standing on end...

Yesterday I made a simple device to hold a cube on point so that it can be drilled from one end to the other. This was my third concept. Anyone with experience in the real world knows that drill bits wander off course as they pass through wood. And those who have experience in making things will know that it is hard to start a drill on a point, or to start a drill on an angled surface. In making Froebel's gift number two, craftsmen had managed a difficult task. At first I visualized an assembled device, then imagined one in which recesses to secure the edges of the cube would be held just so. I started making that one but then I realized that a cube could fit in a hollow cone. As often happens, that was the concept that I woke up to after a long night of contemplation. So I had two false starts before coming up with this design concept.

Aron had asked how to do it. Scott assured it could be done, and that if Froebel could do it, surely we could too. We will find out later in the day whether it works. Froebel would not likely have had access to a drill press, but holes could be drilled using a lathe. When Froebel was a young man he was apprenticed to a forester and would have been well familiar with the lathe, shaving horse and draw knife that common woodsmen used at the time.

So while there is no clear evidence available concerning how the first gifts were made, we know that they were made using the simple tools of the time. A lathe would have allowed a cube to be held against a hollow cone like I have made as a drill held in the lathe at the drive end could have been used to pass through.

As you can see in the photo immediately above, it is possible to drill through from one corner to the other. In this case, I used the drill press to drill in from opposite corners utilizing the jig shown above to hole the cube on the table of the drill press,  then used a hand held drill to join the two holes with a longer bit. The brass rod is merely inserted for demonstration purposes.

Barbara has been making good progress on the translation of N. Christian Jacobsen's book, I Sløjdsagen Et Inlæg. The book shows as much value as I anticipated, as is shown by the following:

The knife is that tool which a child most naturally and easily grasps: it is simple to have at hand and can be used for both this and that. It is a tool with which much work can completely be done, and without help from another. Yes, nothing more on this need be said; the knife is above all else the tool of ordinary dexterity, that is to say, sloyd’s tool.

I can see why Christian Jacobsen was one of Salomon's favorite authors. And as I explained to Barbara, Jacobsen puts the knife in the heart of the matter.

Make, fix and create...

parsimony and craftsmanship

How to drill from corner to corner?

A couple years back I was accused of being parsimonious, and was puzzled at being insulted before it was explained to me that parsimony was a good thing. My understanding of parsimony was as follows:

extreme unwillingness to spend money or use resources.

"a great tradition of public design has been shattered by government parsimony"

synonyms:

cheapness, miserliness, meanness, parsimoniousness, niggardliness, close-fistedness, closeness, penny-pinching; informalstinginess, minginess, tightness, tightfistedness, cheeseparing; formalpenuriousness

But in academia, parsimony can refer to Occam's Razor... the principle of simplicity related to having started with the fewest assumptions. The more assumptions, the greater the likelihood of error. Or in craftsmanship, parsimony can be the reduction of method to the fewest steps. One of the things that comes through practice is that the body makes fewer unnecessary movements and both the  speed of the work and quality of the work can increase unexpectedly. When you reduce the number of steps, you reduce the introduction of error. So in accusing me of being parsimonious, I had been offered a compliment.

So I raise a toast to parsimony and craftsmanship. Yesterday, a blog reader asked me how to drill a hole in a wooden cube from one corner to the other for the making of Froebel's Gift number 2. In some models, holes were drilled and dowels inserted for rotation of the objects. I asked Scott Bultman, who has been associated with a Michigan toy maker his whole life. It is a family business and they used to make Froebel gifts before they arranged to have them made in China where gift number 2 can be made by a small manufacturer at a rate of 300 sets per week. When they made the sets in Michigan, the holes were not drilled, but he assured me that Froebel must have known how to do it.

That exchange with the reader and with Scott led me to examine the cube and sent me to the woodshop after dark to develop the process. As with all things, the first inclination is to dream up something complex. We make a natural assumption that if we don't know how to do it, some complex tooling or methodology must be used. But, WWFFD? (What would Friedrich Froebel do?) Without a full woodshop and complex apparatus the law of Parsimony would have been in effect.

With the observation of the cube, I began work. Applying the law of parsimony, all complex solutions were tossed out. With two false starts, I have simplified my approach. I will share what I discover, as success is close at hand.

Between teaching and writing, I have been negligent in the marketing of my work, and yesterday I sent a number of boxes, a piece of small furniture and two sculptural forms to a new gallery opening in Memphis. To see work go out the door leaves opportunity to make more. That's a good thing. To sell it and move it into other people's lives will be even better.

Make, fix and create...

development of form

While modern education seems to have fallen on the narrow shoulders of the alphabet, and so many children (even in pre-school and Kindergarten) bear the heavy burden of letters and have chosen to shrug off such a heavy load,  Pestalozzi had recommended an "alphabet of form". The idea was that there were other things than reading that offered value of study. Form for instance. All learning was to arise from the senses first, and from the child's direct experience. The illustration above is from How Gertrude Teaches Her Children, Pestalozzi's book that proposed a revolution in education, based on how an exceptional mother might take care of her children and influence her community.

If you think of progressive education as a relay, Comenius handed off to Rousseau, Rousseau to Pestalozzi, Pestalozzi to Froebel, Froebel to Cygnaeus and Salomon (running side by side) and then Salomon to Dewey (even though they never actually met.) As has always been the case, most runners think only of themselves and their part in the race, and may be inclined to disparage the contributions of those who handed off to them. Maria Montessori, for instance, was critical of the performance of Froebel, even though her method was not independent from the foundation he laid in the invention of Kindergarten. Education as to form, was one of the important differences perceived by N. Christian Jacobsen between Danish Sloyd and Swedish Sloyd.

Swedish Sloyd, as taught by Salomon was deeply rooted in the progressive tradition launched by Comenius, in which children were to learn from experience, and adults responsible for their learning would take advantage of their greatest resource... the natural inclination of the child to follow their own interests in learning. To ignore those interests, in the view of Comenius would be o lay obstacles in the path of effective teaching.

The letters (in the view of most progressive educators) could wait until after the child had been guided to make intellectual sense of their own perceptions. And so for Salomon, and as he tried to reinforce through his lectures in 5 languages, Educational Sloyd was about the development of the whole child, and was part of a philosophical lineage of progressive education. And it was extremely important to him that his students (teachers) understood their own positions in the development of education. He knew that at some point, time would march past him, just as time had eclipsed Pestalozzi, and that educational sloyd was but a "casting mold" from which an even more modern and progressive system of education would emerge. It may be of interest to readers that Salomon kept a stone from Pestalozzi's gravesite on his desk as a reminder of his role in an historic progression. It may seem egotistical to some that I have stones from Salomon's gravesite on my own desk.

