hype cycle...

The Clear Spring School where I teach wood shop got its first technology grant in the early 1990's from Apple. According to hype, computers were, after all, going to upset a few things, and schools that did not jump on the bandwagon would be setting their children back by decades if not worse.

The chart above is of the Gartner hype cycle, and is remarkably similar to the Dunning-Kruger effect in its shape.  It has been noted that the peak of inflated expectations (and its more grueling aftermath) exactly corresponds with the shape of the mount of stupidity.

The problem with human beings seems to be that we rush ill-considered into whatever is new in order to lay claim generationally to a sense of agency in the world. For instance, the new maker movement  largely ignores the rich history of shop classes that built our nation and helped millions of students to find a meaningful place in school and in life, and as a consequence ignores also the rich pedagogy of hands-on learning that would have been available to them from Educational Sloyd.

In the meantime, the OECD, the organization that monitors school performance world-wide, and that has called attention to the high cost and poor performance of American Schools has found that just as would be predicted by the Gartner Hype Cycle, technology and its application in schooling has failed to deliver on the expectations surrounding it. The OECD notes:

frequent use of computers in schools is more likely to be associated with lower results.

In other words, over the last twenty-plus years of computers growing their way into schools, the hype has grown but the performance has not. My thanks again to David for sending the link: Computers 'do not improve' pupil results, says OECD.

It should be noted that rushing to technological solutions  in education may be expensive  and will likely fail to deliver expected results. One of the interesting things that should be noted about digital technology is that its intended to make things easier and easier, when children really need to do real, difficult and challenging things that build both character and intellect at the same time.

In my wood shop, I am in the process of finishing boxes

on the other hand

In support of yesterday's post referencing the Dunning-Kruger Effect and the "peak of mount stupid," Joe sent me a link to an article in the The New York Times telling that schools are graduating students at a higher rate, but that those students are ill prepared for college or for life.

Little that takes place in a conventional public school has much to do with the well known principles of child development or with how children learn best. From the time of Froebel, (and before) educators made an effort to understand children and how they develop as intelligent human beings. Maria Montessori followed Froebel by nearly a century and described child development as follows:

...we discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being. It is not acquired by listening to words, but in virtue of experiences in which the child acts on his environment. The teacher's task is not to talk, but to prepare and arrange a series of motives for cultural activity in a special environment made for the child. ––Dr. Maria Montessori

If you study the graph shown in yesterday's post, you can see why educatonal policy makers are reluctant to make significant changes in schooling. The valley of despair is deep and the descent from mount stupid is abrupt and would seem cataclysmic for those peering over the abyss and the long efforts required to ascend to more effective schooling.

My boxes, on the other hand,  now have pulls attached and are ready for finishing when I have a nice day to do it.

Make, fix, create, and insist that others learn likewise.

the peak of mount stupid.

Dunning and Kruger proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

• fail to recognize their own lack of skill
• fail to recognize genuine skill in others
• fail to recognize the extent of their inadequacy
• only recognize and acknowledge their own lack of skill, after they are exposed to training for that skill.

David Dunning and Justin Kruger had been inspired by a bank robber who mistakenly thought that by rubbing lemon juice on his face, it would make him invisible to security cameras. The robber had heard that lemon juice could be used to make invisible ink and assumed it would have the same effect on his face. The question, how can a person be so stupid led Dunning and Kruger to make a study of it. What they found was that the phenomenon was a universal principle. When people have little experience in something, they assume it is easy. From Wikipedia:

Although the Dunning–Kruger effect was formulated in 1999, Dunning and Kruger have noted earlier observations along similar lines by philosophers and scientists, including Confucius ("Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance"), Bertrand Russell ("One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision"), and Charles Darwin, whom they quoted in their original paper ("Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"). Geraint Fuller, commenting on the paper, noted that Shakespeare expressed a similar observation in As You Like It ("The Foole doth thinke he is wise, but the wiseman knowes himselfe to be a Foole."

By sheltering kids in schools from doing real things, we build their confidence on what has been called the peak of mount stupid. We also squelch their interests in further learning at the same time. The second chart shows the gradual rise in confidence level of American students from 1965 to 2010. As students have done less and less real in schooling, as wood shops, music and laboratory science have been cut, confidence has been sent on a steady rise. But in light of the Dunning-Kruger effect, is that a good thing?

