When my sister Ashley died, I was asked to perform a song at her funeral. I picked “I’ll Fly Away,” a gospel tune written in 1929 by an Oklahoma sharecropper who walked to school in Arkansas to study music.

I’ve heard the song a hundred-thousand times, easy. I think I heard the Chuck Wagon Gang’s recording first, but most people today know the 2002 version by Allison Krauss and Gillian Welch from “Oh Brother Where Art Thou?”

At Ashley’s service, I held my old Gibson acoustic and asked the audience to sing with me. In the mix of voices, I could hear the tension between the old versions of the song and the new. Women sang the line “In the morning” like Welch. Men sung the same line like the Oakridge Boys might, in a deep bass.

It was kind of beautiful. But to me, it was also a lie.

Some glad morning when this life is o’er
I’ll fly away
To a home on God’s celestial shore
I’ll fly away

Growing up in a Southern church in a community filled with gospel music, you got the message that your trials on earth are to be endured. The reward comes when you die. That’s when there will be no sickness, hate, starvation or pain.

Over in glory land there is no dying there
The saints are shouting Vict’ry and singing everywhere
I hear the voice of Nell that I have heard before
And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore1

Whether or not you believe in heaven, I’ve always found this idea cheap and disturbing. It lets us look past the suffering of others and the cruelty of our world with a smirk. Because it will all be hunky dory when we reach the Vinyl Village in the sky.

We can do better than this layaway salvation plan.

The Shakers knew this, and it’s one of the reasons their furniture and architecture have such a strong grip on my mind and imagination.

I first set foot on the Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill in 1993. I was taking a class in furniture making at the University of Kentucky and was trying to build a blanket chest in a post-modern Southwestern style (note, I have never been to the Southwest).

At the time, my day job was at the Council of State Governments, a non-governmental organization that arranged sleep-over holiday junkets for state-level lawmakers and administrators. My boss there decided we needed to go on a retreat. He chose Pleasant Hill.

If all this sounds disorienting, then good. I was disoriented.

Have you been to Pleasant Hill? If so, I don’t need to tell you this, but the colony emanates a palpable energy.

I’ve heard this same story from hundreds of visitors. You climb the path from the parking lot to the colony’s main road, which is lined with white fences and trees.

You look up, and everything you were anxious about in life gets washed away.

So you seek to capture that moment. Almost everyone takes out a camera or phone and takes the same picture of the same road from the same vantage point. They want to remember that second. The moment their nerve endings changed polarity.

I admit that I did the same thing in 1993. This, I thought, is what heaven must be like.

My reaction, and the reaction of thousands of others, was exactly what the Shakers were chasing after. Note that this entry is not in praise of their beliefs. Like any sect, they had some good ideas (gender equality, lemon pie for breakfast, occasionally dancing semi-nude) and odd ones (celibacy and separation of the sexes).

But the Shaker idea that we should create heaven on earth is something I cannot shake. Specifically, the Shakers held that their villages were sacred spaces. And that when Jesus Christ returned (returned again, actually; it’s a long story) that heaven would look like a Shaker village. Except somehow even more perfect.

This idea of creating heaven on earth flowed through Shaker architecture, clothing, broom-making, the way they laid out their fields and even the way they separated their animals. And, of course, the way they built their furniture.

Most people describe Shaker furniture with the word “simple.” Yet simple does not mean it’s easy. If you have ever tried to build a dead-nuts reproduction of a Shaker piece, it will try you. It is demanding. It is difficult to do right. The overall piece might look simple, but it is anything but.2

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Your innate intelligence, your achievements in the corporate world and the number of degrees you have earned at university won’t help you much at the bench when you start woodworking.

To be sure, some people have some natural dexterity (I didn’t) that helps them take the first steps in the craft. But after teaching a lot of beginners during the last 20+ years, I have found there is only one way to get good at woodworking: Do a lot of woodworking.

As David Savage said: “You need to build a shed-load of furniture.”

This simple fact is sometimes hard to accept for people who are used to being a star pupil or an outstanding employee. I’ve had CEOs, attorneys, surgeons, PhDs and one high-ranking politician get quite frustrated when they cut dovetails and their results look no better (or even worse) than the elevator repairman at the bench next to theirs.

When anyone (regardless of their position in society) gets frustrated because they have failed in a class, I try to trace their steps to disaster. Did you do this? This? How about this?

Many of them lie, but their work tells the truth. Their chisel was dull and too wide. They didn’t mark the waste. They used a coping saw to remove the half pin. They used their own cockamamie marking system instead of the traditional “marriage mark” that I begged them to use.

How they respond to this failure determines if they will learn anything or not. You cannot buy a tool to get you out of these weeds. You cannot simply say, “But I’m a doctor,” and have the door opened for you. You have to admit: I stink, and I need to know the steps to become good.

Those steps aren’t usually found in books, I’m afraid. A book can tell you how to saw, but those instructions are meaningless until you are sawing. With some people I had to literally take them by the hands and guide their strokes so they could feel it. That’s humiliating for some, I know. But you cannot download this. It is uploaded through your fingers.

The way forward is, I’m afraid, to go Full Buddhism and destroy your sense of self. Become a small child on the first day of school and do what exactly what you are told. Gradually, you will match the letters to sounds, the vibrations to results, the patterns into words and the wood into furniture.

A 2026 Teaching Tip

I used to think the best way to teach people was to give them a lot of information. To fill their brains with what I know about saws, planes, chisels and trivia from “MILF Manor 2.”

Now I know better. That massive intake of information should be self-initiated with a pile of books, magazines and open browser tabs.

Students get better results when the teacher offers brief, almost haiku-level instruction for the task at hand. For example, chairmakers John Brown and Chris Williams urged people to “think round” when making sticks. I tell students to “hunt the arris” when planing octagons into sticks.

I am happy to answer questions after I give a demonstration, but I’m unlikely to say more than a word or short sentence.

And I’m even happier to talk about dumb minutiae over a beer or dinner.

But when we’re at the bench, words are obstacles. They are imperfect and clumsy instructions for how to put your thoughts into the wood on your bench.

I hate lists.

1. The No. 14 Thonet. I literally hate these chairs. I hate sitting in them, I hate looking at them and I hate knowing the oppressive history of the company that made them. But other than that, they’re OK. Michael Thonet was a brilliant woodworker who figured out how to combine steambending with intricate carved detail. His early chairs are nothing more than stunning. Then he and his family decided to cash in on the cheap steambending technology they developed, denude entire forests of trees and create a lowest-common denominator product that put lots of other furniture makers out of business. There is nothing to like about this chair.

2. No. 35 Folding Chair. This is the chair that inspired the folding director’s chairs that haunt the dinette sets of 50-something divorced men in their first studio apartment. This chair should come with your choice of a Duran Duran poster or a penis pump. Honestly ugly. Uncomfortable. No lumbar support. And it’s like sitting in a child’s swing set made from underwear.

3. Bibendum. These chairs aren’t totally uncomfortable. But they look exactly like an art school project where someone took a dog turd and smashed it flat. Then they rolled two more fresh dog turds in their hands and carefully arranged them on top of the smashed poo patty. Then bought steel legs from Rockler and called the thing: “Oppression of the Natives No. 12.”

4. B33 by Marcel Breuer. Many of the chairs on this list seek to challenge what a chair is, or to remove everything unnecessary and still have something you can sit on. This chair is the latter. Taking advantage of the technology to bend tubular steel, this chair is the spiritual ancestor of the plastic stacking $20 Adirondack chairs you can buy at a gas station. How can we make something that requires no skill, yet tortures the sitter?

5. B.K.F. Chair. This is probably the stupidest chair in this list. Have you ever sat in one? It’s like hanging out in some old man’s nutsack. You literally have to be stoned out of your mind to survive more than five minutes in this thing. I think the bamboo papasan chair is a better choice than this bag of cheap skin and wire.

6. Molded Fiberglass Armchair. Nope. Wrong Eames chair. The Eames made far more comfortable and interesting chairs than these molded fiberglass turds. These chairs are fragile and look worse with every passing year. The Eames deserve better than this.

7. Superleggera. This is the only chair on this list that I like. It’s wood. It’s a technical marvel. It won’t kill you when you sit in it.

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One of my favorite stick chairs is the Irish Gibson. It’s remarkably comfortable, even though the seat isn’t saddled. Its radical geometry and clever construction do all the work to make it the “favorite chair” at a party.

And making one is easy. Well, it should be.

I haven’t built a Gibson since 2023 after I hit a rough patch while teaching a class on building it. During the middle of the class, I realized my jigs to drill the mortises between the arms and seat were too tricky for the classroom. So I designed a new drilling jig that made the process easier.

I ended up dissatisfied with that jig, too.

I shoved the chair design to the back of my mind. At some point, I pledged to fix my problems with the Gibson for the latest (and final) edition of “The Stick Chair Book.” But I couldn’t get my head to live up to the promises that my mouth and typing fingers made.

Which brings us to today. This week, I had no choice but to build a Gibson. I will teach a class on the chair in two weeks. So I had to sort out all the problems, questions and awkward operations when building one.

This story has two acts:

1. I figured it out!

2. Oh crap, I had a dream and a better solution revealed itself!

Act 1: This Works

Dear diary: I figured it out. It was simpler than I thought.

The solution lies in the two “posts” of the chair. The posts are the only sticks that connect the seat, the arm and the backrest. And they are the only sticks in the chair that are *not* drilled at a compound angle. They are drilled at 30° straight back from the front edge of the chair.

Once that fact entered my lobes, everything fell into place.

Here’s what I did. I drew a 0° sightline through the mortise locations for the posts in the seat pattern. Then I took my pattern for the arm, laid it over the seat where I wanted it to go and I drew that same 0° sightline on the pattern for the chair’s arm. (The new full-size patterns with the sightlines are below for you.)

That sightline on the two patterns guided me as I drilled my two most important holes (besides my ear and nose holes).

I placed the arm pattern on a piece of 1"-thick cherry, traced the arm shape and drew in the 0° sightline. Then I used a laser and a bevel set at 30° to drill the 3/4"-diameter mortise for the post. Then I flipped the arm pattern over and did the same operation for the other arm on a second piece of 1" cherry.

I cut the arms out after drilling these mortises, following the patterns.