Some might wonder why it is important to understand the history of manual arts training. The purpose for me, is that we re-establish the lineage of education. Two points form a straight line, but if you do not know which point came first, you have no true sense of direction. Readers might discern a relationship between Pestalozzi's alphabet of forms and Froebel's gifts.

We had the Clear Spring School holiday program last night, and I marched for Save the Ozarks in the Christmas parade. It was amazing to hear the cheers of our community as we passed by, and to know that in our opposition to the power line, we do not stand alone.  Now it is time to settle in for the holidays. I submitted a proposal to Taunton Press for yet another box making book, and plan this week to develop more chapters of the book on Making Froebel's Gifts.

Make, fix and create...

a careful transformation of self...

Last night I dreamed of my sister Ann who died about 15 months ago of multiple systems atrophy, an awful disease. Ann was involved in arts and crafts her whole life, and in my dream offered to show me a new way of welding dissimilar metals. She thought it might be something I would be interested in writing about as it would be of use to other artists.

I thought at first in terms of some kind of flux that would allow the bond. We walked down a long corridor, opened a small door and took out two small packets of paper like those a homeopathic physician might use to offer his or her medicines. One contained a powder and the other a small live caterpillar, which were to be taken for transformation. Not all that is to be accomplished in the arts is through transformation of the material. Some requires the transformation of the artist.

Yesterday I invited my 6th grade students to play with Froebel's Gift number 7. I was curious what they would come up with. One girl wouldn't let me see what she had designed until it was finished. If you can't guess what it is, read carefully. In the photo below, my student insisted that I share what she had made via iPhone with her mother. Such is a child's pride at the time of transformation.

There are indeed many processes requiring both skill and transformation of the mind and heart of the artist.

The following is repeated from an earlier blog post and concerns the transformation of humanity in our earlier years. Were caterpillars required?

Six ways in which segments can be rotated for use as
tools and weapons. The stippled areas represent adhesive.

Mary Marzke sent me links to an article by Lyn Wadley on the use of adhesives to attach stone to wood in the making of shafted tools, weapons and instruments. Wadleys's work was published in Current Anthropology, and illustrates the intellect involved as early man crafted tools to enable his survival. Evidently, there was enough adhesive remaining on some crafted pieces of stone from 70,000 years ago to reformulate the means through which they were attached and through which the adhesive was made. This work pushes forward by 40,000 years, the earlier speculation by V.G. Childe and others that the handle came as late as 30,000 years ago.

Compound adhesives were made in southern Africa at least 70,000 years ago, where they were used to attach similarly shaped stone segments to hafts. Mental rotation, a capacity implying advanced working‐memory capacity, was required to place the segments in various positions to create novel weapons and tools. The compound glues used to fix the segments to shafts are made from disparate ingredients, using an irreversible process. The steps required for compound‐adhesive manufacture demonstrate multitasking and the use of abstraction and recursion. As is the case in recursive language, the artisan needed to hold in mind what was previously done in order to carry out what was still needed. Cognitive fluidity enabled people to do and think several things at the same time, for example, mix glue from disparate ingredients, mentally rotate segments, talk, and maintain fire temperature. Thus, there is a case for attributing advanced mental abilities to people who lived 70,000 years ago in Africa without necessarily invoking symbolic behavior.

There is no concrete evidence that man's development came as a result of language alone, but there is evidence that the making of things took a leading role in the development of man. There is a growing body of evidence that making the tools for our survival and the increased size of the human frontal lobe were parallel developments. You can find Lyn Wadley's article Compound‐Adhesive Manufacture as a Behavioral Proxy for Complex Cognition in the Middle Stone Age here. In order to understand all this and write this paper, Wadley had to make the adhesive from materials found in the natural environment and then replicate the methods for attachment, demonstrating again that you won't really learn all that much about real things by just yakking. "Her main research interest is ancient cognition and her experimental archaeology is geared towards understanding the mental architecture required for various behaviors."

In order to better understand your own mental architecture,

Make, fix and create...

Formell education?

The following is from an earlier blog post, November 7, 2007.

Today the words "formal education" refer to learning that takes place within the context of established educational institutions, as contrasted with "informal" education in which students learn on their own, self-motivated and self-directed.

Back in the late 1800's and early 1900's, the words "formal education" had a distinctly different meaning, particularly when used by Otto Salomon, director of the Sloyd Teacher School at Nääs or by one of his students. The following is from Hans Thorbjörnsson, Swedish historian and curator of Otto Salomon's library at Nääs:

"In Swedish language Salomon is using the terms (expressions) ”formell bildning”, ”formell uppfostran” och ”formella mål”. In The Theory of Educational Sloyd they are translated ”formative education” (education meaning both bildning och uppfostran) and “formative goals.” You are quite right interpreting the Swedish formell as general competence, character development, citizenry and responsibility. Salomon talked about the child’s development morally, intellectually and physically being promoted during sloyd work. For the mere sloyd skills (handling tools and material/wood) he used the terms “materiella mål” (material goals) and “materiell utbildning”. In The Theory of Educational Sloyd the Swedish terms are translated utilitarian goals / utilitarian education."

This simple term, in Swedish, "formell" or in English, "formative" or "formal" recognize the wood shop's goals of shaping lives as well as giving shape to wood. As any shop teacher or former shop teacher can tell, there are important things going on as children engage in the process of working with wood. Sure, they are developing skills in the use of their hands that would benefit society were they to become carpenters, craftsmen, engineers or surgeons, but they are doing much more. In our current political and cultural climate with our obsessive concern to teach those things we can measure on standardized tests, we have largely forgotten what those other things are.

Make, fix and create...

shape to fit, or fit to shape...

Gift number 7 with obtuse angle and two equal sides.

Today, I worked on Gift number 7, its variations and the chapter that will include it. Swedish Sloyd and Finnish Sloyd were both intended as means to extend the Kindergarten principles into the upper grades, whereas other forms of manual arts training were more directly concerned with supplying bodies to industry. To give a child some experience with various tools might make their transition to employment easier for them and for their potential employer. To give a child the capacity to shape his or her own destiny was a more noble inclination.