In my wood shop today, I plan to finish boxes.

Make, fix, create, and extend to others the opportunity to learn likewise.

deluge...

Here in Northwest Arkansas we are in our third day of a predicted deluge. Highways were flooded yesterday and the rain continues today. Roads have been washed out, and highways flooded as bands of rain have cycled through our area one after another.

This has been interesting to me, in part, because three days before this event, computer models had warned what we were in for, and the advances made in climate science, helping man to understand and predict weather are clear cut. Even the staunch conservatives who deny the effects of global warming, do so at the risk of making fools of themselves. How dare they deny the credibility of climate science and still make use of the weather information available at hand on their iPhones? What can they say when their policies of obstruction of scientific understanding have resulted in cataclysm? Oops, Maybe?

We pay a heavy price for our schooling. It's not what it costs in terms of teachers and buildings, but what it costs in failure to engage students and stimulate inquiry among all students. I explained this in an earlier post during the 2009 presidential campaign, Why jp aint smart. But I'll try to quickly explain it again. Our current model of public schooling denies the value of student inquiry, and pushes children through the process of schooling without regard to their readiness for inquiry. It culminates in students who do not know the process of sifting through data to discover truth, and insists that belief is enough.

Friedrich Froebel's Kindergarten was not about just giving children what they needed to pass on to the next level. It was about helping children to connect with and understand the whole of life, and their relationships to the worlds of nature and of man. And when we tally the true costs of our educational model, we must take into consideration the opportunity costs of what American educational policy makers chose to ignore.

In my wood shop during these rainy days, I've been making boxes, finally adding pulls and routing the bottoms. I can finish sanding and begin applying Danish oil today, but will likely wait for a sunny day when I can either open the windows or set up to work outside.

Make, fix, create, and extend to others the opportunity to learn likewise.

at work (and at play)

Yesterday I cut the lids off 32 boxes after sanding them smooth with  the random orbital sander. Then I installed hinges in each. There is a direct relationship between the techniques I use to teach and the production techniques I use to make boxes efficiently to a high standard. In classes, I don't want my students standing in line when they could be box making. In the shop, I want to make money and exercise my mind and body in the most efficient manner possible. The same techniques can be useful in both circumstances.

The photo above shows my latest improvement of technique. Small blocks with strips of the same thickness as the saw kerf keep the box from closing on the blade as the lid is cut from the body of the box. Over the years I've practiced a number of different techniques for this, but this is the latest, and allowed me to get boxes done much more quickly and safely than in the past. As cuts are made the blocks are put in place. For the last cut, all three blocks will be in position to hold the lid and body of the box with just the amount of space between for a near perfect cut.

One of the things that will be talked about during the presidential campaign will be the need for all children to attend preschool as a precursor for Kindergarten and regular schooling. The following is from the Atlantic article, "The New Preschool is Crushing Kids"

Step into an American preschool classroom today and you are likely to be bombarded with what we educators call a print-rich environment, every surface festooned with alphabet charts, bar graphs, word walls, instructional posters, classroom rules, calendars, schedules, and motivational platitudes—few of which a 4-year-old can “decode,” the contemporary word for what used to be known as reading.

Because so few adults can remember the pertinent details of their own preschool or kindergarten years, it can be hard to appreciate just how much the early-education landscape has been transformed over the past two decades. The changes are not restricted to the confusing pastiche on classroom walls. Pedagogy and curricula have changed too, most recently in response to the Common Core State Standards Initiative’s kindergarten guidelines. Much greater portions of the day are now spent on what’s called “seat work” (a term that probably doesn’t need any exposition) and a form of tightly scripted teaching known as direct instruction, formerly used mainly in the older grades, in which a teacher carefully controls the content and pacing of what a child is supposed to learn.

But what researchers are finding is that the teacher driven regimen and control robs children of self-directed play time leading them to shut down their receptivity, causing them to resist or even hate schooling. What educational policy makers must be forced to understand is that there is a difference between learning, and being taught. All children love to learn. Only under the best of circumstances can being taught, and learning coincide. And that must begin with the interests and cooperation of the child. Where that interest is lost or never gained, children are forced to suffer through.Where students and teachers are placed in coercive environments children rebel and resist in patterns that may last life-long.