I then put the arms on the seat. I lined up the sightlines on the arms with the sightlines on the seat. And I eyeballed center of the mortise on the seat with the center of the mortise I’d drilled through the arms.

Clamped everything down.

Then I used the mortises in the arms to guide the 3/4" drill bit to bore the mortises in the seat.

That operation made everything else about the chair easy.

I shaved the posts to shape so the arms sat 8" above the seat, then clamped an 8"-tall block of scrap under the front of the arm. Now I could drill the mortises for the short sticks in the arms and seat. No jigs, other than that block of scrap.

It was all downhill from there. Shape everything. Glue the posts, short sticks and arms into the seat. Blah, blah, wedge, blah, backrest, knocker docker, blah and fin!

Act 2: An Even Easier Way

So, not quite “fin!”

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Compared to many of my woodworking friends, I buy wood and treat it a little differently than most.

Many of my friends have a significant stock of lumber on hand, from a garage-full to a few barn-fulls. When they find good lumber, they buy it.

In many ways, this is an enviable strategy because every board is different. If you see a pile of lumber you like for sale, you will never see it again. By the same token, these woodworkers have a good pile of scraps saved away for pens or small projects. Again, a good, non-wasteful strategy.

I have never operated this way for several reasons. For years, space has been a premium. Back in 2012, I had one small lumber rack in my shop that could hold about 100 board-feet of wood. No more. The rest of my storage space was filled with boxes of books (that is, the entire stock of Lost Art Press).

Second, my methods suit my woodworking methods. When I build a project, I do everything in my power to get all the primary wood out of boards that are from the same tree. In fact, I try to get them out of boards that were flitch-cut.

I do this because it makes it so much easier to get consistent grain and color in the project.

While at Popular Woodworking Magazine, we always had a stock of wood on our racks, and I always found it frustrating to pick through it. There was never enough of a certain species – say white oak or maple – to complete a project of any size. So you had to go buy a few boards at the lumberyard to get enough to do the job. And it was always a pain in the butt to match color and the like.

I can remember many long hours just staring at my boards in the shop, wondering how I was going to make it work.

For my own work, I buy what I need for a project and pick the boards based on that project only. So if I have a dresser, I’m going to pick widths based on the case sides and drawer widths. Perhaps I’m just not smart enough, but this is a much easier way for me to work.

And when it comes to scraps, I’m ruthless. I don’t keep narrow or short offcuts. They go into the burn pile (hooray for the family fire pit). It’s too easy to get buried in little bits of wood that will never get used.

All this is not to say that I don’t suffer for my wood. Like the time I needed to buy some 20"-wide sugar pine for a project I built in Maine. Ty Black, a friend of mine, and I spent several sweltering hours in the rafters of an old foundry digging through thousands of pounds of 40-year-old boards to get the three perfect ones I needed.

But I had just enough pine for two chests, with a few boards left over to roast some weenies when I was done.

The 2026 Update

I still don’t have a wood collection. The principles above represent how I buy wood today.

Some of that is because space is always at a premium in the inner city. I have room for only two stacks of lumber in the cellar. Together, they’re about the size of a 1990s Corolla.

One of these stacks is static. It is a pile of “shame boards” – stuff I bought but shouldn’t have. Such as a bunch of mixed species from an old guy suffering from dementia. His wife wanted the lumber gone. I bought it. I paid too much. And now it just sits there. I should burn it. But I can’t.

The other pile is a constant churn. I build a lot of chairs and casework in a year, and I run a bunch of classes. So that pile is 500 board feet of lumber that lasts about six months. Then I buy another 500 board feet.

The good news here is that I haven’t added any board to the “shame pile” during the last 10 years. That pile is about the same size. It still is anchored by those sycamore slabs that I thought would be good seat blanks (but are not). Heck, they aren’t even good firewood.

I keep them. And I probably always will. Because every time I see them, I shake my head, I scold myself and I vow to never buy any more crap wood.

And I don’t. So the plan works?

Congratulations to John of Masury, Ohio. His name was picked as the winner of our swag week and will receive the out-of-print “The Art Of Joinery.”

Next month’s swag is going to be super weird (not like, underpants weird – promise).

One of my turning points as a woodworker occurred when I learned this: Stick-built houses are designed to last about 50 years. And one of their principal advantages is that they are easy to demolish when a neighborhood is redeveloped.

Basically, almost every home built in North America during the last 80 years is no better than a cardboard box for a house cat. Americans took this continent’s primary resource – lumber – and used it to make insanely expensive fancy and flimsy tents.

This was not pre-ordained. Before the advent of balloon framing, houses were built like a good table or a frame-and-panel chest. Mortises, tenons, pegs and drawbores. Yes, you could take the frame apart, but that was so you could repair joints and replace parts that were damaged.

Timber-frame structures can last indefinitely if maintained. There are surviving examples from the 7^th century. And these structures are a bitch to tear down – as they should be.

Modern American carpentry and woodworking, on the other hand, is mostly an illusion – a mirage of the past.

When I was little, I used to think that our house at 2019 Wedgewood Blvd. was wolf-proof because its first story was all red brick. We had neighbors who had houses that were entirely clad in brick. And even wealthier neighbors with houses made of stone.

Suck it, wolves.

All that was an illusion, circa 1973. The brick and stone were a thin veneer over pine studs. We all might as well have clad our houses with wooden paneling that was painted like red brick.

It wasn’t until I visited the U.K. and Europe that I understood how terrible our post-war houses are. There I saw full-masonry (and double-masonry) buildings. And these houses were newer than our wolf-susceptible house in Arkansas.

Today, Lucy and I live in a circa 1896 German-built full-masonry structure that sits on a rubble foundation. It has survived floods, tornadoes and 125 years of being a saloon. It doesn’t move. It doesn’t settle or pop. Squalls, thunder and fireworks barely register when we are inside.

In contrast, being inside our stick-built house in Arkansas during a tornado warning was terrifying. So terrifying, that my dad built a subterranean storm cellar.

When I lost my taste for new houses, I also lost my taste for cheap furniture joints. Biscuit joints are the stick-built houses of the furniture world. They hold up just fine until you reach their breaking point.

Then they explode. There is no repair.

Stub-tenon doors are no better. And Confirmat screws can suck it.

Mortise-and-tenon joints rarely fail suddenly. They get loose. And they sway. And they give you a couple decades of warning before they fall to pieces. Even after they fail, you can usually repair them.

For me, mortise-and-tenon joints are the lowest form of acceptable joinery.

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Since I was about 10, I’ve loved vinyl records. But I have never attended any of the big vinyl shows in our area. I love music, but I have never attended a single music festival. And I love woodworking, but I have never willingly attended a woodworking show.

But because of my job, I have been to … let’s say, been given “no choice” but to attend … dozens and dozens of woodworking shows all over the world since 1996.

What’s not to like? Where to begin? The crowds. The guys selling magic rags and router bits that fell off a truck. The carnival atmosphere – dudes hawking plastic jigs to the newbies. And, as someone who has had to staff a booth, I’ve had to listen to the cranky attendees who are there just to bust balls and slurp up some free stuff.

If you think I’m being unrealistic here, you’re right. The shows are even worse than the above description. Shall we talk about the stale candied nuts? The lukewarm, overpriced drip coffee? The guy who sells clamping cauls who pledges to beat your ass in the parking lot?

Shows are just not for me. I’ve always dreaded them, even when they were in Southern California, Canada or Cologne, Germany. They’ve never inspired, informed or delighted me.

Except for one show.

This show has tried to kill me on two occasions. Once, I caught c-diff at the show and ended up hospitalized, weak and broken for months. But I came back – eagerly. On a second occasion, I caught an insanely bad case of COVID-191. I didn’t die. But I wanted to.

And now I am eager to return to this show again.

I’m talking about Handworks. It’s the only show I’ve been to that is aligned with the way I approach business and the craft. The show is free for everyone to attend. The vendors are hand-picked and must be invited to attend. There won’t be anybody selling pills for your pee-pee. Or diapers for your poodoo. Most everyone who exhibits at Handworks is someone I would trust to babysit my kids.

Vendors, like Lost Art Press, pay minimal booth fees. The fees are about one-tenth of what we’d pay for a crappy pipe-and-drape booth at the state fairgrounds in Indianapolis.

Plus, the thousands of attendees are there because they love the craft. They love the craft so much that they are willing to travel across the country (sometimes the world) to the middle of Iowa for a two-day show.

You might be wondering how this show survives. I do, too. It’s because of Jameel Abraham, Father John “FJ” Abraham and the rest of the Abraham family that runs Benchcrafted. This pain-in-the-ass-to-put-on show is their contribution to the future of the craft. They make no money off it (I actually suspect it’s a loss). But they do it anyway. Why? I suspect they feel the same way about the craft that we do. The craft has changed all our lives. It feeds our families. How do you repay that?

Here’s how: Handworks. Sept. 4-5, 2026.

If you have been, you know. If you haven’t been, it’s hard to explain. So I’ll break it down into simple bullet points:

• Hand tools for sale and for use – more tools than you’ve ever seen.

• Outstanding furniture makers and tool makers – there for you to chat with.

• The beautiful Amana Colonies. If you scoff at Iowa, you have never been to Iowa.

• Sausage, beer and fried chicken – in life-threatening quantities.

• New friends. I’ve never met more like-minded people in my life (who were trying to kill me with their diseases, apparently … ). Honestly, it’s a love-fest. Even if you go alone, you will end up not alone.

This is a great time to register and find a place to stay in central Iowa for the show. There is still plenty of lodging available in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which is where we stay during the show. Everything about the show is easy. Getting there – easy. Paying for it – easy. Contracting a life-threatening illness – so easy.

I’ll be there – wrapped in four layers of garbage bags and an N95+ mask.

I hope to see you there (unless you have hantavirus).

Years ago, I received a frantic phone call from a friend who needed to know who owned the H.O. Studley tool cabinet. He wanted to do a 3D scan of the cabinet so he could then program a laser-cutting machine to make all the parts of the cabinet for a kit.

Customers could then order the kit for $300 and build the Studley tool cabinet. In Baltic birch plywood.

I listened patiently to his pitch and then told him that I didn’t know who owned the cabinet. This was the truth, as it was many years before I’d met Don Williams and was taken to the secret Studley bunker in Kentuckistan.

