Earlywood: How to Impress the General Public with Your Woodworking

Publisher’s note: Once again we aim to impress you with our Earlywood, a free weekly excerpt from one of the thousands of pieces I’ve written since 1996. Sometimes, it’s from a magazine article. Or a book. Or (in this case) a blog post published in 2014. Each entry has been updated or annotated with some modern context or point of view. Enjoy!

The following blog entry might seem snarky. I assure you it is not.

I’m interested in what impresses people when they view a piece of furniture. In fact, when a fellow woodworker shows off a piece of furniture, I observe the other people in the room as much as I observe the piece itself.

So here is a short list of things that seem to really impress.

Big Furniture
To me, this is crazy, but people are always impressed by big honking pieces of furniture. There is something about contemplating an object that is bigger than you are. This is why elephants (otherwise uninteresting and ill-tempered mammals) get so much attention at the circus or zoo.

The funn…