It is difficult for me to understand how folks could sit around being passively entertained when they could be making beautiful and useful things, but schooling is good at preparing you for that. You won't learn anything new by watching football, but you will in the wood shop. Today I will add lift tabs to the lids, sand a bit more, rout edges, and begin the final finishing process. As a result, lovely boxes will be available for sale or to give as gifts. If I were watching football, I would have no new boxes and no new skill to show for it.

Make, fix, create, and encourage others to learn likewise.

let them be like puppies or ants...

My wife and I have friends who have been adjusting their lives to fit the dog they got as a puppy about 7 months ago. It is a beautiful dog and loving and large, but it is also of a hunting and tracking breed that was carefully engineered to its specific purpose.  It is a hound capable of going great distances in the pursuit of game. That means of course, that the dog loves to follow its nose and run towards trouble. It's not a bad dog. It is doing what it was designed to do whether its owners are in agreement at that moment or not. Some additional training will help, but do you purposefully crush the spirit of the dog you love, or can adjustments be made on both sides?

And so, the question must be asked, "How do we create schools that will benefit all children without crushing their spirits?" Is there a formula for it? These questions not new. Fitting a puppy to the circumstances of its life, and the life at large to the circumstances of the puppy are very much like what we face in "schooling kids," for they, too, are genetically evolved through long ages to learn and grow through particular exercises.  John Amos Comenius 1592-1670, considered the father of modern pedagogy (the science of instruction) observed:

Boys ever delight in being occupied in something for the youthful blood does not allow them to be at rest. Now as this is very useful, it ought not to be restrained, but provision made that they may always have something to do. Let them be like ants, continually occupied in doing something, carrying, drawing, construction and transporting, provided always that whatever they do be done prudently. They ought to be assisted by showing them the forms of all things, even of playthings; for they cannot yet be occupied in real work, and we should play with them.

There will be those who will argue that boys, having been neutered by technology will not longer be the boys Comenius observed. Can that truly be the case? My friends could collar their dog with an electronic device that would administer an electric shock when it nears the border of their property. They have chosen a more adaptive and humane course. In the case of boys, the use of drugs to control behavior is at an all time high.

Today in the wood shop, I will be sanding boxes. It seems that I, like a dog, have been engineered toward specific things. So today my boxes are ready for more sanding and for cutting the lids loose so they can be opened and shut.

Make, fix, create and extend to others the opportunity to learn likewise.

facing the death of real schooling...

A crop of veneered boxes, ready for next step.

Kindergarten has been called the "new first Grade" as the educational standards movement has tried to usurp play time with reading, math "and school readiness" training.  Preschool has been suffering the same effects. According to an article in the Atlantic, The New Preschool is Crushing Kids.

Preschool classrooms have become increasingly fraught spaces, with teachers cajoling their charges to finish their “work” before they can go play. And yet, even as preschoolers are learning more pre-academic skills at earlier ages, I’ve heard many teachers say that they seem somehow—is it possible?—less inquisitive and less engaged than the kids of earlier generations. More children today seem to lack the language skills needed to retell a simple story or to use basic connecting words and prepositions. They can’t make a conceptual analogy between, say, the veins on a leaf and the veins in their own hands.

My readers will likely know that schooling in America is steeped in artificiality and our children are drowning in it. From the same article:

A major evaluation of Tennessee’s publicly funded preschool system, published in September, found that although children who had attended preschool initially exhibited more “school readiness” skills when they entered kindergarten than did their non-preschool-attending peers, by the time they were in first grade their attitudes toward school were deteriorating. And by second grade they performed worse on tests measuring literacy, language, and math skills. The researchers told New York magazine that overreliance on direct instruction and repetitive, poorly structured pedagogy were likely culprits; children who’d been subjected to the same insipid tasks year after year after year were understandably losing their enthusiasm for learning. That’s right. The same educational policies that are pushing academic goals down to ever earlier levels seem to be contributing to—while at the same time obscuring—the fact that young children are gaining fewer skills, not more.

How do children gain skills? By doing real things, not the "same insipid tasks year after year!" But insipid tasks is what schools are known for. If Kindergarten which once relied upon play to ready the child for life, is now the new first grade, and preschool is to ready children for a Kindergarten that no longer resembles what it once was, when will children be readied for life?