As I hung up the phone, I remember thinking: People want to build the Studley tool cabinet?

After years of talking to woodworkers, the answer is: Apparently so.

So during the 10 seconds before I first saw Studley’s tool cabinet, I remember checking my bag to make sure I had all the measuring tools needed to create a mechanical drawing of the cabinet for the book “Virtuoso: The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley.” Tape measure? Rule? Caliper? Check, check and check.

When I saw the cabinet, however, I forgot about my measuring tools and any plans for measured drawings. Does a book on the Taj Mahal require 100 pages of blueprints so you can reproduce it in your backyard?

At that moment, I knew we would be making a book that was unlike the normal woodworking book, the stuff I was accustomed to churning out 11 times a year as a magazine editor. I set my measuring tools aside and resolved to treat this object in a way that was foreign to me: As pure 100-percent high art.

This was not easy. As someone who has devoted his life to writing about tool chests, workbenches and handwork, my first urge was to dismiss Studley’s work as impractical and something that should not be imitated. But after many years of dealing with this chest (I think I’ve unloaded and loaded it at least four times) I have nothing but the utmost respect for the maker and his intent.

Henry O. Studley’s tool cabinet is not for us to copy. It is for us to decipher.

Wherever I travel, I get asked this question: “What’s it like?”

So I lie.

“I hate it,” I say. And then I talk about how stressful it is to unload and load all the 245 tools from such a precious artifact without dropping them or harming the chest.

The truth is, my encounters with the chest have changed both me and my woodworking. (And I’m sure that Don and Narayan Nayar, the photographer, would concur.)

The chest mocks us. It is a piece of craftsmanship and design that is virtually faultless, no matter how close you get to it. It’s an experience you don’t get from looking at the poster of the chest or a picture on a screen. It is something that is best experienced in person.

If you start with your eye about 2” from the chest you can see that the interior surfaces are exquisite. The inlay is seamless. The grain has no defects.

As you step back, you can see how each grouping of tools is organized. They are stepped and scaled in an orderly fashion, some of them looking a bit like a military formation.

You step back again. And again. Until it is at the back of the room. At no point does it become imperfect.

It will humble you, as it has me. And it will inspire you to be a better woodworker or toolmaker.

Yesterday, we shared the story of Paul and Pascale’s generous woodshop grants to 21 recipients. Today we’re sharing stories from nine of those recipients. Here you’ll learn how these grants are helping grow businesses, rebuild after a fire and outfit two high schools hard at work teaching a new generation of woodworkers.

Paul Beeman, Beeman Woodworks

Paul Beeman, owner of Beeman Woodworks, has been woodworking for almost 20 years.

“I started in my mom and stepdad’s picture framing shop when I was a teenager, but didn’t see it as a calling or a future career,” he says. “After college, I went back to work there and became interested in what the more serious woodworkers were up to at the shop. I was really lucky to be exposed to a high level of craft there and get to work with some very talented artists.”

Beeman and his now-wife moved to Los Angeles in their mid-20s. While she was in graduate school, Beeman, who had graduated from college with an economics degree, said his only marketable skill at the time was using a table saw.

“I got a job working in an art fabrication studio since I knew how to make frames and the owner would let us stay late to work on our own projects,” he says. “My coworkers were working artists, so they would build mostly stretcher bars and frames, but I abused the privilege and started teaching myself how to make furniture and seeing it as a potential career.”

In 2021, Beeman and his wife moved to Hopewell, New Jersey, where he built out his shop. Today they live in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

“There are a lot of reasons I love woodworking,” he says. “It has provided me a path to being a competent person that does good work that improves people’s lives, which is deeply important to me. Starting a woodworking business is hard and arguably financially pretty dumb, but one thing I have been surprised by is how far it is from a dog-eat-dog business. In my first year of business, nearly everyone I encountered – hobbyist or professional – has been so generous in sharing hard-earned woodworking and business knowledge with me, and I try my best to do the same for others. It is truly a wonderful community and the people that I have met through it are equally serious about building and sustaining that community as they are about building their own skills and businesses.”

Beeman first saw the flyer for Paul and Pascale’s grant on Brian Boggs’s Instagram account.

“Last year, I was lucky enough to get invited out to Pinecroft with seven other professional furniture makers to learn from Brian, and it was a really amazing experience to work in that space with such talented people,” Beeman says. “That experience gave me a lot of confidence as a builder that I didn’t have going into it and was a big reason I felt it was at least worth my time to apply for this grant. I was very surprised that I actually received the grant, given the caliber of the other furniture makers, but I am thrilled that I did.”

Recently, Beeman was unable to secure a small-business loan to finish his shop and buy more serious tools.

“As an aside, if you are trying to get a small-business loan and a bank asks you to project your future yearly revenue and your answer is ‘not a lot,’ that is not a good answer,” Beeman says. “There aren’t a heck of a lot of venture capitalists or angel investors throwing money at fledgling furniture makers. This is a really unique and special thing that Paul and Pascale are providing the woodworking community.”

Beeman works out of a one-car garage and has to move a single dust hose from one tool to the next as he works.

“I have a good setup for a hobbyist, but a pretty unserious one for a professional,” he says. “My wife and I are currently building a standalone shop in our backyard from the ground up, and I will use this grant to upgrade my tools for the space. I already bought a 24" Tannewitz bandsaw ($800 on Marketplace!) that will replace my 14" band saw. I make a lot of shop-sawn veneers, and this will make a world of difference for me. The rest of the grant, combined with selling some of my current tools, is going toward a 12" jointer – an upgrade over my 6" jointer – and a dust collection system and duct work.”

Rolling his dust collector between tools and jointing boards that are wider and longer than his jointer is made to process have been his biggest efficiency roadblocks.

“It is not an exaggeration that these upgrades will double the speed at which I can work, which in a business of extremely tight margins and hourly wages that I don’t bother to calculate for sanity reasons, will be life-changing,” he says.

Most small furniture makers that Beeman knows aren’t struggling due to lack of talent, creativity or drive. They’re struggling due to a lack of space or underpowered/undersized tools for what they are building.

“Paul and Pascale clearly understand that and the massive difference one or two new tools can make in giving a small furniture business a fighting chance,” he says.

Christina Vincent

Christina Vincent’s studio and home are in North Haven, an island in Penobscot Bay, Maine.

“I moved to the island in 2009 and decided to try my hand at carpentry,” she says. “I began as an apprentice carpenter, having zero prior experience in the trade. I learned how to use both hand tools and power tools, practice jobsite safety and the numerous tasks of building a house. As my skills improved, I found my interests ebbing toward fine woodworking.”

In 2014, she attended a course at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship.

“This course was a catalyst, and when completed, I returned to my workshop with vigor to handcraft furniture,” she says. “Just over a decade later, I’ve developed and honed these skills in design, furniture making, turning, carving, finishing techniques etc.”

In Vincent’s community, opportunities for co-op-style access to tools and maker spaces are nonexistent, she says.

“Out of necessity, I made a small workspace and slowly began purchasing the equipment needed to build furniture,” she says. “There is something intangible about how much the art of fine woodworking has become a part of my identity. I derive deep satisfaction being able to take a concept and create it in the physical world. I feel that my process and work have many underlying messages: preserving traditional woodworking techniques while adding individual contemporary design, honoring skilled trades while promoting the evolution of equality, diversity and inclusion in these trades, being a steward of the environment by hand-crafting sustainable, locally made items and community-centric purpose by creating a small business that contributes to the local economy.”

This past winter, Vincent was looking through our Instagram feed and saw that a friend, Paul Beeman (who also received a grant and is featured above), had reposted Paul and Pascale’s original post with details about the woodworking grants.

“I honestly thought it was one of those too good to be true things so, I bookmarked it,” she says. “But then I couldn’t stop thinking about it and how those funds could be allocated to significantly improve my workshop. I did just what they asked for: I spoke of my journey into woodworking, how that has evolved and what being a woodworker means to me.”

Vincent plans to use the grant money to improve her shop.

“Ever since woodworking became a significant part of my life, I have been slowly purchasing tools,” she says. “You know, first a chop saw, then the SawStop table saw, dust collection, jointer and so on, mostly in the order of importance. I really weigh the importance of an item prior to purchasing. What exactly will this help me accomplish? Will it improve the quality of my work? Or increase workflow? Currently, I have a combination jointer and planer, due to the limited space I have been working in. However, that will be changing and I am ready to have individual machines.”

Vincent sees her work as “living, evolving and as a reflection of how I engage with my environment,” she says. “Woodworking brings me joy and I want to share that.”

Matthew Comer, Two Hands Woodcraft

Matthew Comer, owner of Two Hands Woodcraft, applied for Paul and Pascale’s grant after losing his entire shop and all his tools in a fire.

“I had spent more than 20 years building up my equipment and workspace, and overnight I was starting completely from scratch,” Comer says. “Woodworking has been a huge part of my life, and even after such a devastating loss, I knew I wanted to rebuild and continue doing what I love. When I heard about Paul and Pascale’s generosity toward woodworkers, it felt like an opportunity to begin putting the pieces back together.”

Comer has used the grant money to order a Grizzly G0495X 8" jointer, a Grizzly G0531B 21" band saw and a Grizzly G0957 air compressor.

“These tools will help me get back to building the handcrafted furniture and wooden bowls that I’m known for,” he says. “After losing everything, this support has truly made a meaningful difference in helping me move forward.”

A woodworker for more than 20 years, Comer builds handcrafted furniture, traditional dough bowls and artistic wooden bowls.

“I especially enjoy traditional hand-tool influenced woodworking, chairmaking, carving and shaping wood in ways that highlight the natural beauty of the material,” he says. “What I love most about woodworking is taking a rough piece of wood and turning it into something meaningful that people will hopefully treasure and pass down. There’s something deeply rewarding about creating with your hands and knowing the piece you make may become part of someone’s family story.”

Tuscola High School

Ethan Rhinehart has been woodworking since he took his first woodworking class as a high school freshman in 1996.

“I had done some woodworking projects around the house when I was younger, but when I walked into that shop at Erwin High School in Asheville, North Carolina, I was amazed,” Rhinehart says. “I had an awesome teacher and learned so much. So when it came time for me to decide on a profession, I chose teacher. And when I decided on what to teach, there was no question – woodshop teacher.”