There has been a controversy since the earliest days of education, whether the purpose of schooling was to shape the child to fit societal norms, or whether it was to fit (prepare) the child to participate in the shaping of human culture. The concern with form was to begin in Kindergarten and the whole of the child's education was to be "formative."

Barbara, in the translation of I Sløjdsagen Et Inlæg is challenged as are all translators  in that a single word may have many meanings or interpretations. In the example above of instance, the word fit, my be active or passive. Benjamin B. Hoffman attended Salomon's teacher training in Nääs and used the term "formal education," meaning "formative education" as was used by Salomon. "Formal education" in the US has a whole different meaning, and the idea of "formative" has been brushed aside in the name of economic efficiency.

Hoffman and Salomon both meant "forming" the child's character as a whole person, capable of fitting into society, but also acting strongly within it. Dewey's progressive education was of similar purpose. Jacobsen noted that Danish education remained "one-sided," missing the mark of addressing the whole child.

I think my readers might enjoy going back to Kindergarten and spending a day doing what I just did... playing with gift number 7. Don't you think gift number 7 offers some lovely opportunities?

Make, fix and create...

the search for form...

Today, I hope to spend writing. I need to catch up on a couple chapters that need selection of photos, captioning, and organization. Barbara in Stavanger has provided more pages of N. Christian Jacobsen's text, I Sløjdsagen Et Inlæg.

 In these pages, Jacobsen tells of a primary difference between Salomon's Sloyd and that promoted by Mikkelsen and taught in Denmark. It is a simple but distinct difference. Swedish sloyd starts with form and the tools and their exercises are the means to establish form. In Danish sloyd, tools came first, and form was the by-product of their use.

How can that matter? The Danish version of sloyd might lead to development of carpentry skills. The Swedish version of sloyd was intended to develop the individual.

As my middle school students stood yesterday at the lathe, turning blocks of wood into finished dreidels, they were comparing what they saw transforming before their eyes, and in their hands with a preconceived notion of perfect form.

Comenius had said something to the effect, that the craftsman and his or her work arise in the same gesture. The woman standing at the lathe, transforms the material and herself at the very same time. You can choose to call it artistry or craftsmanship. The inclination to do something well was described and understood by educators since the seventeenth century.

As this is the first day of Chanukah, I should also note the importance of craftsmanship in the Jewish tradition. Parents were instructed that to fail to engage children in craftsmanship was to throw them into a world of thievery.

Make, fix and create...

Happy Chanukah

Elementary school dreidels.

The Jewish holiday Chanukah, starts this evening, and at school, as an exercise in woodworking and multi-culturalism, we made dreidels, grades 1-9. I had planned the project and then just this morning realized how appropriate the timing was.

For the youngest ones, none of whom had played the dreidel game before, I did the turning for each on the lathe. They formed the dowel with the dowel maker, and wrote the names on each side. Of course they wanted to color and personalize each one. Then we played the game and it did not take long to catch on. As we played, each used his or her own dreidel.

Dreidel made by Oakley.

For those unfamiliar with dreidels, you might confuse one with a top. But a successful top spins for a long time, and the dreidel being used in a game would bore you if it spun for too long. So a top and a dreidel are not the same thing and should not be confused. Also, a dreidel has 4 sides, each marked with a symbol for a Yiddish word. Not having a stamp for those symbols, we simply marked the first letter of each word, Nun, Gimel, Hay, and Shin.

My older students did their own turning at the lathe. All the students were pleased with their work. Some Clear Spring School students will play dreidel in their homes tonight, just as Jewish boys and girls will do with their families on the first day of Chanukah, 2014.

Make, fix and create...

Use a lathe and drill chuck to bore the hole for the dowel.

Use a gouge to shape the point.

self check out vs. "check this out."

Yesterday I made various iterations of Froebel's gift number 7 which consists of small square and triangular wooden tiles. Each set of 64 tiles fits in a small wood box. It was not likely that all Kindergartners (teachers of Kindergarten) would use all sets, as these are similar enough to each other that the results of exercises with each set would not be marked different. The use of square tiles can be seen to closely resemble the use of cubes from the earlier sets.

But the making of these sets is worth doing. Making boxes to hold the various tiles is excuse enough.

Yesterday I told how the self checkout has become the model for American education. The other side of the coin is "check this out!" when a student takes exceptional pride in his or her own work and cannot resist the inclination to show others what he or she has done. That happens in wood shop.

Other variations of tiles might be to paint them various colors, or to make them from various woods. Yet another option exists in that the tile shapes can be cut from colored cardstock and the arrangement of them can be made permanent, by gluing them on paper.

Make, fix and create...

Self-checkout...

If you live in the US, you have no doubt had experience with the self-check out, either at Walmart or one of the other big-box stores. The idea is this: You walk up with the items you've selected and scan them yourself. It will observe whether or not you've placed the scanned item into the bagging area, and when you've scanned all your items, it will ask you to pay. It can take your credit card, or count your cash and give you the correct change dispensed below. There will be a clerk nearby to monitor the transaction and watch to make sure customers don't cheat.

That is the model some hope to achieve in modern education. The student, taught primarily by digital devices without human intervention or human instruction will simply download the contents of their brains for evaluation, correction, and assessment. It will be guaranteed cheap, as it will take no near-by human teachers to impart knowledge, and no trained intervention or inspiration apart from what's available on youtube. High paid teachers in this situation can be easily replaced by low paid check-out clerks.

Role models will be supplied as they are today. Television.

I am working on Freobel gift number 7 which consists of sets of small tiles cut in square and triangular shapes. There are 3 kinds of triangles used in different sets. As with all things in "progressive education," the tiles were progressively introduced. so that the students could move in increments from simple to complex, easy to more difficult, and literally  expand and exhaust their creative potentials. "What can you do with these two tiles?" a student might be asked of what is given. What shapes can you create with 4 or  or with 6? At the age in which children with crayons or markers can do little more than scribble on paper, with tiles they can create perfect forms.

The craftsman might ask, "How can I make so many of these small tiles safely?" I will be showing that in the book.

Self-checkout in education is nothing new. When children are engaged in self-activity as they were in Kindergarten and in shop classes, they are self-directed into craftsmanship, and learn to self-assess their own work.

Make, fix and create...

student boxes...

It has been my belief that no student should be left at graduation having made nothing useful, beautiful or both and worth keeping. It has also been my contention that there is no better useful and beautiful object to make than a wooden box.

