Earlywood: Insomnia – the Greatest Design Drug

Publisher’s note: I hope you were able to sleep, and sleep in, this morning. It’s once again Saturday, the day we publish Earlywood, a free 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) blog published in 2017. Enjoy!

For the last 20-odd years, I have benefited from regular bouts of insomnia.

When they happen, I’ll wake about 4 a.m., roll over and my head will spin with several conflicting images, usually relating to something on my workbench from the past, present or future. For years, I tried to get back to sleep when this happened. When Lucy and I had children who were young, we needed every moment of sleep possible.

Now, I take a different tack.

I sort through my frontal lobe slideshow as if I’m attending a university lecture in a foreign language. What is my subconscious trying to tell me because it cannot use words?

Then I sneak out of the bedroom and head to my sketchbook, which always sits in the same place with a mechanical pencil at the ready. For the next 20-30 minutes I’ll write the paragraph that has been eluding me or I’ll draw the solution to a vexing design problem.

The sketches are not design documents. I make them rapidly without rulers or scale because I have found the idea can fade if I switch my brain to a mechanical mode.

The image above is a series I drew one night of frame-and-panel doors where the panel is a piece of leather that has been woven (as shown) or riveted or perforated. I am just waiting for the correct cabinet for these doors – probably a low credenza or sideboard.

I often experience insomnia when I am traveling overseas. Sleep comes and goes at odd intervals. One night while across the globe my brain spit out the final iteration of a series of six stools I had been building.

The good news is that I’ve also found this design exercise is the solution to my insomnia. Once I sketch for about 20 minutes and get my idea on paper, my brain says: OK, idiot, thanks for listening and doing my bidding. Now the rest of your meat sack can get some sleep.

P.S. I’m not a medical professional, and my experiences with insomnia have no basis in medical fact. Other side effects from insomnia include itching, burning, decreased sex drive, an impacted spleen, liver pimples and, in extreme cases, the desire to make furniture for a living and starve. Ask your doctor if sketching is right for you. Sketching. From the good people at Dixon Ticonderoga.

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2024 update: Our kids have left home. We can now sleep as late as we want. But my brain still refuses to stop interrupting. Last night I woke up with my brain working on a problem I really didn’t want to work on.

Many people have asked how I create a crisp, hard line between the saddle and spindle deck of my chairs. I do it with edge tools, my scorp and travisher. But students and readers asked for a technique that doesn’t require lots of practice.

My brain wondered: Why not make an 1/8"-thick template of half of the spindle deck’s shape? After scorping and travishing the seat close to the final line, you would clamp the template to the seat and then power sand the seat with a soft pad beneath the sandpaper. The template would prevent you from sanding past the line.

And voilà: a crisp line.

Maybe.