My grandmother laced pieces of old greeting card together with her crochet hooks. Her arthritic hands never stopped achieving! This wooden approximation of her work is clumsy by comparison. But the act of weaving edges together relieves the complex geometry of joining compound angles.
Sometimes the universe sends cool stuff my way. A good friend took delivery of a large machine from Europe. He discarded the packaging timbers in my direction. They were 2400 x 120 x 90mm and some species of pine. These two projects are a response to this good luck. Workbench When talk turns to…
This project began as a means of cleaning out a pile of 60mm x 60mm pallet pine that was getting in the way. …and I had long wanted to try making a wooden wheel. Each segment was cut to 22.5 degrees and the joints were reinforced with 4mm plywood splines. Slots for the splines were…
Indulging Self and Grand Daughter Every act of making has some self indulgence in it. Here is a response to the gift of scraps of 30mm plywood. The sheet edge is a bold linear graphic. Making my grand daughter’s initials to decorate her book ends indulged my desire to play with mitres in the lines…
This is a celebration of end grain. When sanding end-grain to a polish, there is a lovely moment when you stand back to look at the figure. It is always beautiful. The hand cut chain is a fervent hope that the enjoyment never gets away! Human hands don’t seem to be able to create lines…
There is a quiet room where the more stressed of my friends find gentleness. Fixed to the wall is a plywood panel that enables us to stick stuff where ever we feel. The stuff is really a collection of toys that have something sensory about them. It may be a movement or a gentle noise….
How can a woodworker be involved in cake decorating? My wife is a traditional cake decorator. She does the fancy thing with icing and makes sugary lace and that kind of stuff. An event called for an art deco cake. It could have been made from icing, but in that era much of the furniture…