Richard Bazeley sent photos of his year 7 and year 9 student boxes. They were done with butt joints in the younger group and hand cut miters in the older set. After the boxes are assembled with thin plywood tops and bottoms, Richard cuts the lid from the body of the box using the bandsaw.

Then the fun began. In Educational Sloyd, it was proposed that student work focus exclusively on craftsmanship and form, and it was suggested that adornment of form by carving and pyrography were means of hiding mistakes.

But in my woodshop, children take delight in coloring, wood burning, and customizing their work. And you can see in Richard's student's boxes, each is unique.

The making of each box unique and an object of student expression is one of the important ways that student learning can be individualized, even in a classroom setting.

N. Christian Jacobsen had said the following with regard to class teaching vs. individualized instruction:

"Should one educator say that twenty can hear what one should hear, and another say not, both can be right. Twenty can hear the same thing but they understand it each in their own individual way.

The psychological preconditions for understanding and the random associations of idea and their effects are impossible for a teacher to reckon had he but one pupil to deal with. But even when he is concerned with more, he can maintain a continuous rapport with all of them, such that each in particular understands him, such that the quick learners and slow learners each have sufficient to do, in so far as acquisition for the first becomes more deep and multifaceted as a result of better prerequisites for understanding, and which gives rise to a more energized work."

Thanks to, Barabara in Stavanger for the ongoing translation of Jacobsen's book.

One of the problems that has faced teachers of the manual arts has been that some students work quickly and some more slowly. Some work fast out of carelessness or lack of understanding. Some work quickly because they have greater skill. Some work slowly because they address the work with great care and seek perfection in it. And yet at the end of the project, all can reach some level of success.

Spending time personalizing work through the use of decorative techniques gives something special for those quick students to apply themselves to, giving the slower students time to catch up, whether their slowness is the result of lack of skill, or their meticulous character.

Richard's students' boxes are an example of the effectiveness of this approach, and allows for the unique creative voice of each student to be seen in their work. During the decorative phase of student work the individualized relationship between the student and instructor comes to the fore, as students ask, "can I do this?" and the teacher says "yes." And the result is what Jacobsen might have called, "more energized work." You can see that each of these boxes is an energized expression of the student's individuality.

If I had a nickle for every time a student asked me, "Can I use the wood burner?" I'd buy a new miter saw. In answer to some early woodworking teacher's concerns that decoration might be used to hide imperfections in the work. Yes, it can. But we must listen to the first precept of Educational Sloyd. Start with the interests of the child. To ignore those individual interests turns the child cold toward his labors and ignores the teacher's greatest resource.

Today I will be cutting small wooden tiles for Froebel's 7th gift.

Make, fix and create...

customer service...

Last night, Arkansas Governor Beebe, celebrated the end of his 8 years in office with a party in which 120 staff members were given boxes that I made for them. Each was engraved on the inside of the lid with the words, "Thanks for Believing! Beebe Administration, 2007-2014. Those were good years, and it is my hope that these boxes serve each as a pleasant reminder. I was honored and grateful to have the opportunity to serve our Arkansas Governor in this way.

In my love of fixing things, I sometimes encounter difficulties obtaining parts. For instance, this last week the igniter on our Kenmore oven went out and I knew immediately why the oven wouldn't warm up. So I went online, and ordered what the Sears Parts website insisted was the right part. It arrived and I opened the oven panels to begin removal and replacement of the part. But what I discovered was that the parts new and old bore no resemblance to each other.

I immediately called Sears Parts and after navigating through their menu options and being on hold for the usual distressing period of time, I talked to Debra. She was kind and courteous, but insisted that they had sent me the right part. I was kind and insisted that the parts bore no resemblance to each other, and that there was no apparent way that the new igniter would fit. Finally, Debra transferred me to a manager, who after another extended period on hold, informed me that yes, they had shipped the correct igniter. I asked if it was a substitute part, and she said no, but that she would check with GE, the maker of the range. After checking with GE she said, yes it was a substitute part, but that GE assured her it was the right one and would fit without adaptation.

So based on such strong assurances, I took the old igniter off and with some difficulty, attached the new igniter and "fired her up." When I turned on the oven, and waited for the oven to start, I was greeted with the sound of a small explosion and the smell of gas. Lovely, I thought. No baked potatoes tonight!

The next morning I called Sears Parts and insisted that they had sent me the wrong part, which they denied. Finally the woman asked whether my range required a male or female connector. I told her that my range required neither, that the part was directly wired using wirenuts. She couldn't understand that and insisted it had to have either a male or female connector and that the problem must be that they had sent the wrong one. She suggested another part, gave me the part number so that I could look at it on google, and I found that it was shaped and configured just as the one that made my stove almost blow up. In frustration, I asked for a service repair call.

Three days later, the service tech arrived, and we were his last stop on a very long day of service calls. It took him only a few moments to notice that the igniter was obviously the wrong one for the stove. He checked and learned from his computer that they had sent and I had installed "the right one" as specified by Sears Parts and by his service manual, but that there was no way in the world that the "right one" as specified by Sears would work.  He pulled that wrong part out and put in a substitute part shaped exactly like the one I took out and charged me $218.72. If they had sent me the right part in the first place I would have successfully installed it.  I would have spent less than $60, not spent hours on the phone, and would have had the oven working 4 days earlier.

The next day I called Sears Parts to arrange the return of the wrong igniter, and made note to them that by selling the wrong one and insisting it was right, and encouraging me to install it despite my concerns, they had endangered my home. They agreed to refund the charges on the wrong igniter and sent me upstream with an email address where I might file a complaint.

Sears Holdings Solutions is a part of Sears where they try to address customer complaints by throwing small amounts of settlement money at them in order to avoid small lawsuits and calls to the attorney general's office, but not to avoid problems that would put customers or their homes at risk.

I told Jeff K. at Sears Holdings Solutions about the troubles, and he offered a $65 partial refund of the $218.72 repair charges, but told me that if I had safety concerns, I should call back on their 800 number. Can you believe how callous that was? ...that someone in Sears Customer Service would care so little about the safety of their customers that they would place the burden of safety on me, expecting me to spend another half hour or more on the phone to fix what was already well documented in my case and concerned a duty that they had to assure customer service and safety? I found their lack of concern astounding.

Well so much for my sad story. The lesson is one we learn over and over again. Don't think that just because someone spends time sitting at a computer all day, that they have any grasp of reality. If you are living and working in the real world, expect occasional stupidity from those who are not.

