I sip my tea while it’s hot. It’s first thing, around six, and I’m always first in through force of habit. I contemplate the things I need to do today, tomorrow and then for the week. This week I will take the dining table I have been working on since Christmas into the house. We …
I think grain is a deceptive substance, unpredictable and predictable in both its unpredictability and its predictability. When you least expect it, it nose dives, in a split cut, half the tenon or dovetail disappears. When the grain circumnavigates a knot and we think it will never plane on one side or the other of …
There is less written about wood than you might think. Oh, there are tomes in works by academics and organisations but what helps woodworkers should be a simple down-to-earth visual for people to see why we must plane and saw and split and pare cut wood differently according to something ambiguously called grain. In teaching …
It’s not unusual for people new to woodworking to be averse to taking risks as they develop their desire to work wood. The uncertainty of outcome feeds into our fear of any kind of failure and of course, we’re often involved with a material that generally presents us with an unpredictable outcome when we least …
By the lake, a well-worn walkway slips and slides underfoot as I search the still water’s edge for voles. They seem less prevalent now, the different types, than when I saw them every day along the quite rivers and streams of my youth. In the mornings, I often see foxes lope away from my approaching …
I have loved mesquite since I first met with back in 1984. I mistakenly thought it to be a Mahogany variety, perhaps Sapele, something like that, but it was too dense, too hard for those woods. I didn’t work with it again until two or three years later when after my first introduction to it …
It would be wrong for me to give the impression that all we (I) do is inspired with a dynamic that has a power to carry the idea as a concept through to actually making something happen in its three-dimensionality. Inspiration is mostly an idea you have about something you want to achieve that goes …
Taking a break from the workshop, the bench and tools, is always hard for me to do but absence supposedly makes the heart grow fonder and work is and always has been the anchor without which I find myself adrift. Of course, I am not the only one that feels this way. Many people are …
There have been so many birthday wishes and I have kept reading them as they came in over the last 24 hours. It is overwhelming for me to think that you didn’t let my birthday pass without sending me a personal message and this is just to say a big Thank You! to each and …
Happy New Year Everyone! This is Paul’s son, Joseph, briefly seizing control of this blog to mark the occasion of my dad turning 72. Happy Birthday Dad! I invite you to join me in wishing him a happy birthday in the comments below. While you are here, I thought you might enjoy a bit of …
