Liten tiner...

Tiner are Norwegian bent wood boxes, and as you can see I'm making several. My wife calls these my "bentwood beauties".

Making a card holder box, and the  tiny tiner are the last two projects to complete for my Tiny Boxes book, and yesterday I took some of the last step-by-step photos needed for the book.

During the next month and a half, I will be finishing the text and taking the beauty shots of each project and its variations.

This book has gone more quickly than I expected due in part to the small size of the projects, but also to the amount of fun I've been having in making each one. My shop and finish room are littered with tiny boxes of all kinds, ready to be finished, photographed and sold.

On the hands, (and everything here is about the hands) an article in French, Lire, écrire: «C’est le corps qui apprend» discusses the relationship between manual handwriting, keyboarding, cognition memory and reading. I was just reading last night that Froebel believed in teaching writing first and then reading, but this was to be done after years of Kindergarten had engaged the whole child as a creative force. From the article translated from French:

- Maria Montessori was right, it is the body that learns. Today, the development of technology helps reduce drastically the engagement of the body in learning. It is assumed that cognitive activities are pure abstraction: it is a serious mistake, one begins to realize. There is an emerging scientific current called "embodied cognition", which calls for a return to the body put into play in learning. That said, Maria Montessori was not the first to defend this view: the mathematician Henri Poincaré, in the nineteenth century, said: math, it passes through the body.

It is true that digital technology is smart stuff. Einstein noted that his pencil and he were smarter than he was, and so the purpose of technology has always been to strengthen the hand of man, so to speak, in our understanding and control of the environment. But what favor have we done for our children if we leave them virtually helpless in confronting the real world and real work? And if it is true that we learn first and best through the body, what favors have we granted the intelligence of our kids if we have failed to train their hands to express real skill?

It is certainly one thing to have a subject in mind, and another entirely to have it in the heart where it finds purpose, and in the hands where it finds use.

Make, fix, create, and help others to do likewise.