Yesterday, the photographer for the Historic Arkansas Museum's Living Treasures Exhibit came and set up a shot of me at my work bench, surrounded by tools and boxes. Part of the display was of an arrangement of Froebel blocks from Gift 5B. This is the set that offers the ability to construct Romanesque architectural forms.

Make, fix (safely) and create...

this day...

Today I have a photographer coming from the Historic Arkansas Museum. They are planning a show in 2015 of the works of those designated as "Arkansas Living Treasures," and the photographer will take a photo of me in my messy wood shop.

I received the first 12 pages translated from I Sløjdsagen Et Inlæg, by N. Christian Jacobsen. I am blown away by the depth of it, so far. Not at all shy, he plunged right into the depths of what had been controversial, Otto Salomon's insistence that classroom teaching is ineffective. In the book, Jacobsen is attempting to explain the differences between Swedish Sloyd and the Danish version of it promoted by Aksel Mikkelsen.

Yesterday in our local newspaper the school superintendent of a neighboring community (Berryville, AR) noted that when he enters a classroom and finds the students listening passively, they are not being effectively taught. Do you think he's gotten the message from this blog? Yet, it is difficult to manage a classroom in the traditional sense where students are each doing different things. And if students are doing things as well as learning, they will not all be performing at the same level of skill or at the same level of interest, or at the same level of comprehension. Is that so difficult to understand?

 Jacobsen, in his book chose to plunge directly into a subject near and dear to Salomon's heart, so it is no surprise that he would be one of Salomon's favorite authors. Otto Salomon, who led the international movement in Educational Sloyd, made reference in letters to his discovery of the "Columbus egg." While some educators might be watching for a mystical philosopher's stone to bring pieces of the puzzle together, the "Columbus egg" has its roots in the practical rather than the mystical.

The original story of the Columbus egg was as follows: Many, many years ago, Christopher Columbus was sitting in a tavern with some other sea captains who where joking and making light of his discovery. “Anyone could have discovered that!” they said. “No big deal!" (The quotes here are not exact, as I don’t speak Portuguese or Italian.) Columbus grabbed an egg off the table and said, ”I can balance this egg on end.“ The other sea captains tried and then proclaimed, “Impossible!” "You are a fool!" they said. Columbus tapped the egg on its end, cracking it slightly and set it down, perfectly balanced. “That’s cheating!" The captains complained, “Anyone can do that!” “Yes," Columbus said, “now that I’ve shown you how.”

As explained to me by Hans Thorbjörnsson, Salomon's "Columbus egg" was not his discovery of the use of the model series, but rather the arrangement of exercises that provided the order in which models would be arranged and introduced. Each model required a range of skills and understanding in the use of various tools, and to learn and acquire those skills and understanding through the performance of exercises in an orderly manner related to the model series was the foundation of self-directed learning... Salomon's Columbus egg.

When I was a beginning woodworker, I knew that if I could successfully cut a few good joints, I was well on my way to being able to make anything I wanted. But of course, cutting the simplest of mortise and tenon joints was not as simple as it might appear. Cutting the mortise alone required handling of the chisel in a variety of distinct motions. It required the use of a mallet. It required close scrutiny and understanding of the material. But before one even started, it required understanding of measuring and marking tools, including a rule or tape measure, square and marking gauge. Salomon said "An exercise is the working (tooling?) of a material of a certain quality with a certain tool for a certain purpose."

He divided working of wood into 68 distinct operations, or exercises (övingar) that would be used in the making of models, and these exercises presented to the students in sequence was the foundation of the process, not the models themselves. Understanding the exercises would be required for teachers and educators in other countries and cultures to be able to develop new models as substitutes to meet the interests of their children, and the requirements of the Educational Sloyd method. What results is a complex matrix of skills, exercises and model series.

A simple model (a number of exercises)

And so while Salomon suggested that model series be adjusted in each country and community to meet the interests of each child, understanding enough of the underlying exercises to develop new models and to know where they fit into the model series was not as easy thing. For instance, I have been dancing at the edges of Educational Sloyd for years now, and in making a new model shown above, I find it challenging to figure out exactly where it would fit in. The complexity should explain a few things.

Many of those who attended summer classes at Nääs returned to their home countries determined to teach Sloyd. But the challenges of adapting model series to their own students led many of them to slavishly adhere to what they had learned to make in Sweden. As a result, Educational Sloyd was viewed by some as uncreative, and unAmerican. Even a thing as simple as the key holder shown above, the complexity of exercises and what must be learned are huge. For instance, in order for the tenon to be cut to fit, the wood must first be cut square on the end. Cutting square with a hand saw is not particularly easy. It requires learning about the square, the saw, about the material and about oneself. In my new model shown above, my next challenge would be to find where it would fits into a Nääs model series.

I can list the exercises used in its making and compare with the 68 exercises used in making the original model series in Sweden, and perhaps learn where it might fit in. This for me illustrated the difficulty of creating a model series.

As to how the key holder fits into my classes? Ozric said, "I want to make that!" Thus answering the first point of Educational Sloyd... Start with the interests of the child.

Make, fix and create...

Gifts and occupations...

Yesterday in my home school woodworking class, students came with their train painted and finished, and then spent their last day of class making additional toys of their own choosing. Last week, I commented in the blog that there is a difference between making things with legos, and making things from real wood, and almost as though they had been reading the blog, that subject was brought up by my students. There is a difference. When materials are transformed, students see their real impact as transforming agents in the real world. Real tools, real materials, real impact.

Friedrich Froebel had devised "gifts and occupations" and the difference between those describes the difference between legos and woodshop. Legos are for learning and play and in their use, they remain unchanged. You know when you are making something with legos, that they will at some point be taken back apart and put away at the end of play unchanged, just as when designing with a set of Froebel blocks, you know that they will all fit neatly back in the box.

Froebel's gifts were exactly like that. His occupations on the other hand involved the transformation of materials.  In woodshop, once you've made a cut with a saw, there is no reverse, no delete, no going back. The craftsman and his work are transformed at the very same moment. In the exploration of occupations, the student sees himself as having real effect and effectiveness in the real universe.

You can play all day with legos and have fun in the process, but there is no distinct mark of having transformed either the materials or yourself. From the gifts, students grew toward the occupations, expressing greater self-reliance and creativity, becoming makers and  of useful beauty.