However, after earning his vocational education degree, the only job he could find was to teach drafting.

“After 21 years of teaching drafting at Tuscola High School, I am finally getting to teach what I set out to teach all along – woodworking,” he says. “I have never taught it, but I am so excited to begin in August.”

Rhinhart, along with Eric Sollie (the masonry teacher at Tuscola High School), will begin teaching the new woodworking class in August.

“He and I both attended Appalachian State University, worked in the same woodshop there and share the same passion about what this kind of class can do for young people,” Rhinehart says.

Sollie has been interested in woodworking since he was a child, watching his grandfather work in his shop.

“I got my formal training at Appalachian State from Bill Hanner, enjoyed working as a woodshop assistant and have been working in construction and woodworking ever since,” Sollie says. “I enjoy what I do because I get to see the next generation take away skills they can use to make a living and can pass down to others.”

As the high school’s career development coordinator, Laura Turner said she was inspired to apply for the grant to help launch the new woodworking class.

“While exploring ideas and resources for the program, I came across the grant on Instagram and immediately saw it as an opportunity to help bring this vision to life for our students,” Turner says. “I reached out with an inquiry to ask whether applications from public schools would be accepted, and I was encouraged when I was told we could apply. In public education, funding is often very limited, especially when starting a brand-new program from the ground up. Creating a quality woodworking program requires substantial investment in tools, equipment, materials and safety resources.”

Rhinehart says one of the first things they will purchase is a SawStop table saw.

“This particular saw is in many woodworking shops across the country, and it has built-in safety features that make it a must in an environment where teens will be operating it,” Rhinehart says.

Also on their to-buy list are some vises, sandpaper, bits, glue and saw blades. And if there’s money left, they’d love to get a CNC router.

“This grant represents more than financial support – it represents the opportunity to provide students with hands-on, career-focused learning experiences that can spark creativity, build technical skills and open doors to future careers in woodworking, construction, design and skilled trades,” Turner says. “This support will help us establish a strong foundation for a program that will positively impact students for years to come.”

Drew Hart, East 38^th Studio

Drew Hart, owner of East 38^th Studio, began woodworking less than five years ago.

“I randomly stumbled upon a furniture class at school, already two weeks late into the semester and no prior knowledge of woodworking, and they reluctantly let me in,” Hart wrote in his application. “I was hooked. I found my path forward.”

Everything was new, intimidating and challenging, he says. He was constantly making mistakes and working many late nights, but his creativity “was running wild.”

Learning woodworking at school proved helpful in several ways.

“If you get a job at the school woodshop, you can work all day and night, not just normal open hours,” he says. “You learn how to care for, maintain and fix all types and ages of machines. You will make some of your best friends, people who inspire you and will work with you so late into the night that the morning janitor looks at you like you are crazy.”

With school ending, Hart says, “I knew in my soul I had to chase this dream.”

People told him he wasn’t ready. He didn’t have enough experience. That he would be broke forever.

“This stoked the fire in me even more,” he says.

He bought the cheapest tools he could find on Facebook Marketplace and fixed them up in his parents’ garage.

“Each machine has its own unique history,” he says. “It gives me purpose to carry on their legacy. I met so many amazing people on Marketplace who wanted to ensure their machines got a new life.”

Like Barry, who gave him a more than 100-year-old stroke sander that was used in an old piano factory for next to nothing.

“He just wanted to pass his wisdom to the next generation,” says Hart, who passed it along to his friend Jaz in exchange for some walnut.

Hart bought a “beast of a jointer/planer” from Tom, who bought it from his mentor and wanted to pass it along.

“Tom is one of the best timber framers of his generation,” Hart says. “He was selling off his shop to pay for his bills, fighting cancer.”

After spending a long winter restoring tools, Hart moved to Iowa to be with his partner at the time.

“We continued to build our furniture studio,” he says. “But just as we got some traction, our partnership abruptly ended. I had to pack up my machines and sell many off to afford a truck. I rented the cheapest shop I found back home in Cincinnati. I threw myself into the deep end. I rebuilt my shop and started a new chapter. But none of this would have been possible without my friends and family.”

Hart says he has hundreds of ideas floating around in his head and in sketchbooks that he has been craving to bring to life.

“But I lacked either the time or resources required to materialize these designs,” he says. “As soon as I saw the Edelmans’ grant on Instagram, I knew I needed to apply. My brain began to run wild with possibilities of machines to grow my shop and ability to explore and experiment.”

Hart plans to evolve his collection of vintage machinery to be more versatile and increase his production capacity.

“I will stay true to my love for vintage machines, not only for their unrivaled beauty compared to modern machines but also their robustness and low cost.”

Ashley Pieper, Shallow Creek Woodcraft

Ashley Pieper is the owner of Shallow Creek Woodcraft, a one-woman small studio furniture practice in Central Pennsylvania.

“I have been woodworking seriously for nearly five years, but started as an interest about 16 years ago,” she says. “I am officially in my second year of business and really happy with the ability to work in a field I am passionate about. I fell in love with the craft pretty quickly from the beginning, but once I started designing my own work and tapped into all the expanses of creative avenues possible, I was locked in.”

After reading about the grant, Pieper noted that it seemed directed at small craft furniture businesses, so she decided to apply.

“I have been navigating trying to make things in the shop work for me as best as possible, but had needs for tooling improvements,” she says. “I did not think I truly had a shot at receiving it, but the practice of speaking to my work and putting myself out there to help drive this dream forward felt like good practice at minimum.”

Pieper says the grant money will improve the scope of work she can accomplish in her practice.

“I plan to purchase an improved dust collection system and ducting as my first priority,” she says. “Happy lungs will be wonderful! I will also purchase a vacuum pump and bags to be able to expand my marquetry work and bent laminations. I am also looking to add a lathe to the shop. The balance after those tools will be hand tools for chair work and period furniture techniques.”

There is so much Pieper loves about woodworking.

“I love the connection with a natural material and the stillness of mind working from my bench with it,” she says. “I love the ability to be a solo business and have a beautiful community to connect and share with. I love the feeling that I have found where I am supposed to be in the world and that the work I do becomes part of a family background for others. I love that I discover more and more things to love as time gets invested into the craft.”

This grant, Pieper says, is a nice affirmation of the work she has been pouring her heart into.

“Beyond the monetary generosity of Paul & Pascale, having their encouragement from the gift is priceless,” she says.

Paul Duffy, Duffy Designs

Paul Duffy of Duffy Designs is a veteran Air Force officer.

“After separating from the Air Force in 2013, I pursued a career in architecture,” Duffy says. “I soon discovered that office life wasn’t for me. I transitioned to designing and building cabinetry for camper-van conversions, which later led me back to school for fine woodworking. I attended Red Rocks Community College here in Colorado in 2019 and received my certificate of Fine Furniture Craftsmanship.

While attending Red Rocks, Duffy started taking furniture commissions. In 2020, he and his wife purchased their home, and he officially launched his own business.

“She has been gracious enough to allow me to turn the 500-square-foot garage into a furniture studio,” he says. “I love the craft of building with my hands. I find it fulfilling to transform rough pieces of a tree into something beautiful and functional. Most days, I feel like I just don’t have enough time to build everything I would like to.”

Duffy saw Paul and Pascale’s ad in Fine Woodworking and decided to apply.

“I felt that I met the criteria and the grant would alleviate the hurdles I encounter in my small shop,” Duffy says.

Duffy is using the money to buy several new machines.

“I have been using a benchtop DeWalt planer for far too long,” he says. “This is my opportunity to get a heavier 15" cast-iron planer in my shop. I make a fair number of chairs and have outgrown my current entry-level lathe. I just set up my new Laguna lathe yesterday, which will be a pleasure to spend hours turning at. Thirdly, I am purchasing a Shaper Origin. My design process starts on the computer using Autodesk Fusion, and I currently utilize another shop’s CNC to make templates, jigs and fixtures. Having a handheld CNC in my shop will be a big improvement.”

Glasgow High School

Jeff Pavey, the industrial arts instructor at Glasgow High School, has been woodworking since the 1990s.

“My father had a small woodshop in our garage at home,” Pavey says. “We did a lot of antique refinishing and building small items. I’ve remodeled homes and built a couple of homes, also. My passion, though, has been in furniture.”

After having both knees replaced, Pavey decided to return to college to earn a degree in engineering and technical education. He recently finished his third year teaching 6th grade through 12th grade at Glasgow High School in Glasgow, Missouri.

“I love seeing a student have that ‘ah-ha’ moment,” he says. “That moment when they see a pile of lumber start to become what they envisioned in their mind. That’s my favorite part of teaching woodworking. Sometimes it’s hard for them to stay motivated to get to that point because of how long it takes to get there. Cutting, fitting, fine-tuning, sanding … and sanding … and sanding … and sanding some more, till they are mad at me. But in the end, when they start to see the project come together, it’s all worth the pain and suffering. That’s why I love teaching woodworking.”

Pavey believes more schools should offer shop classes.

“I am beyond grateful to work for a school that believes in having industrial art/woodshop in schools,” he says. “The support our program has is fantastic. But as everyone knows, schools have limited funds to go around to all of our programs. Even though the grant was meant for small woodworking businesses, I thought I would apply. My theory is that it never hurts to ask. All they can do is say no, but on occasion, good people say yes.”

Pavey plans to buy a 4’x4’ Shapeoko 5.1 Pro CNC Routers, two new Grizzly dust collectors, a new Grizzly lathe, plus a few lathe accessories. If there is money left over, he’ll buy a few hand tools as well.

Annie Meyer, Annie Meyer Studio

Annie Meyer, of Annie Meyer Studio, has been woodworking for just over 15 years.

“I love that this craft requires both precision and creativity,” Meyer says. “I love how challenging it is, and also how expressive it can be. As much as I enjoy the solitary workflow, I thrive the most in a classroom setting. I teach undergraduate students, and I get such a thrill from watching them move from feelings of intimidation to empowerment in the woodshop. I love watching their wild and strange ideas come to life. In my own practice, I design and build furniture pieces that are both sculptural and functional.”

Meyer says they applied to a number of woodworking and creative grants over the last few years.

