Rabu, 30 Maret 2016
Starting to Put It Together In My Mind
Ive been thinking a lot about design and furniture styles and nearly everything encompassing those circles lately. The impetus for these rumblings comes from two sources. The first is our new house and the sad fact that we dont have enough good furniture to suit ourselves. I can build furniture and I can fix this problem, but I want to build furniture that will last us the rest of our lives, so building beautiful furniture that is designed right for our tastes and lifestyle is important. I want the pieces I build to work together with each other and with the house itself. Similar in experience to what I was talking about HERE after reading "Poems of Wood and Light."
The second is I have been reading my way through the new book from Lost Art Press by George Walker and Jim Tolpin called "By Hand and Eye." The book speaks to me from my own interest in history. Ive spent good time and energy figuring out how woodworkers of the past created furniture from a technical point of view. Planing boards flat by hand and cutting dovetails with a backsaw. But the technical side is only half the picture. Knowing how to fold a crease into a piece of paper doesnt give you the ability to create origami and knowing how to make a mortise and tenon joint with a chisel and saw doesnt imply the ability to make beautiful furniture.
"The Joiner and Cabinetmaker" is one of the better woodworking tomes put to print in the last decade or more. Ill give the caveat that it is a mostly a reprint of an older book accompanied by research. In general it is very well received and I cant remember ever reading a dissenting or belittling review of it.
Fairly early on in the text of the actual book (Pg 56 - 58) there is a small passage that fascinated me when I read it, yet it seems to have garnered little notice. Reading "By Hand and Eye" brought this passage back to mind and I had to revisit it again. It tells about the care an apprentice must take if he is to go out to a customers home and measure the space to fit a new cabinet. It goes on about how he must carefully check and double check the height, width, depth, and write these numbers legibly on a piece of paper, scratching them onto the back of a snuff box with a point of a nail is unacceptable.
The books point of view puts you in the shoes of the apprentice, but after re-reading the book a couple times I started to think of this passage from the journeymans point of view.
Picture it.
Youre working hard in the shop on a Wednesday morning, putting the finishing touches on a clients chest of drawers. Suddenly the Master stops at your bench and hands you a piece of paper with measurements the apprentice Thomas was sent to collect yesterday. On the paper is the numbers for height, width, and depth and maybe a few other notes in the Masters hand. The cabinet is to be made of oak and deal and have drawers underneath and doors on top.