Yesterday in my woodshop, I cut keyed miter slots in the corners of boxes and installed contrasting keys to strengthen and decorate the mitered joints. Today if it was not Christmas day, I would be in the shop sanding the sides flush and smooth and cutting the lids from the bodies of the boxes so that hinges could be installed.

Do people not know that creativity begins at the earliest days of childhood and that it can be drowned in school? My thanks to Mario for forwarding the article. It truly amazes me that educational policy makers would be as ignorant as they are. But the reasons are clear. The further you get from the hands, and hands on, the further you traipse from reality.

Make, fix, create, and encourage others to change the system so that others can learn likewise.

taking advantage of a holiday season...

I have been busy playing in the wood shop by finishing projects I'd started and failed to complete. For instance, the tiny tiner shown above are now lidded, sanded, finished and ready to sell. I now have over 30 larger boxes that have veneered panels in the lids, and that are ready now to have miter key slots cut and contrasting keys glued in place. I can just keep whittling away each day. And while I'm not sure what to do with all this work, there is pleasure in it.

One of my students from Marc Adam's School of Woodworking sent photos of some recent work. The class he took was intended to help students take their box making to the next level. During class Rich worked on boxes for wine bottles, and you can see that he has certainly achieved high levels of design and craftsmanship. The boxes he made were to give as gifts, so I think you can see how he made best use of the holiday season as an excuse to refine his own skills.

Wine box by Rich Herbert

  

I showed photos of my box guitars to editors, and one is interested in a book about making them. It would be a short book, featuring only 6 instruments and show variations in how they can be made. It also promises to be a book that will only take a few months of my time to produce, but will allow me to be of some further use.

Make, fix, create, and assist others in learning likewise.

cork balls and toothpicks

Yesterday I received a small package from Portugal containing 100 5/16 in. diameter cork balls to experiment with in sticks and peas, Froebel's 19th gift and the Kindergarten exercise that launched Buckminster Fuller's interest in architecture and engineering. My play with this gift to myself is shown in the photo above, and is one of the last non-editorial steps in completing my book on Froebel's Gifts. Who would have thought such a simple thing could have such a profound effect on human culture?

I am in the process of using the cork balls and toothpicks to build a bridge-like form, but I have to mention that this kind of thing is not easy, and would not have been easy for children if their hands and fingers and minds had not been made nimble by the earlier gifts.

In the wood shop, I have been chasing loose ends and applying my time in various directions. I have an order from my wife for business card holders to be completed for her to give as gifts. Those and small bentwood boxes will be finished today. I also glued up three guitar necks to use with the box guitars I'm making, and have nearly settled on a bridge design for one. That one is nearing the point of being strung. 

Make, fix, create, and extend to others the joy of learning likewise.

Hofstadter's Law

boxes for box guitars.

Yesterday in reading Crawford's, The World Beyond Your Head, I found where he mentioned a law (which he did not name) that everything takes longer than planned. That was a phenomenon I had noticed myself through making beautiful useful things, but in reading Crawford's book I became curious whether it had actually been stated as a law with a formal name and all. Here it is thanks to Google:

Hofstadter's Law:
It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
— Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Douglas Hofstadter is a clever man, and his book mentioned in the quote above can help to explain academia and academic pursuits in that actors create meanings that may or may not have reference to reality, that are nonetheless meaningful to the actors involved. Escher's hand drawing a hand, drawing a hand is the perfect visual metaphor for the pursuit of academic learning. So your can get your degree in some arcane area of didly squat and never even know how to make a box.

The boxes shown in the photo above are the start of three box guitars. Two are rectilinear, and the other is what I call a K-Body due to its resemblance to the letter "K".

Woodworking magazine, FDMC in their latest issue has a special report on Woodworking Education in which they contacted seven U.S post secondary schools with wood tech programs. These seven programs have a nearly 100 percent job placement record, but have been handicapped from the outset, as have been their students by educational policy makers at the highest level. According to Mark Lorge at Fox Valley Technical College:

The challenges for our industry started quite a while ago. Every politician that wants to make a name for himself messes with public school funding. The trend in high schools is to try to send every graduate to a university. When the funding is cut to the schools, the programs that are not viewed as academically rigorous are the first to go. All industrial arts classes are expensive and take up a lot of space. Unfortunately, these classes have the perception of being geared more toward the academic underachiever.