“For each grant I do get, I have dozens of rejections before it,” Meyer says. “There are so many funding opportunities out there for creatives. I’ve learned that it takes the endurance of shooting your shot over and over before one lands. I was totally shocked to learn this one worked out. I had seen this opportunity advertised and knew it could make a huge difference for the shop I have been wanting to build in my new home in Maine.”

Currently based in Boston, Meyer and their partner have been fixing up an 1840s farmhouse in Midcoast Maine over the last year.

“We plan to build a studio space and woodshop in the attached barn,” Meyer says. “The grant money will go towards outfitting this space with foundational tools and machines. Through the generosity of the Paul and Pascale Edelman Woodshop Grant, I’ll be able to continue this practice in my new life in Maine.”

In December, Paul and Pascale Edelman announced on Instagram they were giving away 10 woodshop grants of $10,000 each to independent furniture makers. They also ran an ad in Fine Woodworking. In the end, they gave away 21 of these grants and plan to offer more in the future.

We had many readers reach out with questions: Who are these people? Why (and how) are they doing this? What’s the catch?

So we talked with Paul Edelman about his path from teacher to entrepreneur to woodworker and philanthropist. (Spoiler alert: There’s no catch.) And in part two of this series, we share stories from nine woodworkers who received these generous grants.

From Teacher to Entrepreneur + Paula and Pascale’s Love Story

Paul and Pascale Edelman met in a hostel in 1994 while solo backpacking and working overseas.

“We lived and traveled together off and on, went back to our own countries, met back up and wrote a lot of love letters,” Paul says. “We ended up deciding to go our separate ways with heavy hearts, and then, as life would have it, 13 years later, we came back together! I moved to France in 2009, we had a son in 2010 (Pascale had two boys already, my stepsons) and now we’ve been married for 16 years.”

Paul Edelman hasn’t always been a woodworker. In his late 20s, he decided he wanted to work with kids and share his love of reading and writing. From 2001 to 2005, Edelman taught 7^th-grade English in East Flatbush, Brooklyn.

“Once I got into the classroom, I found the experience enriching and also very challenging,” he says. “What I loved most about it was teaching creative writing and getting my kids to open up and explore their imaginations.”

While teaching, Paul leaned on fellow teachers for ideas and resources. Many teachers, he realized, could benefit from a repository of teaching ideas. In 2006, he launched TpT (originally Teachers Pay Teachers), an online marketplace where teachers can sell lessons, worksheets, printables, assessments and more.

“It was an incredibly gratifying experience to build it and help create the culture and ethos behind it,” Paul says. “It’s one of those rare businesses where everyone wins, and I’m very proud to have made it happen.”

Paul ran the company for about eight years, then served on the board of directors for nine years, until it was acquired in 2023.

After the success of TpT, Paul says Pascale continued to work for a time before stopping to learn to make stained-glass windows at a well-known studio in Paris.

“Pascale isn’t a woodworker,” he says. “She’s like a poet, though she doesn’t write poetry. She’s attracted to the beauty in the world, in art and nature.”

After spending a year in the studio, quickly learning how to make gorgeous windows, she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma.

“After a bone marrow transplant, and now back under chemo for a couple years, she’s still always busy doing large, gorgeous renovation projects, playing the piano, learning to paint, reading, making a stained glass window from time to time and spending many, many hours gardening, making spaces inviting and idyllic,” Paul says. “She never stops, except for during the bimonthly treatments, a real force of nature! She’s doing well, as the treatments are getting better and better quite rapidly nowadays, thankfully.”

After stepping back from TpT, Paul took some time off and then started investing in other companies, but he didn’t enjoy the work.

“I finally realized something about myself, that I wasn’t really a businessman,” he says. “I didn’t like meetings or spreadsheets or negotiating or even managing people. The thing I liked was creating. Teaching creative writing. Creating original lesson plans. Creating the business, having the idea and then building it. Once it was built, I loved working on building new features on the website. That’s what got me going, but at the same time, it was very frustrating that I didn’t have the skills the web designer and the software engineer had to actually make things. Learning woodworking was the one possible answer that persisted in my mind since around 2018 or so, something off the computer that could tick all of the boxes for me. I’d get to take an idea and then build it myself! After it’s done, it’ll feel amazing, and then I get to do it all over again.”

Paul says he’s always been drawn to wood and wooden furniture.

“I admired carpenters and wished I could do what they did,” he says. “I was never particularly handy or artistic. Could I even do it? Fine furniture seemed so far away. As a way to get my toes wet, I bought a few tools and built a couple of simple work tables with butt joints and screws, and then, during Covid, I spent a lot of time cutting down branches at our country house and carving walking sticks. I could work on a stick for hours, and the time just slid by, and I found the different kinds of wood so interesting and beautiful. I was hooked. That said, I wasn’t getting anywhere on the furniture side.”

Becoming a Woodworker

After the Covid-19 lockdown, Paul hired Mayuka Jayasekera, an English furniture maker living in Bordeaux, to build a corner table.

“We got to talking, and I learned he was driving one hour each way to work in an open barn at his in-laws with just a few basic machines and tools,” Paul says. “I saw my chance. I offered to finance a full woodshop in the city center of Bordeaux, where he could work as long as he agreed to teach me everything he knew about woodworking. And that’s what we did!”

For the woodshop, Paul bought a hangar that was being used as a neighborhood parking garage. It came with a house, which he and Pascale thought would be a great studio for artists and artisans.

“The renovations have taken a while, but they’re almost done, and already four are working there: a leather craftsman, a fine arts painter, a jewelry maker and a custom bike framer – a mix of French and expats,” Paul says. “There are two more small studios still to rent out. It’s all very new. Our shared kitchen and showroom haven’t been completed yet, for example. We have another studio space nearby, which Pascale shares with a talented ceramist, so little by little it’s becoming a nice small community of artists and artisans.”

The main woodshop was finished in 2022, and Paul has been there 9-5 Monday to Friday ever since.

“Mayuka taught me how to choose and mill wood, how to use the (Festool) Domino and chisels etc., and then I just learned by doing. I started my own projects within a few days, asked Mayuka questions when I had them, observed how he worked and just plowed forward. I watched a lot of YouTube videos, too, of course. One thing I think that helped me advance relatively quickly was that I wasn’t afraid to take on projects I wasn’t ready for, to build something big and complex, to just jump in and start cutting wood. Succeeding this way early gave me a lot of confidence, but I still feel like a very intermediate woodworker. There are so many things I don’t know how to do yet.”

So far, Paul has mainly built furniture that he and Pascale needed or wanted for their apartment and country house.

“I generally design on the fly and figure it out as I go,” he says. “I don’t always know exactly what I want, but I very much know what I don’t want, so the process of eliminating most everything reveals what’s left to build, and then I treat all of my mistakes along the way as happy accidents that give me an opportunity to improve the design. And since Pascale has really great taste, all throughout the process I’m imagining what she might like, too, so that helps me hone in on something nice that’ll work for us both.”

Giving Back to a Community They Love

While Paul and Pascale had been donating to charities fairly regularly, Paul wanted to give back in a more personal way. So he came up with the idea of woodshop grants, which Pascale enthusiastically supported.

“The idea came from my seeing the classic chicken-and-egg problem in the custom wood furniture business,” Paul says. “You need a better-equipped workshop to build more and better furniture, which would allow you to sell more. But to afford the better workshop, you need to sell more furniture first. You’re stuck in this loop from which it’s tough to break free.”

He witnessed this firsthand when he learned that it took Jayasekera four years to save up €5,000 for a planer/jointer – up until then, Jayasekera had been doing all his planing by hand.

“I thought that instead of only giving to charities, it would be more meaningful to give directly to independent furniture makers to help them beat this problem,” Paul says. “And also, woodworking has given me so much; I’ve really never been happier or enjoyed my work as much as I do now. Helping others stay in the field and succeed as woodworkers and furniture makers seemed to hit a sweet spot for me.”

The Edelmans received 1,173 applications, with stories so compelling that they increased the number of grants they awarded from to 21 from 10. Choosing who received them, Paul says, was difficult.

“We were making changes until the last moment and wanted to help many more,” he says. “We received a bit of criticism for how we ended up choosing ‘fine furniture’ designers as opposed to those making less design-y furniture – that it became a design competition. As it was our first one and we had no idea what the response would be, it’s true that we left it pretty open. Almost all of the 1,173 applicants were equally in need of shop upgrades, so the only way to differentiate was to mostly select those making what we considered to be beautiful furniture, too. There was no science to it. Certain stories and portfolios tugged at us more than others, including the appeals from the public school shop teachers, which indeed hit a soft spot from my time as a school teacher.”

Reading through every application, the Edelmans noted some commonalities.

“Some of the themes that I related to was how the act of woodworking lights up and focuses the mind; how it gives purpose to one’s life; how satisfying it is to work with such a noble material that has so many virtues; and especially how wonderful it feels to create something useful that may last and serve a purpose for others for a very long time,” he says. “It’s incredible, too, how many came to woodworking more seriously during or shortly after Covid. I guess we all were given a pause from our busy lives to evaluate what really mattered. Woodworking matters, clearly. On the other hand, the struggle is real for just about everyone. It’s not an easy path.”

The Edelmans plan to offer these grants regularly for a time.

“Not sure if the next one will be in 2027 or 2028, we’ll see,” he says. “For certain, this has been one of the most gratifying things we’ve ever done. I think there should be more grant money for the artisanal trades. If the IRS made these types of grants tax-deductible, which they are not currently, it could help attract more funding from foundations.”

What’s “Swag Week?” Read the footnote.1

This month we are giving away a copy of our first book, “The Art of Joinery,” which has been out of print for many years. I think this book is from the first pressing, but I’m not sure.

The book is an exploration of 17th-century Joseph Moxon’s treatise on woodworking, which is the first English-language book on the craft.Moxon wasn’t a woodworker, he was a printer. But the text is clearly informed by his observations and discussions with woodworkers.

We took that text and amplified it with modern photos and illustrations. You can download a revised version of this book for free here.

This book was important for Lost Art Press for a couple reasons. One, sales from this book were good enough that we started work on another, “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker.” And two, the book gave us our logo of dividers.

