As is often the case.

As is often the case, I've been making parts for about 30 inlaid boxes. The woods are walnut and basswood. The fronts and backs are tenoned and the ends are routed for these parts and the floating panel bottoms to fit. Both the mortising, tenoning and the forming of the edge of the floating panel bottoms are done easily on the router table.

Next I'll make the patterned inlay and begin making the inlaid lids.

As I've done for many years, I try to keep a selection in stock, but they don't last long. You can find my work at http://dougstowe.etsy.com or at a few locations in Arkansas.

Make, fix and create...

Woodworking with kids.

I am attempting to share a few woodworking projects that may be helpful to you as well.

https://mailchi.mp/2ccdf2238339/touching-base?e=7aba398381

Look for more in the days, weeks and months to come.

Make, fix and create...

Verbundenheit

"Connectivity" –– what we learn in one subject area should connect us with what we learned in others. Freidrich Froebel used the German term "verbundenheit" which has been translated as conscious connection or "connectedness." The following is from my book Making Classic Toys that Teach. https://amzn.to/4kPsV85

"The Third Principle: Connectedness

Froebel’s third principle was "connectedness." While one could focus attention on facts and things in isolation, those facts and things are also deeply connected through myriad means; the child, too, should learn to see himself or herself as a part of the larger unbound world. As outlined by Froebel in The Education of Man, “Education should be one connected whole, and should advance with an orderly and continuous growth—as orderly, continuous and natural as the growth of a plant.”

One things that Froebel did not mention directly is where the connections should be made. There is a risk of creating contrived rather than discovered connections, when the teacher creates the connectiveness or connectedness and lays it before the child, rather than allowing children to discover connections on their own. So connectedness should take place within the child, in relation to his or her own experience, not be purposely laid out as one more fact to be taken in that was laid out and arranged by teachers. Just as the artificial boundaries between fields of study make school studies artificial, artifice used to stitch fields of study back into an integrated whole, sustain a disconnection between the child and the real world.

One of the points that I try to make is that learning must surprise, and thereby touch upon the sense of personal discovery that brings us to a state of educational preparedness in the form of physical, emotional an intellectual alert. A case in point is a shape that Froebel called "the doll," that was left for the child to discover on his or her own through play with Gift number 2.

Throughout the literature by and about the teaching of Froebel's kindergarten, the doll receives no further mention or illustration, as it was to be deliberately left for the child to discover without the form of interference in learning we often call "instruction."

So the question must arise for each of us, "how do we make learning as natural for others and ourselves as the opening of petals on a flower?" We do it though a process in which the student is allowed to make the connection between all things.

 I am working on a series of white oak boxes with faceted top panels and legs. They are nearly ready for lift tabs and hinges. The rubber band is to hold the legs in place. They will be much prettier when coated with Danish oil finish.

When things are not to your liking, to make beautiful and useful things is an act of resistance. Do not sit idly by.

I have made thousands of boxes over the years and the vast number of them have found their homes as these will. They will be a bit more lovely when a Danish oil finish brings forth the colors of wood.

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Lift yourself through the arts.

 Architect Will Price address to the Eastern Manual Education Association, 1904:

"Man at first was a naked, cold, hungry animal in a cold and strenuous world, and out of that, because of that, man is becoming worth while. That very weakness, that very nakedness, tested the ingenuity of man, compelled him to invent. Out of such invention two things came to him; in the first place, a great joy in the sense of creation; in the second place, a development because of that work.

"Man then endeavored to express his new point of view; because with his development came a new outlook, a new meaning to the rolling cloud and to the rushing water and to the lightning, to the song of the birds; and so, art was born. Art is not, as has been said, “the visible evidence of man’s joy in his work,” because it is that very joy and that very work itself.

"If art was the visible evidence of man’s joy in his work, then the rich would indeed, as they think they do, possess the hoarded treasures of the world; whereas they but gather the crumbs that fall from the artist’s table.

"The real joy, the real good there is in art (and by art I mean the art of making the dishpan as much as a statue of Phidias), the real motive of art after all, when you analyze it, is simply to make us worthwhile, to made us fit to love and be loved, fit to live together."

Make art. Lift yourself through the arts. Make the world a better place.

In action and service.

In action and service the hands disappear as we engage in skilled manipulation of material. The man at the lathe skillfully shaping wood takes no notice of his hands. The tool and the hands holding it in well-practiced form, become an extension of his intellect as his consciousness engages directly in material and the creation of form.

Slow making

What if our new metaphor for time was craftsmanship, hours spent in caring and practiced skill?

We’ve heard of the slow food movement. The idea of making things quickly and too easily, thus providing empty calories for the creative soul, is a notion we should explore, and then avoid as unhealthy for the human spirit. Fast food or corn chips? A passage from Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel Always Coming Home speaks to me as a woodworker.

 

“It was a good thing for me to learn a craft with a true maker. It may have been the best thing I have done. Nothing we do is better than the work of hand-mind. When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast; even speech using the voice only may go too fast. The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time. Purity is on the edge of evil, they say.”

 

One of the things that can slow a person down in woodworking is the knowledge that what one makes can last a hundred years or more. There are examples in museums of pieces that have lasted for their beauty and utility for years before our own. When an item is crafted with useful beauty in mind, it transcends not only the years it may last, but also the need one might feel to hurry in its making. What are the few extra minutes to do things right when each moment of attention is witnessed in the finished piece for such a lengthy span of time? What’s the rush in the light of generations? You may walk through the Frick Galleries in New York City and find things that took time in the making using skills that are now lost to most of us. …that may not be understood in the moment absorbed at a quick pace.

"Things men have made with wakened hands and put soft life into are awake through years with transferred touch and go on glowing for long years.

And for this reason, some old things are lovely
warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them."— D.H. Lawrence

How long did it take to make that? The potential customer asks in the hopes of equating your work with some level of comprehension related to their own salary, thinking only that hours spent are the same as money. How long did it take to learn to do what you’ve done so well? is a better question that might relate to your own life.   

We have become so impulsive, so undeliberative in our actions, that I urge you to contemplate the very slow making of things. Through applying more conscious attention, can we invest greater mind in the making of the things that fill our lives and awaken our sense of beauty? And what would the effects of such actions be?

It seems that much of our hurry is driven by the metaphor, “time is money.” But time is not money. It can be the opportunity to invest care, carefulness, attention, serving and listening to each other. What if our new metaphor for time was craftsmanship?

Make, fix and create...