The unusual button toys shown below were a student's idea. The dowel marked with purple rings gives the appearance of Saturn's rings, and shows that even something as simple as a button toy can offer creative opportunities.

And as my students noted earlier, as my home school classes began, "who knew you could have so much fun with something so simple?"

I am beginning work on Freobel's gift number 7 which involves small wooden tiles, both square and triangular in sets. Again, small wooden boxes must be made.

Yesterday in our local newspaper the school superintendent of a neighboring community noted that when he enters a classroom and finds the students listening passively, they are not being effectively taught. Do you think he's gotten the message from this blog?

Make, fix and create...

effective exploration and use of form and material

I have been reading about the way in which Froebel's gift number 7 was introduced to students in the 1800s. Gift number 7 consisted of sets of flat tiles both square, and various triangles. The idea was to move from geometric solid shapes toward a material more akin to drawing. The number of pieces in each set would be overwhelming and chaotic if the full set was presented at the start. So students were first given 3 pieces, and then 7, and then larger sets with which to construct various forms. If they had been given the full set, and told to make something, where would they start?

The idea that learning should move from the simple to the complex, from the easy to more difficult, and from the concrete to the abstract. To simply put a huge set in the hands of kids would overwhelm their creativity, neglecting to provide a starting point for their creative process.

Yesterday at Clear Spring School, my first grade children made Christmas trees. They start with a board shared by two students. They take turns cutting from one corner all the way down through to the other. Then when the board is divided in two, the various layers of the tree are cut, leaving only 1 tiny end piece that goes to waste from the process. That the pieces come from a single piece gives a sense of the transformation available in a piece of wood, and without waste. If a child is given only 3 tiles from a larger set and is encouraged to find all possible shapes that might be derived from those 3 tiles before moving on, I believe you can see the thoroughness of that which takes place. When a child is given too much stuff, wastefulness and inattentiveness to both form and material are encouraged. Whereas, to make a tree from wood, with nothing wasted but the sawdust swept from the floor at the end of the lesson conveys a sense of completion and responsible use of resources.

Today I have the last week of my home school class.

Make, fix and create...

fists of fury? divergent views of humanity.

A paper in 2013 by Morgan and Carrier, Protective buttressing of the human fist and the evolution of hominin hands suggested that the human hand evolved through sexual selection, with protective buttressing to protect it from damage as it was used to batter the faces of opponents. They followed up their research by suggesting that the human skull evolved to safely take a punch. Both of these theories met a firestorm of opposition.

In my view it was not the human combative role that led to evolutionary advancement through sexual selection but that particular individuals had the power to manipulate and control their environments through the application of dexterity.

There may be a few women drawn to the clenched fist, they in hopes of finding protection. But it seems that one of the sexiest images used in advertising has been the man (or woman) with a tool belt. A man who can fix things in the real world shows a certain prowess that by extension, can win hearts. You can read some of the correspondence on "fists of fury" Here.

Today in the Clear Spring School wood shop, my elementary school students will be making tiny wooden Christmas trees. In the process, the boys and girls will be developing their own creative and cooperative capacities. Make, fix and create...

testing the steel edge's sharpness...

One of the things that led me to Nääs, and made me know that I would find a treasure trove of Sloyd there, was that there were only two places in the world that had copies of Hand and Eye, a journal of Educational Sloyd and Kindergarten that was published in the late 1800s. I wanted to stick my nose in those journals and the only other place they were known to be found was in the British Library.

There are things that cannot be fully explained. For instance, what a craftsman learns by using his hands. And so perhaps poetry can come close. My new friend Barbara sent a poem by Harry Martinson, translated from Swedish Människans händer:

Human Hands

The hands’ experience is touch
their life among things is varied,
full of silent content.
They do not hear but are there in vibrations.
They do not see but know how it is in dark cellars.
When velvet is appraised they are there,
and whetstone and scythe blade they silently test.
They sense with light touch the steel edge’s sharpness.
How have they managed to gather all their subtle experiences
of wool and grit, of down and steel,
of smooth surface and of prickly globe thistle,
of silky talcum and of all types of flour.
Their register is unprecedented
from shiny silks to coarse sacks,
from coarse files and kitchen graters
to the smooth nails of newborns
and the sheen of touch on the blooms of everlastings.
They live in the country of sensation where touch is all
and where touching’s mystery raises its bridge between nerve and steel.
But in the butterfly’s dust they find their limit.
                                            --Harry Martinson

There are ways to test the sharpness of the steel's edge. Some will take the sharp blade and scalp hair from the arm. Some will test the blade on a thumbnail. If it digs rather than slides, it can be adjudged just sharp enough. If you look dead on at the tip, squint with eyes tight to overcome whether you have your glasses on or off, you can, on a dull knife, see a bit of light looking back. On a truly sharp knife, you'll see nothing but the cosmos reflected equally from both sides, left and right.

Early educators knew that the senses were key, that experience even for poets should come before words and that the partnership between hand and eye is essential. Students were not to be confined to death at desks, but were to be set free, under the guidance of the wise. Then folks came along, and decided education would be much better if they put a motor on it.

In school, I am getting ready for my first grade students to make tiny wooden Christmas trees, knowing that these trees are truly a symbol of much more that just the Christmas holiday season. The tree is a symbol of everlasting life and light in the darkness of the winter solstice.

Make, fix and create...

imagination...

Kindergarten Children and workbench, 1956

My show last night was hardly worth the effort but for the opportunity to hang out with artist friends and drink cranberry juice and vodka. I sold 3 books and no boxes. As one man confessed (not to me directly, but that I overheard) "these boxes are lovely, but I don't know what I'd put in one."

A friend of mine, and former student, Kathleen, has been teaching woodworking and making pet urns and crematory urns in Chicago. At least with pet urns and crematory urns, no imagination is required. You're dead by the time you need one. So perhaps I should make a change of course, and specialize in making something that requires less imagination.

So where does imagination come from? It's just like any other muscle. It grows strong through being exercised, and as we begin losing active imagination as early as kindergarten, and are carefully groomed to be complaisant and responsive consumers of standardized stuff, the market for creative work has declined in recent years.

The photo is from blog reader Todd Willmarth, and his uncle is one of the kindergarten kids gathered around a workbench in Spring Valley, Minnesota in 1956. The workbench is similar in height to the ones we use at the Clear Spring School. Thanks Todd, for a view into a more creative time.