When we turned in the book to the printer, he said, “Don’t you want to put anything more on the cover than the title?” I shrugged my shoulders and slapped the dividers image from Moxon’s book on the cover. And that became our logo.

We’ll select a winner on June 5 and mail them this book. If you are a paid subscriber to one of our three substacks, there is nothing for you to do. You are entered in the drawing. Thank you for your subscription.

For the last four years, I’ve wandered off to a local cemetery to look for naturally curved armbows for chairs. There’s a huge forested section of the cemetery that’s never been developed, and they allow visitors to walk there and scrounge firewood.

Every time I visited, I left empty-handed. My conclusion: Trees in North America tend to grow straighter than the trees that line the hedgerows and field walls in Wales.1

But, as it turned out, I was wrong.

Curved stuff is everywhere. You just have to train your eyes a bit – and reject some conventional woodworking wisdom.

So, let’s drag that wisdom out of the woods, rough it up a bit and steal its lunch money.

Here’s the commonsense nugget: You shouldn’t harvest branch wood for furniture. It is filled with stress because of gravity. The underside of the branch grows in compression. And the topside of the branch is in tension. So when you cut it, it self-destructs.

A couple Cincinnati-area woodworkers and amateur sawyers taught me this lesson first-hand. When Sam Sherrill and Michael Romano started harvesting street trees to convert them to lumber, a local family offered up a massive pin oak on their property. The family asked the friends to build them a table in exchange for all the wood in the tree.

They jumped at the chance. But when they felled the tree, they discovered the trunk of the pin oak was rotted and almost completely hollow. It seemed to be a waste of effort.

But wait. Some of the branches from the pin oak were 3' in diameter, which is the size of mature boles of some trees.

So they took the branches and slabbed them up.

The trouble happened when they tried to joint and plane the branch wood with machinery. The slabs literally self-destructed under the knives of the planer. Every board stopped the machine’s 3-hp motor cold when the branch’s tension cut loose.

They showed me a video. When a branch exploded, it sounded like a gun shot.

So for the last 25 years, I’ve steered clear of anything that had even a whiff of branch.

As it turns out, avoiding branch wood is a good idea if you’re trying to end up with flat boards for casework. But if you are willing to let the branch have a say in what you build, you can use the stuff.

That means sawing it with a band saw and doing the task gradually. First I remove the bark to make the wood less tasty for bug life. Then I cut the branch to rough length and saw through the branch’s pith. The unstable pith will crack the surrounding wood as the branch dries.

After making a few cuts on the branch, I leave the stock alone for a few days to let it move if it wants to. And – this might be more important – I follow the curve established by the branch’s fibers. I don’t try to get the branch to match my arm patterns.

So far, this has worked well. Nothing has blowed up.

Once I felt comfortable sawing up the stuff, I had to adjust my eyeballs and my language to find more sources for it.

First, the Eyeballs

When you meet someone, it’s kind of weird to fix your gaze on the person’s legs. But that’s basically what I do when I look at trees. I stare at its bole and wonder about the wood inside. I might glance at the overall shape of the tree (oh, how lovely you would look lying on the ground, dismembered).

But branch wood has always been a no-no, so I never spent much time gazing at the shapes among the leaves.

Ganderize this Bradford pear in our neighborhood. Nope, its eyes are up here. Start following the bole as it branches out and… bingo. There it is. A chair arm.

Now the Words

Chairmakers aren’t the only people who use naturally curved branches. And after some reading, I began looking. There are marine lumberyards that cut “knees” for wooden boats. These right-angle bits of wood help the boat keep its shape.

Last week I visited Dara Timber in Berwick, Maine. Jack McAuliffe, the owner, regularly cuts knees. He sold me five bits of promising wood with the bark still on – this is not like Home Depot.

When I returned home, the first step was to remove the bark (wait, do I need to buy a barkspud?), clean off the naked wood below with a hose, then figure out how to cut the stuff.

After getting the chunks into manageable sizes (which is going to be my fun Sunday), I’ll freeze them to eliminate any wood-eating pests because I’m not a fan of bug-killing poisons. Check out this article from the University of Kentucky on how to treat wood with a household freezer. I’ve used this process several times with great success.

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In 2020, we introduced a column called “Chair Chat” with Rudy Everts and Klaus Skrudland, both keen amateur chairmakers. Klaus is in Norway. In 2020, Rudy lived in Germany, but now lives in the U.S.

One of the most important parts of learning about chairs is to look at a lot of chairs and listen to people talk about what they like and don’t like. Even if I don’t agree with someone’s assessment of a chair, I am interested in how that person reacts to a design.

Klaus, Rudy and I like to chat about different chairs via WhatsApp, an internet messaging program. And I think that you might enjoy a look at some of our lighthearted talks.

Beware: This is like talking about a chair after a couple of beers. These are not formal critiques based on the column orders or Vitruvius’ “De architectura.” They are a look at what chairmakers talk about when they look at old chairs – both beautiful and a little on the funky side. The language is a little salty (though no worse than you’d see on broadcast television). If you are sensitive, please don’t read any further.

These chats are one of the highlights of my day. Below is the first one we published in our column. You can read all the others here. I hope you enjoy these old ones and they help you form your own opinions about design. And I am happy to say that we are making more Chair Chats for Rudy’s substack, Underhatchet. So stay tuned for more rudeness.

Rudy Everts: Hi Klaus, I found this chair you’d maybe like to see! It has been sold by a south Wales company. It’s quite small, it measures: height 29", width 24", depth 19", seat height 16.5".

Klaus Skrudland: Whoa. Do you think it’s from Wales? Looks like it’s from Mars.

Rudy: Many chairs being offered for sale claim Welsh heritage to fetch a higher price. This one is actually from South Mars. I know, the chair seems crude, but wait until you see the armbow joint.

Klaus: Quite a rudimentary chair, indeed. I have a weak spot for these simple, raw chairs, though. They give me a kick.

Rudy: By the way, that back leg definitely looks like a turd.

Klaus: Mmmhmm. It’s being pooped out as we speak.

Rudy: Charming… So, should we go over the chair top to bottom or other way around? Your call. Crest or legs, that is the question.

Klaus: I’m a leg lover!

Rudy: Alright. Well, with wonky chairs like this I always wonder if the maker used a whole branch and just stripped off the bark. And did he/she leave the pith in?

Klaus: It sure looks like they just picked branches of a tree and perhaps drawknifed or spokeshaved them to shape. Probably with the pith in. I also wonder if they didn’t bother finding straight branches for legs? Why not?

Rudy: I think this chair says “I don’t give a f**k” all over.”

Klaus: He probably was an anarchist that just wanted something quick and dirty to sit on to eat his lamb stew and drink his tea. I bet he didn’t see this conversation coming! However, this must be a classic example of “furniture of necessity.” It’s so rudimentary that the previous evolutionary step is almost just sitting on a log!

Rudy: Yes, I was just coming to that — the seat. This must be one of the crudest examples of seats I have seen. The surface doesn’t look very refined. I wonder how comfortable it is?

Chris: Wide seats are always hard to come by. My guess is this one was split out and the furrows are the result of that process.

Klaus: Probably brutal to the butt. And now it’s even burnished by 200 years of farts. It was probably much worse back then! Still, it’s a charming chair. It’s like a weird, old and demented aunt, that is totally out of whack and sometimes outright foul mouthed and crazy, but lovable nevertheless.

Rudy: Martian farts, you mean. However I agree that the chair has its own charm nevertheless. Going back to the seat, I do like its shape and it looks like the maker added an underside bevel to lighten its appearance.

Klaus: Is there a bevel to it? I can’t see it. Anyway, the seat is not as thick as they often are on these vernacular chairs.

Rudy: You’re right, the seat is just thinner on one side and not all around.

Klaus: I think that’s right, yes. By the way, do you think the chair is made entirely out of green wood?

Rudy: I would be hesitant to say the wood was all green when the chair was made. Though the warping of the seat would indicate this. However the armbow joint is tight enough and the leg tenons protrude just a little above the seat. If those had been green they would have shrunk when they dried and not fit the mortises anymore…

Klaus: You’re right, Sherlock. Good point. That arm joint is cool, too. Some kind of half lap. It demonstrates a certain skill and in a way contradicts the crudeness of the chair.

Rudy: That armbow joint is apparently called an open mortise-and-tenon joint. And check out the stick that runs right through it! Highly unusual!

Klaus: The more I study this chair, the more I like it. As with many of these primitive chairs, they’ve got a strong personality. It’s hard to ignore this chair in a room. Anyway, I wonder why he needed a joint there at all. My guess is that the whole arm was one crooked branch, but it was too long in the middle and the maker had to shorten it. Interesting chair, this one.

Chris: Or the arm was a slightly curved branch that was resawn and then joined in the middle with the open mortise and tenon.

Klaus: Could be. How about the finish? Must be a “Welsh miserable!”

Rudy: Welsh arse finish, if you ask me. What about the sticks? We haven’t gone over them yet.

Klaus: Ah, the sticks! Give me your thoughts!

Rudy: I like the 3-3-3 spacing a lot. With the long sticks together and the short ones spaced out. But the sticks look like they’re on the thick side, don’t they?

Klaus: They’re definitely on the chubby side, somewhere around 3/4″, I would guess. The long sticks are slimmer over the armbow, though. It has probably something to do with the thickness of the crook he used. The maker had to drill smaller mortises in order to not burst the arm. What about the crest, then?

Rudy: It is so small. You barely see it. Like a shrunken head.

Klaus: Yeah, why so short? It only makes the chair look weird. The chairmaker either had an idea that this chair needed a short crest design-wise, or this piece of wood is simply what he had at hand. As far as I know the Welsh tradition, the latter is probably the case.

Chris: There is always the possibility that the crest was taller at first. After a long stick broke, perhaps, the crest could have been lowered. Can’t say without inspecting the real thing.

Rudy: The crest is even so low it almost attaches to the arm, like a doubler! Doesn’t add a lot of comfortable back support…But I like it because it’s funky!

Klaus: Haha. For sure, this crest doesn’t add comfort at all. Instead it’s constantly poking you at a painful spot in your spine just to remind you that there’s no time to rest. Which was probably the case for a hard working farmer in Wales. Or on Mars.

Rudy: Haha, I think you’re right!