The concept that these students may learn differently or gain self-esteem by actually making a tangible product doesn't get taken into consideration.

The way Hofstadter's law fits in is that we began the Wisdom of the Hands program at Clear Spring School in 2001, and I started this blog in 2006. We may be making slow progress in reshaping how manual arts can fit in to the overall development of each child. Still, this is taking much longer than I thought.

On a related matter, children need to play, and eat healthy foods, in addition to making things in wood shop. The idea that children should be confined to desks for more than 15 minutes at a time is idiocy, pure and simple.

Make, fix, create, and encourage others to learn likewise.

a PhD in reality

A student mask from Australia

In a recent article in National Geographic, the author was describing the effects of global warming on the people of Greenland. The most dramatic effects of Global warming are quite clear to those who are observing the loss of glaciers and sea ice, and it would be a good idea to banish our current crop of GOP leaders to a remote isle in Greenland where they could learn first hand about what our fossil fuel dependency has done and is doing to our planet. If the GOP leaders didn't want to face the cold of Greenland, we could send them to the Marshall Islands where they could watch the waves of a rising sea lapping at their feet.

In the article, a particular hunter  is described as having a PhD in the natural environment, but of course the author was not talking about a real PhD degree which would be meaningless in Greenland. He was using a term common to readers to describe, metaphorically, an advanced state of understanding. But what is a PhD in reality, if it is not derived from an understanding of the real world? The penultimate degrees are generally granted to those who have attained mastery of a high level of abstraction.

Our educational system is steeped in artificiality from the top to the bottom. Putting the hands to work in learning is the only way we might actually change things. Where the hands are engaged learning is at greater depth, retained longer,  and brought into direct context and yet most educational policy makers cling desperately to dark hopes that some future contrivance will engage children and force them to learn. (But learn what?)

With school out for nearly two weeks I continue to clean shop. I am gradually finishing boxes that were started months ago. Last night I cut linings to fit the bottoms of several boxes.  I feel a compulsion to use what I know to create and share. I am finishing one guitar and am starting three more and I am planning to use the mask above from Richard Bazeley's class as my model for the design of the body of one guitar.

In my reading of Matt Crawford's book, the World Outside Your Head,  I am on chapter two where he is describing embodied cognition, a subject I've described here in the blog many times. Schooling at all levels suffers from an overly narrow definition of mind, and a  failed perception of who and what we really are. Extend that into society at large and you begin to understand why politicians can lie, be believed, and get away with it.

Make, fix, create, and instill in others the love of learning likewise.

tiny tiner...

I spent most of the day yesterday cleaning in the wood shop, building a scrap rack to organize waste wood for burning in the wood stove, and hauling logs from the woods with my tractor. Some of the logs are for firewood, and the others will be milled into lumber. I took just a few minutes for therapy, finishing tiny tiner I had started during the photography of my Tiny Boxes Book. These Scandinavian inspired bentwood boxes have lift lids. Further sanding, and application of finish will make them complete.

I am amazed at how much scrap wood has accumulated since the last time I so thorough cleaned shop. If the amount of scrap is any indication of my production, I have been a busy man. The sawdust bin in my shop is also full and I'll empty its contents today and compost it to build the soil in the forest around the house.

I am reading Matthew Crawford's new book, The World Beyond Your Head. My local librarians ordered a copy when I told them that I was quoted in it, and when I went to pick it up, I learned that they had photocopied the last two pages of the book to keep at the desk and share with other library patrons.  I seem to be a very minor local celebrity.

The first chapter of The World Beyond Your Head enters the subject of attention and how our powers of attention have been eroded in part by our digital devices but also surrendered to those who would manipulate us toward their ends. Attention(when it is manipulated by others) is the way through which individuality and personal creativity are lost. In that regard, I seem to be one of the very few on the planet not totally immersed in the Star Wars phenomenon.  Even presidential candidate Hillary Clinton finished her closing remarks with "may the force be with you." Clever but dumb in my humble opinion. As a craftsman when the first Star Wars episode first came out, I had plenty already going on in my own life, and regarded the over the top exuberance of my peers as a warning of sorts.

Developing the powers of attention is not specifically targeted as a value in schooling. Our industrialized economy is dependent on industry's ability to coerce attention toward the acquisition of devices and objects that we do not need, and that simply further complicate our lives in ways that serve their interests.