When I visited at the University of Helsinki in 2008, I found my way (inadvertently) to the woodshop where Kindergarten teachers working on master's degrees were being taught to teach woodworking. The shop was right next door to the hall where Sloyd teachers were presenting academic papers (much more like social science research) on teaching various crafts. That small woodshop and the teacher's work there was the highlight of my visit and a thing that most conference attendees never saw.

Make, fix and create...

You begin.

While some will be at the mall or on-line chasing a few goods, others will be in the pursuits of better, in their kitchens baking bread or cookies, or in their sewing rooms or workshops, crafting themselves. Their skills, either new or freshly honed will add little to the economy, but add great depth to the warmth of our human culture.

Some of my work set up and ready to sell.

Today I'll show and sell my work at the Lux Weaving Studio on White St. here in Eureka Springs. Hours, 4-8:30 PM. I'll have boxes, books and some small furniture for sale. In addition, some of my earlier commissioned work can be seen today during the Eureka Springs Preservation Society's Tour of Homes, in the home of Susan and Jim Nelson.

The following is a poem by Canadian poet Margaret Atwood, a favorite sent to me by a new friend.

You Begin

You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
this is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.

Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.

It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.

Margaret Atwood 1978

I think I have a new favorite poem, too.

When my  4 year old great niece was here last week, she colored like that. I gave her a small lantern that, being cheaply made, ceased to work. I used my tiny screwdriver and some duct tape to fix it as she watched patiently. She learned that it is fun to fix things and no longer such a terrible thing when new things break. It becomes the excuse to look inside.

Make, please fix and please create... With the world going as it is, our children will each need each of these skills.

20 making days left...

If you've no skill or understanding to impart to a next generation, you might as well stop reading right now and never come back to the blog again, or take what you don't know how to do and base your further explorations on that... In school, I've been trying to get my students started early in the process of conveying how-to knowledge by having them write brief how-to pieces. One submitted her draft yesterday on how to hammer a nail. I had hoped that she would take the photos herself, but she chose the easy way that is ever present on the internet... She simply copied from the vast array of images that are available. Another student is making a wooden sword, and taking the photos with her iPhone... a bit more pleasing and also readily available approach. Several of my students are interested in making Jefferson Ciphers, a system of coding and decoding messages through a cylindrical device, so one made his first prototype in yesterday's class.

I attended an art show last night and chatted briefly with a fellow craftsman of my own age who has become concerned that he may only have another 10 to 15 years before he will have to make drastic changes in his life. His biggest concern is that he may not be able to manage his same level of creativity and exploration. The tools that he has developed for his use will be meaningless in untrained hands.

On the same subject, I got an email from a person involved in "Technology Education," suggesting that my use of the term as interchangeable with manual training, manual arts, industrial education and all the other myriad terms that have been applied to woodshop has been mistaken. He said, "My understanding of Technology Education (in brief), is, the study of the history and evolution of technology and technology’s influence on society." The first use of the term technology in all this pertaining to education, I beleive was Uno Cygnaeus' use of the term "techne"... a term still in use in Scandinavia in reference to the manual arts. Technology in the US is often used in reference to tools and devices, rather than referring to technique, which also comes from from the Greek,  tekhnologia.
technique (n.)

1817, at first especially in criticism of art and music, from French technique "formal practical details in artistic expression" (18c.), noun use of technique (adj.) "of art, technical," from Greek tekhnikos "pertaining to art," from tekhne "art, skill, craft in work" (see techno-).

technology (n.)

1610s, "a discourse or treatise on an art or the arts," from Greek tekhnologia "systematic treatment of an art, craft, or technique," originally referring to grammar, from tekhno- (see techno-) + -logy. The meaning "study of mechanical and industrial arts" (Century Dictionary, 1902, gives examples of "spinning, metal-working, or brewing") is first recorded 1859. High technology attested from 1964; short form high-tech is from 1972.

It would be pleasant for some teachers to address technology purely as an historical subject. They could stand at the head of the class and lecture on the subject. But it would be dry for their students and would ignore the human element and the human-hand in the development of human culture... Technique,  or techne, describes the human relationship with the instruments that have developed human culture. I humbly suggest that the isolated study of the history of the development of technological devices would ignore the learning potential that would come from the making and actual use of those devices.

A great and good man, an atheist, who had rescued hundreds of children from the Nazi holocaust was asked how it could be possible to be such a good man without believing in some particular religion or another. He informed the interviewer from the BBC that he believed not in God, but in ethics.

Regardless of your religious persuasion or lack of persuasion, there is a clear reason to engage our children in craftsmanship. The values imparted through it are the foundation of human culture.

For those of the Christian persuasion, we now have 20 making days til Christmas. For shoppers this season, all hell has broken loose. If you want some quiet shopping for hand-made work, please attend my show at Lux Weaving Studio, tomorrow evening, Friday December 6, 4-8 PM.

Make, fix and create...

not every lego in the world can do this...

 Blog reader, science teacher, David Kings sent this photo from his iPad. Most parents and grandparents will relate  to the scene that unfolds at David's feet. The message is from Lego and suggests that both boys and girls will find pleasure creating with their blocks.  The note states, "It's imagination that counts, not skill. You can build whatever comes into your head, the way you want it." I agree completely with the second part of the statement.

Creativity and skill walk hand in hand. Imagination and creativity take place both in the mind and the nimble fingers of a child. Dexterity applied to working with real materials has value, and skill is not an ingredient to be ignored.

The images below are from yesterday's home school class at the Clear Spring School. The children have been making trains. One has sliding doors, and another, the coal car is filled with a collection of polished stones.

Yesterday, I spent an hour with my favorite electrician figuring out how to get adequate power to my school lathes, in our relocated wood shop on the main campus. It took some serious head scratching and some time tracing circuits to discover the simple approach. It is amazing how when a problem is first viewed, the mind races to complicated and expensive solutions. But paying strict attention to the law of parsimony can lead to good results.

  In this post, I am not attempting to disparage Legos. They are wonderful until they get out of hand and as a parent or grandparent, you step on them in the night. I do want to make the point that if you are buying presents for a child, you might consider real tools, and some materials with which they can exercise both creative imagination and skill.

Doing easy things has a certain pleasure. Wooden parts don't snap together like legos. You must come to an understanding of materials and develop skill in the making. Doing difficult things that require a higher level of attention, builds both character and intellect. My home school students have legos at home. They build amazing things with them, and they are already wanting to sign up for my next class.

Thank you David, for the photo.

Make, fix and create...