Chris: I won’t say that anything’s uncomfortable until I’ve sat in it. I will say it’s funky in its present form.

Klaus: The chair is very funky, as you say. I totally agree! But not as the sleek and smooth funk of the eighties, like Cameo or Prince. Maybe more as rough and sweaty funk like 70s Parliament or James Brown coked out of his mind! By the way, should we wrap it up and give the chair a name?

Rudy: Absolutely. The chair needs a name. Just give me a minute.

Klaus: Yup!

Rudy: What about naming it after a JB song? Not the Welsh JB, mind you! I mean James Brown. How about “Give It Up Or Turn It Loose?”

Klaus: That’s perfect! It’s a funky tune and it’s exactly what the chairmaker did. He turned the chair loose!

I’m not proud of this story, but it’s important to tell.

In the early 2000s, I went to dinner with a bunch of hand-tool enthusiasts after a woodworking show. I was still a fetal woodworking editor and didn’t know many people, so I was grateful for the invitation.

After a few beers, people began talking shit about Roy Underhill. They said he wasn’t a serious woodworker. He was too “TV.” And that his show was actually a step backward for the craft of working with hand tools.

Roy made everything a joke, they said, instead of taking handwork seriously and bringing that vibe to the PBS world on Saturday mornings.

At that point, I’d not met Roy. All I knew was what I saw on TV. I liked his show, but I didn’t have a single fact I could say in response.

So I said nothing. I let the kookiness rage unchecked.

If I could go back in time about 25 years and sit in on that dinner again, here’s what I’d do.

1. Skip the polenta appetizer. It wasn’t worth the calories.

2. Put down my napkin and declare: “If any of you here has done more than Roy to promote the craft, please stand up and take a bow.”

3. Then make fart noises with my armpit or something. (I’m not really good with the Step No. 3 stuff.)

These days, I stand ready to defend almost all my fellow do-goobers who have decided to seek woodworking fame and fortune. I do this because the fame is minor (“Ooh, maybe I’ll be in a Shaper Origin advertisement”) and the fortune is worth about what you’ll find in a Chinese cookie.

People like Roy, Norm Abram, Marc Spagunolo, Anne of All Trades, April Wilkerson, Ana White, Paul Sellers, Mustache Boy, Matt Cremona, Shannon Rogers and etc. do what they do because they love the craft.

And not only do they love the craft – we all do – but they are willing to make fools of themselves in public to help bring others into it.

Nobody opens themselves up to unending criticism, nitpicking, anonymous snark and outright creepy stalking because it’s fun and profitable. It isn’t fun. And there isn’t much money in it.

We do it because the craft has given us so much. Purpose. A career. An independent life. A way of expressing ourselves.

And the only way to repay the craft for these gifts is to fertilize, water and grow it for others.

So it’s especially bewildering when snarky woodworkers try to pit us against one another. Yup, it’s pretty common for students to say: “I bet you really hate Paul Sellers.”

What? No. I barely know Paul. Most of us in the craft barely know each other. We’re all too busy trying to make a living at something that is way less profitable than selling sod or oils decanted from snakes.

So, no I didn’t hear what Marc Spagnuolo said about secondary sharpening bevels that directly contradicted my advice on page 33 of my book “Sharpen This.” Marc doesn’t have time to read my books. And I don’t have time to watch all his videos.

And when we woodworking writers/vloggers/3^rd string celebrities do meet up, the last thing we do is argue about … anything, really. We’re thrilled by each other’s company. Mostly, we rehash crazy stories about customers who are bonkers. That’s right. I guess we talk mostly about y’all.

Such as the ones who followed us to the restroom with a video camera. Those who proposed marriage in an email with attached photos of the “included” workshop. Or those who offered to pay money in exchange for soiled work pants.

So when I go out for beers with woodworkers after an event – I still enjoy doing this – I’m ready if the smack talk begins.

“Oh, you don’t think April Wilkerson encourages people to grow their skills?” I say. “Well, she’s done more than anybody in this whole damn building to grow our craft.

“So suck on that for a second. Uh, and try the polenta!”

Why Travel? A Flood of Good Ideas

This year, I’ll take 11 trips to places in the United States, the UK and the EU. I am the first to say: That’s too much travel. But I am also the first to say: STFU – you’re not my mom.

This evening, I’m sitting in Peter Galbert’s kitchen in an 18th-century farmhouse in Berwick, Maine. I came here to teach a class, talk to Pete about his next book and reacquaint myself with Maine. It’s been too long.

And while those were the three items of business for the week, a lot more has gone down.

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I had a girlfriend in high school who had two unusual characteristics. Lynette was a drama major (not a recommended trait in girlfriends) and her father owned a sweet MG convertible. Whenever I would go to her house for dinner, her father would be under the hood of the vehicle, wrench in hand, until the fried okra hit the dinner table.

The MG always needed something, and Lynette’s dad had to do it himself. This was, after all, Arkansas in the 1980s. And anything that wasn’t built in Detroit elicited stares from the townsfolk.

While finishing up my first English-style workbench, I thought about that MG and Mr. Hutton.

I built this bench in 2006 for my first book, “Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use” (Popular Woodworking). This particular design was based on several historical benches that I studied, including the version in Peter Nicholson’s “Mechanic’s Companion,” which also provided key construction information. The angled legs and tail vise came from other examples.

It was the first English-style bench I’d ever built or used, so there was a bit of a learning curve, both with its construction and in learning to make the most of it while working on it.

I found that, like its British four-banger brethren, the bench was a bit needy.

For example, I flattened the top the week prior, but a week later it was out of true. So I flattened it again. I also wondered if the top was stiff enough to withstand heavy planing. The top was 1-1/2″ thick and supported by thick bearers beneath, but it still had an almost imperceptible springy feel that gave me pause. Would it make a difference in my day-to-day work? I didn’t know. But I was going to add a couple more ribs on the underside of the top to see if I could stiffen things up.

Perhaps the problem was that I was comparing this bench to the Roubo-style French bench I built in 2005. The top of that bench was almost 4″ thick and unyielding to all punishment. But that bench took twice as long to build and required three times the material.

Clearly, I needed to take the English bench for more of a test drive.

As I began breaking in the bench by working on it, I found some things about it that were quite nice. The angled leg vise was fantastic. The large front apron was an excellent means of supporting long and wide work with little effort, although I did have to learn how to work with it, which was a blessing and a curse. And I had actually been clamping stuff to the benchtop without too much trouble at its ends.

Bottom line: I go through this process with all projects. I start with great optimism as I begin a project. After a series of highs and lows, I complete the project. I stand back, take a look and focus on its flaws, the project’s frustrations and my mistakes. Then, after I put the project into use, I mellow. The flaws fade and I’m able to see the project for what it is, somewhere between the optimism and the despair.

I hoped this was also true with the bench. It sure didn’t happen with Lynette (or her dad’s MG). He sold the green convertible and Lynette dumped me for one of the officers of the drama club.

In 2020, this bench was backed against my French bench and I still worked on it regularly. What was most surprising about the bench was how little I modified it in 14 years. I added a commercial planing stop, a few holdfast holes and a bench light.

Here’s a video tour:

Items shown or mentioned in the video:

• Record planing stop. An antique from Patrick Leach.

• European screws for the leg vise and wagon vise. From Lee Valley.

• Gramercy holdfasts

• Wooden bench dogs from Lie-Nielsen.

• Veritas Hold-Down

In 2025, we rearranged the bench room and sold the English Joiner’s Workbench. I do miss it at times, but I am grateful for the extra space we now have in our bench room.

These two Welsh-inspired stick chairs were built earlier this year for a local furniture show, and I am now offering them for sale.

Prices and details on how to buy them are below. But first, some notes about these two almost-identical chairs.

These chairs are based on one of my favorite Welsh chairs, which was shown in Richard Bebb’s “Welsh Country Furniture” (Shire). Not much is known about this chair, so I call this form the “Bebb chair.”

Like many Welsh chairs, this one has the arm positioned fairly high above the seat (about 12"), and it’s quite comfortable. The dramatic rake and splay of the legs mimics old work as well.

The chairs are made from American black cherry and are assembled with animal glue so they can be repaired easily in the far future. The chairs are finished with soft wax, which is completely non-toxic, easy to repair and looks better with age. The chairs were exposed to full sun while in the furniture show, and so the cherry has already developed a nice rich tone, which will only improve.

Unlike the original Bebb chair, I shaved the arms fully round for comfort. And I carved in a “wolf’s tooth” protection symbol on both ends of the chairs shoes (right next to the decorative ogee).

The chairs are 37-1/2" tall overall. The seats are 17" off the floor. The backs are fairly upright at 9°, with a seat tilt of 6°. They are suitable for dining or working, but they are comfortable for long spells as well.

How to Buy the Chairs

We’re selling these chairs via a random drawing. All prices include packing and shipping to anywhere in the U.S. There are no additional charges. One chair costs $1,800. Or you can get both for $3,300.

If you wish to buy a chair (or the pair), send an email to lapdrawing@lostartpress.com before 3 p.m. (Eastern) on Wednesday, May 27. Please use the subject line: “One chair” if you want one chair, or “Both chairs” if you want both. In the email please include your:

• Name

• U.S. shipping address

• Daytime phone number (this is for the trucking quote only)

Here’s how the drawing will work: If we randomly pick someone who wants two chairs, then they will get both. If the first person we pick wants one chair, then we will pick a second person for the second chair.

If someone who gets picked asked for two chairs, but only one chair is available, they will have the option of buying one chair or simply passing on the offer.

If you are the winner, the chair will be shipped to your door. The price includes the crate and all shipping charges. Alternatively, the chair can be picked up at our storefront in Covington, Kentucky.

A curious Frank Klausz picked up my panel plane – I’d made it from a kit. He turned it over and looked at its sole and its iron peeking out from the mouth of the tool.

“You have honed a straight bevel,” he said. “Good.”

Then he turned the plane back over and looked at the plane’s cocobolo infill, the brass lever cap and the iron. He shook his head and walked away from my bench. With my panel plane in his hands.

I wasn’t about to stop him. But I followed him.

He walked to his bench at the woodworking show where we both were exhibiting. He showed me a patch of rust on my iron. The rust was on the top of the iron and nowhere near the cutting edge.

