serve and share in a life that is so much worth the effort. Our circumstances are all very different to one another, but the uniting factor here is that we work with wood and share the good and bad of it with one another in the hope that what we make and the skills we gain will always keep improving. So it is with life.

In 2008/9, December and January, I watched a new and unusual design come to life. I recall that first horizontal line traverse the page from left to right as a baseline from my pencil and from which to raise up the sides and front the columns and such. My first bald eagle sketch resembled more a seagull with an oversized beak until I went to my bird book to better understand the hooded eye and the angle and size the curved beak needed. I picked my woods as best I could and osage orange became the eye, heavily curled walnut the breast feathering and curly maple the neck cape and head. I cannot say this project did not invade my Christmas, it did. We had but two or almost three weeks left to conclude the work and deliver it on the eve of President Obama’s Inauguration. It’s funny that making something can take over your life, and take it over it did. This was to be my final work made in the USA, even though I didn’t at that minute know that it would be. After that, I took out four months to focus on finishing up 15 years of work in 36 manuscripts I hoped would become my foundational course for a new and emerging woodworker. I prefer to call those new to woodworking an amateur group defined by their newfound love of crafting by hand. Hobbyist, weekend warrior and pastime woodworker never did quite fit the criteria I saw coming to pass. I think it was the comparison to software engineering and the digital experience others were immersing themselves in that caused the unique difference I saw coming to pass. Hand tool woodworking contrasted markedly with the world they were used to. It was no less a passage of discovery for them as it was for me. As it is with all exacting designs, you walk into the unknown. In this case, I might add the term unwittingly into the unknown.

Reliably, I clung to the tradition of time-tested joinery of centuries past. Within the design lay well-hidden frameworks developing the carcass joinery beneath a facade of heavy veneer work of plains, fields, friezes and crossbanding. The pieces should have qualified me to so many inclusions but I measure my successes more by being acknowledged by none. As I understand it, I was the first designer in 70 years to design pieces for the White House Permanent Collection. In one sense, these would be my best Christmas present yet — a present to the people and Presidents of USA and a present to myself and those who worked alongside me. These would be my final pieces to be made there in the US. I never made another piece but my heart will ever be there in the US and Texas. Nothing could cap the gift given to me in being able to design what I did.

Last week, I completed a less demanding gift, a frame from spruce studs. These studs will create a simple framework to hold panels of plastic glazing within which to raise four tomato plants. You can start your tomatoes a few weeks earlier here in Britain inside such a structure. Add a light bulb and the warmth is enough to keep the plants warm enough to promote growth and stop a freeze. `as the plants grow and the heat builds in spring, you simply lift out the panels or lean them out on their chains. It will give you 20-30 cherry tomatoes a day at the peak period of May through July and then production gradually taper off — I wanted the gift that keeps on giving. I have used one like this for the past six years or so.

Gifts to me have been my most recent apprentices. Those I have trained in the last 10 or 11 years. They each came without the sometimes more usual baggage because they so wanted to be here and to learn. What you see is what you get and the honesty is so refreshing as there is no pretense in any one of them. They come, they learn and they make alongside one another. Times can be deathly quiet then noisy, chatty and still. Nothing is hidden. This too is a gift of realness to me. I don’t need to pick through anything. It’s mostly the small things they do that are not really so small. Alongside these, behind a 15 meter long, soundproof wall of glass, is a different space and creative sphere so different from the other, a place where everyone is involved in filming, editing and the processing of day-to-day works. These people, both sides of the wall, have all been a true gift to me. Each is a self-contained package of carefulness, gift-wrapped in their own special identity and uniquely placed in my life.

Currently, I am halfway through a book of my life’s journey to date – well – more like a third of the way, I think. It has been interesting remembering all that I have done with my life and some formidable challenges. I would like to think I will finish it within the coming year. I will do as I have done thus far and give it an hour a day and two hours on other days.

I am thankful for all that this year gave to me. The ways people worked around and through and over the pandemic. Lessons learned reach and range far and wide in our individual worlds and some lost precious loved ones with a loss we might never have recovered from but for family and friends. As it was in many situations, what seemed impossible came to pass because we dared to hope