We have 20 making days, before the Christmas holiday.

I Sløjdsagen Et Inlæg

Otto Salomon had a favorite author he quoted on the use of the knife. N. Christian Jacobsen's book, written in Danish and published in Oslo in 1892 is extremely rare and I was able to get a copy from the Danish National Library by inter-library loan. I intend to carefully scan the pages and make them available to anyone who would care to make a translation. Here is what I have so far and what inspired me to want to read this book and to think it might be worth translation:

“The knife demands total attention and permits no mechanical work. Furthermore, the knife can produce—unlike the plane, as an example—curved surfaces in form work. This makes the knife superior when it comes to the development of a sense of form and beauty.” [summarized by HansThorbjörnsson]

In the meantime,  I have a class this morning for home schooled students and in the afternoon will begin setting up for my Saturday art show.

We are down to 21 making days before Christmas, and consumers are busy shopping for gifts and bargains. If you are a maker, instead, you will have skill remaining after all the packages are opened, and so many meaningless gift objects are sent unceremoniously to the landfill or thrift store.

Make, fix and create...

Number 5

Yesterday I gathered and sanded the parts for Froebel's gift number 5. This is likely the set of blocks that inspired Frank Lloyd Wright's career as an architect. You can build amazing structures with this set of blocks and its easier than you might think to put away at the end of your play.

The blocks fit neatly within the wooden box. Stack the blocks to form a cube, slide the box over the top, and all the blocks off the table onto the lid. Use the lid to hold the blocks in the cube,  then turn the box over and slide the lid in place.

It is not real easy for small children with small hands to do, but then in the early days, parents and teachers were just as concerned with children developing manual dexterity as they were with the input of information. Later in the development of Kindergarten, they decided that these small blocks were too difficult for the children to manage, and much larger blocks were introduced. Those larger blocks turned play with blocks into a social endeavor (a good thing),  as children built things together in groups, but still, the development of manual dexterity, and the need for it, will not go away. Think of the surgeons who may also have gained their skill and intelligence through the use of Froebel's blocks. Are sensitive and caring dexterity any less important today?

I believe that the truth was more likely that such small blocks were difficult for the adult teachers to manage. Froebel worked with small groups of children in a small school and Kindergarten was originally conceived as being a small group activity with close personal supervision. As Kindergartens became widely introduced, they had to compete on an equal economic footing with schools based on drill and recitation, in which it was relatively easy to demand all children do exactly the same thing at the same time, oppressive as that may be. So Kindergartens crowded as many as 50 or more students in a classroom, all doing the same thing at the same time. It must have been impossible to keep complicated sets of small blocks intact. If you can imagine 50 small children sliding all these blocks off the table and onto the box lids at the same time, you can visualize catastrophe. I suspect that there were times when the teacher was left in the classroom long hours just putting blocks back in their appropriate boxes.

In any case, to make Gift number 5 for your child or grandchild, might lead to something more than you might expect... Skill in your own hands, dexterity and intelligence in theirs.

Here is a short list of gifts that give.

Tools, sets of blocks, gift certificates to craft lessons and cooking classes, how-to books (and the encouragement to do what is offered inside,) lessons for your son, daughter, or grandchildren in your own wood shop.

Today at the Clear Spring School, my primary students finished their puppets.

We have 23 making days before the Christmas holiday.

Make, fix and create...

24 making days til the seasonal onslaught of consumption is nearly complete

Your invitation to an art show.

Readers might enjoy this treatise on things by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. "Why We Need Things," is from a book, History From Things, Essays on Material Culture. It suggests that we have an unreasonable addiction to serial possession of objects that would be meaningless to us is we were more deeply engaged in processes of personal growth. These objects are killing us and the planet, and there is no better time to consider their impact than the season in which we become obsessed with the acquisition and dispersal of meaningless stuff. The following quotes are from Csikszentmihalyi.

...proliferation of artifacts would not be a problem if not for the fact that objects compete with humans for scarce resources in the same ecosystem. Forests are big destroyed to provide lumber, wood and pulp; metals and oil are consumed to propel vehicles. The potential energy contained in our environment is dissipated as we covert it into objects, which rapidly become obsolete: thus we accelerate the process of entropy that degrades the planet.

We like to think that objects are in our control, but Csikszentmihalyi suggests that this is not the case.

"In some respects, artifacts are like new species that reproduce themselves alongside biological ones. Looking at an illustrated history of musical instruments or weapons or vehicles, it is easy to imagine that one sees the record of an evolutionary process tending toward greater and greater complexity of function. We like to think that because objects are human-made, they must be under our control. However, this is not necessarily the case. An object with a specific form and function inevitably suggests the next incarnation of that object, which then almost certainly will come about about. For instance, the first crude stone missile begat the spear, which begat the arrow and then the bolt, the bullet, and so on to Star Wars. Human volition seems to have less to do with this development than do the potentialities inherent in the objects themselves."

My email these days is full of offers for special deals that are claimed to too good to pass up. They are not. What might be too good to pass up, however, is the opportunity to find personal growth the fulfilling of the obligation to give gifts this holiday season,  by making those gifts yourself.

"The addiction to objects is of course best cured by learning to discipline consciousness. If one develops control over the processes of the mind, the need to keep thoughts and feelings in shape by leaning on things decreases. This is the main advantage of a genuinely rich symbolic culture; It gives people poetry, songs, crafts prayers, and rituals that keep psychic entropy at bay. A Brahmin can afford to live in an empty home because he does not need objects to keep his mind on course. In our culture, mathematicians, musicians and others adept at the use of symbols are also partially freed from reliance on an objectified consciousness. We very much need to learn more about how his this inner control can be achieved. Then objects can again be used primarily as instruments rather than as projections of our selves, which like the servants created by the sorcerer’s apprentice, threaten to drown their masters with relentless zeal."

Is there a difference between making gifts, and purchase of them? When you make what you give, you are engaged in personal growth in the process. You have truly given in such cases, a gift of your better self. If you plan, still to buy gifts, buy those that encourage personal growth in others. Hand made gifts from your own community will encourage the development of human culture in your own city or town. There no better way to "develop control over the processes of the mind" than to become engaged in craftsmanship, music and the arts. Make something beautiful and useful and encouarge others to do likewise.

I am getting ready for a show this coming weekend in which my work will be available for sale. You are invited. Lux Weaving Studio, 4-8 PM, Saturday December 6, and the following Saturday, December 13.

Make, fix and create...