He took the plane apart, cleaned off the rust entirely and put it back together. It took about 10 minutes. He handed the plane back to me and smiled.

“You can do better,” he said.

Frank was right. Until that moment I never thought much about how my tools looked. I only cared about how they worked. So I learned to sharpen, and I learned to set up my tools. But I didn’t care if they were a bit dusty or had spots of rust.

I mean, that’s patina, right? That is evidence that I used the tool and wasn’t just a collector.

Wrong. That day I realized and decided that my tools, my bench, my shop, my car and my work clothes were all reflections of who I am as a woodworker.

You can disagree with me and be 100 percent correct. I know plenty of woodworkers who are far better than me and have grimy tools and cluttered workshops. Some people can compartmentalize and do pristine work in less-than pristine conditions.

I apparently cannot.

Sometimes visitors and customers ask me why I keep the shop so clean. “Do you get any work done?” is a common way to put it.

The reason “why” comes down to self-respect. Why clean your face when you wake up each morning? It’s only going to get dirty during the day. Why wash your car when it’s only going to rain tomorrow? Why sweep up the floor when it’s only going to get covered in shavings the next morning (or the next minute)?

The only answer I have is self-respect.

Or put another way: Thank you, Frank Klausz, for setting me straight.

More Dutch Chest Improvements

After adding two lift-out trays for my chairmaking tools (see that entry here), I thought about what to do with the big open space in the lower compartment.

I need a place to store the tenon cutters, drill bits, level and some of the other bulky items I use when teaching chair classes. I decided to make a deep, removable drawer that could be put out on a bench so students could fetch the tools and put them back when they are done.

The drawer is 6-1/2" tall, 10" deep and 25" wide. I built it from some scrap pine. The corners of the drawer are rabbeted and nailed. The bottom boards are tongue-and-grooved and screwed to the bottom edge of the drawer box. The box runs on elm runners that are screwed to the sides of the compartment.

Once again, I divided up the interior spaces using 1/2" x 1/2" scrap pieces of cherry that I pinned in place. I added a couple wooden knobs to the drawer (we keep those in stock).

Then there was one last improvement to make.

I don’t like to travel with nice backsaws because the sawplates are too fragile. So I have some folding Japanese saws (a Dozuki and a Ryoba) that are good to go. I wanted to attach them to the inside of the chest’s lid. But I didn’t want to go all toggle-fest with it.

Enter the Olivia (no, not Megan’s cat).

One of our students named Olivia brought a Dutch chest to a class and was used elastic fabric to hold tools to the lid (and elsewhere). Pure genius.

1So I went to Michael’s craft emporium, bought some elastic from the sewing section and devised a simple way to hold both saws on the lid. I screwed two pieces of 1/2" cherry to the lid that were 4" apart. With some red elastic between them. It worked great. (I chose red to match the exterior of the chest.)

I have a lot of elastic left over. I plan to put it to good use when I return from this class. More tools need to be elastically restrained. Thanks, Olivia!

“I do not get your weird chairs,” exclaim about a dozen messages or comments every year.

I understand your bewilderment.

I remember being a prospective student at Northwestern University in 1985 where I had been paired up with freshmen journalism students. We were supposed to sleep in their dorm rooms and see what university life was like.

My two hosts sat me down on a bed and thrust a Budweiser in my hands.

“Drink it,” they said. “And you’re drinking 10 more. You are getting drunk. Maybe we’ll drag you outside naked.”

Up until that point in my life, I had taken one sip of beer. It had been my dad’s Coors Light, which had been poured over ice at the beach during a vacation. It was memorably disgusting.

I took a sip of the Budweiser, and I can still remember the metallic and bitter liquid spreading through my mouth and snaking down my gullet.

Beer is objectively nasty stuff. It’s basically watery bread. Fermented starch. And flavored with a bitter plant (hops) or worse.

I did not “get” this weird drink, and I took about four sips of it that night, each one warmer and worse than the previous. I did not end up naked and drunk in the quad.

Now, 41 years after that fall evening, I have changed my mind about beer. I am endlessly curious about the different forms of the drink and enjoy learning about its role in our culture and history. After listening to a podcast about beer in Biblical times, I was struck by the parallels between the history of the beverage and of the vernacular stick chairs I have been studying and building for many years.

I suppose these parallels shouldn’t have been a surprise. The stories of many good things in our world have a similar arc. And the turning point in the story’s third act is always the Industrial Revolution.

But it’s a good story, and it helps explain my love for both hops and these funky chairs that are “a smidgen off being ugly,” according to chairmaker Chris Williams.

For most of human history, beer was something you made at home. Everyone was a brewer. Beer was a source of nutrition and hydration. But ancient beer was unlikely to taste like the stuff you buy today. For a long time, the role of yeast wasn’t understood. And hops – the most common added flavor today – weren’t always used. Honey and other spices were common.

Commercial production of beer might have been an innovation of the Ancient Egyptians (you can read a history of beer and business here, which is where much of the following business data comes from). But up until the mid-19th century, most brewers were local businesses. There were no national or international brands of beer.

The rapid industrialization of the West allowed beer to be produced on a large scale and homogenized. Prohibition wiped out most of the local and regional brewers. And by the 1970s, 75 percent of all the beer in the United States was produced by only four monster corporations.

The product also kind of sucked. Coors Light over ice?

And while those macro brewers still exist (and are still growing through acquisition and consolidation), there has been a remarkable renaissance in small- and mid-sized brewers. In 1980, there were only 92 breweries in the U.S. As of 2024, there were 9,922 breweries. A hundredfold increase.1

Plus beer as a beverage is far more interesting and diverse these days.

The history of stick chairs is not as long as the history of brewing (as far as we know). But it also has some wild twists and turns.

The first image of a stick chair that I know of is from a Welsh book of laws from the 12th or 13th century called “Laws of Hywel Dda.” There are two images of stick chairs shown in this particular Latin translation. My favorite one shows a judge in the stick chair, and he’s pointing with one hand. His other hand holds what is likely a book (but which I prefer to think of as a cup of beer for the purposes of this story).

Stick chairs have been around for hundreds of years before mass manufacturing. We suspect that most were made by farmers in the off-season, so it was a household enterprise, much like making beer. Judging from the surviving examples, they were made by crafty individuals who likely made the chairs for their nuclear or extended family. Or for people in their village.

Because each stick chair is unique – I’ve never seen two that are identical – we can conclude that they were likely made one by one. Or in small sets at most. There are variations in the chairs that can place them in certain time periods or in certain regions. But there’s little to no evidence that these chairs were even a highly organized commercial endeavor. (Irish Gibson chairs might be the exception.)

These vernacular chairs show up in many countries throughout Scandinavia and the U.K. And stick chairs could be the ancient ancestor of Forest chairs (aka Windsor chairs).

Regardless of the shape or strength of that family tree, Windsor chairs appeared in the early 18th century and rapidly became a commercial enterprise that employed hundreds and then thousands of people. The city of High Wycombe became Britain’s primary chairmaking region. But the chairs were manufactured all over the UK and were a major export for the country.

The Windsor chair became so successful that today it is widely regarded as the most common form of chair.

“It’s been said that half of all wooden chairs on the planet are either Windsors or are directly descended from the style,” according to the Magazine Antiques.

While there are exceptions, most mass-produced Windsor chairs are unremarkable firewood and share little or nothing with their ancient ancestors – except for a name.

Evidence: All of the broken chairs that have been dragged across my doorstep have been factory-made Windsors. (I decline all chair-repair requests from customers – not because I am a jerk, but because chair repair could easily consume all of my waking hours. And it’s not what I want to do with my time.)

These factory-made Windsors are the Coors Light of the woodworking world.

Just like with the world of beer, however, things began to improve for the world of handmade chairs in the 1970s and ’80s. Mike Dunbar and Dave Sawyer began exploring Windsor forms, and both began teaching others, planting the seeds for thousands of other chairmakers. John Brown self-published his “Welsh Stick Chairs” book, which began to sketch in the early history of chairs from his part of the world.

Thanks to these people, we now have a second generation of chairmakers following in their footsteps (I count myself as a member of this generation). And if we do our job right, the third generation is getting started in the craft right about now.

So with any luck, we’ll never have to return to a world with tasteless beer and flimsy chairs.

Please join us if you can. In fact, if you join this week, we’ll waive the hazing (yes, of course it involves a tapered reamer).

2026: My Favorite Beers

There are so many good beers out in the world today that a list like this is almost meaningless. But if you ever see any of the following beers on draft, I recommend you try them.

1. Hopslam by Bell’s Brewery. A double IPA brewed with honey. It will mess you up. Sweetly.

2. Gadget by Urban Artifact. Urban Artifact makes the best sours I’ve ever had. And they use so much fruit.

3. Astronaut Food by Urban Artifact. The strawberry version of this is great. The blueberry version is impossible to describe.

4. Old Rasputin by North Coast. A perfect Imperial stout. Will mess you up good.

5. Pliny the Elder by Russian River. The single-best IPA I have ever tried. Perfect in every way. Balanced. Worth the trouble.

6. La Fin du Monde by Unibroue. I love Belgian ales. This one is proof that the New World can do them justice.

7. Delirium Tremens by Huyghe Brewery. One of these with some frites … heaven.

Despite all our efforts to keep our inventory under control at the Anthe building, we struggle to find space for our incoming new titles. So to clear some much-needed floor space, we are putting one of our biggest hogs of floor space on sale until the end of June.

“With All the Precision Possible: Roubo on Furniture Deluxe Edition” is just $85 until the end of June. The regular price is $125.

This is our nicest-made biggest book. And it’s one of the foundations of the written record of Western woodworking. Andre Roubo was the first joiner to ever write about the craft, and he interviewed fellow artisans to amass his massive work. He drew many of the illustrations. And he explained many things that had been secrets.

We spent almost a decade translating this work into English for the first time ever. And to meet that achievement, we printed this book oversized, with heavy and beautiful paper.

And for a short time you can get this book at a price that is a bit of a deal.

We are working hard on solving our space problem, including an overflow facility outside the city (if anyone has a pole barn in Northern Kentucky they want to sell us, send an email to help@lostartpress.com).

In the meantime, enjoy this book. It’s one of our best.