In any case, we are down to the wire now for ordering things from my Etsy store if you want them to arrive in time for Christmas. Orders placed by Monday for US delivery will likely arrive before Christmas Eve.

Make, fix, create, and extend to others the opportunity to learn likewise.

The rise and fall of manual arts...

When I made a very brief visit to North Bennet St. School in Boston in 2001, talking with their development director opened a crack in my understanding, that then, as I began to pry things open, revealed what should have become clear to American educators, but for the fact that humans must be drawn (commanded even) to look deeply and closely enough to see beyond the surface of things.

My student Oen, second grade, wanted to make a wooden sword just like one made by Hannah, one of my older students. He looked at the two parts of the sword, the handle and the blade, and taking two pieces of wood, proposed that they could be glued. Putting Hannah's sword before him, I asked, "look closely at how it is made." Only by looking closely and examining the intersection between the handle and the blade, could he see that the end of the blade was whittled down to enter a hole in the handle that gave a strong connection between the two.  In order to make what he wanted he would have to drill a hole in the handle, and then shape the end of the blade to fit in that hole. Making the sword was a whole lot more work than he imagined it would be. But knowing how it needed to be made, allowed him to actually make one that would work and would last. The most important point, however, was not Oen's making of the sword, but his having taken the time to look closely and learn from an examination of the real world. For a second grader, this is how progress is made. I am training Oen, not only to make, but to see.

Understanding Educational Sloyd is not quite so easy. One can look at a progression of models to be made by students using certain tools, with each to be made at a certain time in relation to each other. What one does not see is the underlying theory upon which the progression was planned. An immediate hunger to develop skilled hands for industry led the early manual arts movement to rush forward without a deeper understanding of how it fit in.

In the US, proponents of the manual arts squabbled from the outset over whether Sloyd models would be used in progression, or whether, following the Russian system of Victor Della Vos, exercises unrelated to the making of specific useful objects would suffice. Educational Sloyd, to its disadvantage, was a far deeper subject than simply fitting hands to industrial purposes and what they missed was the deeper view of how children learn, and must learn in order to be most deeply engaged. Educational Sloyd explained how all children learn and explained the necessity that all children make beautiful and useful objects, but in a society bent on maintaining the pre-existing social stratification,  and the separation between the intellectual class and working class, the more narrow view of manual arts won out.

Now, in the US and in the world, there is a growing excitement about making things, and maker labs are being formed in schools, and of course that is all a good thing. Kids of all ages need to do real things. But what is still lacking these days is the adoption of a theoretical foundation concerning how and what children will learn from the experience and how it fits into their overall schooling and development.  Otto Salomon, in Educational Sloyd developed and promoted a theoretical foundation for manual arts that carried an understanding of how students learn, and how we might best teach. That theory of Educational Sloyd, and the understanding buried at the point where the blade and handle are conjoined should have been observed and adhered to throughout schooling, and not just in the manual arts. But just as Oen saw the handle and the blade as separate things that he could stick together with glue, the new maker movement will rise only to fall again, if we don't drill the hole  in the handle and shape the tang of the blade to fit. This is precisely why Educational Sloyd has even greater value today. While folks are looking for educational reform, the Theory of Educational Sloyd holds the key to effective change.

Make, fix, create, observe, and encourage others to love learning likewise.

wild man guitar...

Yesterday we had the holiday program and pot luck at Clear Spring School and it was warm enough for it to be held outside. Unusual for December. I plan to use the holiday break to clean my shop, finish boxes and continue making experimental cigar box guitars.

The photos are of my "wild man" guitar which explores the use of an oversized top. The idea is that the top can be expressive without changing the underlying box shape. This idea will help my student do more expressive and unique work.

The idea of this guitar is that the sound holes form eyes, the curved parts below below the body are like mutton chops. The bridge will form the mouth. The tail piece is made just as I've made them in the past, with galvanized sheet metal and screws. I am stamping the name of each guitar in this series using metal stamps.

We are getting down to the wire on shipping from my Etsy store. Shop now if you need a gift in time for the holiday. Because making is not confined to usual business hours, you now have about 150 hours remaining in which to make gifts before Christmas.

Make, fix, create, and extend to others the love of learning likewise.