In late 2020, Elia Bizzarri and Curtis Buchanan produced an online class teaching Curtis’s Democratic side chair. This chair was designed to be built using a relatively small selection of simple tools, and doesn’t use some of the more complicated tools chairmakers typically use. I didn’t always stick to this intent, but used tools I had on hand.

I ordered wood from Elia, and kept up with the online classes until all the green wood was processed, bent, and allowed to dry. Preparing the leg stock using a hand axe was a new experience for me, and I enjoyed it immensely. When I was finished, I had 2 thoughts: I wanted to remake all the parts now that I had a bit of practice; and I wanted to do more work with the axe. That led to setting aside the project for almost a year and a half while I carved spoons and bowls.

This spring, I finally carved the seat and finished the chair using the original sticks I carved. Curtis typically doesn’t use glue when assembling this chair, except for gluing the wedges into wedged joints. I intended to glue all the joints “just in case”, but in several places I forgot to apply the glue, so most of the back only has glue in the wedges. I didn’t take any pictures until I started assembly.

Unlike a typical Windsor chair, all of the sticks on this chair are shaved instead of turned. They are left octagonal rather than circular. The angular shape of the seat complements the facets on the legs, stretchers, and spindles.

The chair is painted with General Finishes acrylic (“milk”) paint and finished with wipe on poly varnish.

Marla’s mother died recently, and Marla and her siblings asked me to construct a burial urn in the shape of a book. Here’s how I did it.

They requested I use wood salvaged from Leatherwood, Marla’s great-great-great-grandfather’s house. The pine boards I used were originally stair treads, so they were thick, painted, and encrusted with 150 years of dust and grime. After finalizing the design, the first step was to find the good wood inside the ugly.

After removing the rusty cut nails and cutting the stair treads roughly to length, I used a scrub plane to remove the outer layer of grunge with a blade that’s easy to resharpen, followed by a planer to flatten the boards and remove the bulk of the unneeded thickness. This resulted in the boards I needed and a birdseed bag full of shavings that still smelled like pine.

My design required the front and back cover boards to overhang the sides, the way the covers of a hardcover book extend past the pages. The cover boards were 1/2″ thick to provide enough thickness to carve. To make the edges a more appropriate thickness I planed a rabbet along the edges of the covers, and a groove to hold the sliding lid. The page edge boards fit between the cover boards, and the spine board caps the covers on the other side.

Since this is a book, it needed a title. The family settled on “The Book of Holly”, with carvings of holly leaves and berries in the corners. My supply of Leatherwood wood is limited, so I practiced on scraps. I tried paint to see how that looked, but the final decision was raw wood with an oil finish.

To avoid having to rebuild the entire box if I made a mistake, I did the carving before assembly. This was the most lettering I had ever done, so I was glad to have the practice. The curves aren’t easy with the grain pulling your blade in various directions. Since this is a book and an urn, I opted for a formal typesetting design rather than trying to draw the letters in a more creative way. I designed it on the computer, printed it out, and temporarily glued it in place while carving. This worked quite well, and my unsteady hand removed any sign that this had originally been digital art.

I carved the letters with a knife, the technique used by David Fisher. I was imagining the hand drawn lettering used on Eric Sloane book covers, although I didn’t actually look at reference images before choosing Adobe Caslon as the font to use here.

The leaf carving uses techniques from Peter Follansbee’s toolset, although the pattern was original. I defined the outlines with vertical cuts with gouges, and then I carved away the surrounding surface so the leaves would be raised. Since this is pine, it required very sharp tools to cut instead of mashing the wood, and I didn’t need to use a mallet for any of it. I stropped my knife every few letters to keep everything cutting well.

Next was carving the spine board, which I didn’t take any pictures of. I marked the shape of the cover on the ends of the spine, and planed away material to curve the back of the spine. On the edges of the spine board I carved a groove where the cover of a hardcover book bends open. I then used a chisel to carve the ends of the spine board to line up with the cover properly. (You can see this in the picture of the lid, below.)

To assemble the urn, I glued each page board onto the back cover separately, and when it was dry, glued on the front cover using a temporary spacer inside the unsupported corner to keep everything aligned. Once that was dry I added the spine onto the end of the box. Doing it in steps like this was slower, but ensured I got everything lined up without having to juggle 6 pieces at once with clamps going every which way.

The last piece to construct was the lid. I left this until after the book was assembled so I could get a tight fit (but not too tight). For this, I just planed rabbets on the two corners of the lid board, carefully approaching the proper thickness so it wouldn’t be too loose. Marla requested I carve paper page edges on the page boards, so I used a very coarse rasp to carefully scribe a series of (almost) parallel lines. I also added a notch to make it easier to open (and to tell which side is the lid). The lip of wood retaining the lid is very thin, and all weak short grain, so I wicked thin CA glue into the end grain from the inside to provide substantially more strength.

The top of the book with sliding lid

At this point construction was complete. I rounded off the corners slightly with a block plane, and gave everything a very light sanding with 220 grit paper: enough to remove rough spots and signs of the electric planer without removing hand tool marks. After that, I applied raw linseed oil, and that’s that. This doesn’t need to be a durable finish, but the oil emphasizes color variation in the wood and increases the contrast of the carvings where end grain is exposed.

I’m very happy with how this turned out. It’s not often that I make a plan, and then implementation goes entirely according to plan without needing to make adjustments on the fly, but this one worked.

Although I’ve been wood turning for many years, I never really ventured into turning plain old bowls until recently. Here are several bowls I turned last year. All are finished with linseed or walnut oil; some also have beeswax. Most were rough turned green and returned after they dried; some were completed green and allowed to warp as they dried.

In 2020, I started learning to carve spoons. I planned to carve enough to give as Christmas gifts for all the relatives, but I cut myself pretty badly and had to put that off until 2021. Most of these spoons were gifted away in 2020 or 2021.

Wood species is noted when I know it, but basically all of my spoons are carved from scavenged wood and I’m not always sure what kind it is. Most of the Cherry spoons have darkened significantly since pictures were taken.

I built this Moravian style stool for Marla’s mom for Christmas in 2020. I used plans that I believe originally appeared in Popular Woodworking magazine. I found the plans online at the time, but can’t find a link for them anymore.

This simple stool uses a board top with sliding dovetail battens running across the grain on the bottom to provide extra support for the leg tenons. This results in a very light but strong piece of furniture. Yes, it’s a cardinal sin to use cross-grain construction like this, but it works. Worst case scenario, the top will crack but the stool will stay in one piece.

The seat board is salvaged pine from the stairs at Leatherwood, the now demolished home of Marla’s great-great-great-grandfather. Despite the tree being cut down over 150 years ago, when I cut through the grunge and dust it still smelled strongly of pine. Three of the tapered octagonal legs are hard maple; the fourth I replaced with hackberry because the maple was flawed and cracked. Finished with acrylic craft paint and wipe-on polyurethane.

When my mom was moving into her new house in 2016, I gathered several half-finished projects my dad started, and brought them home with the intent of finishing them. They sat in a box in the basement for several years. In 2020, after we had a French drain put in, I rebuilt my shop in the basement and finally found time to finish these projects.

First is another Windsor style stool based on plans from Fine Woodworking. Dad turned the seat and a multitude of legs and stretchers, but never assembled the stool. I was able to use the seat and some stretchers, but the legs were all too slim, so I turned replacements. The seat is pine and the rest of the parts are most likely maple.

I painted with black acrylic craft paint and applied a wipe-on varnish finish. The stool is in regular use in my shop now.

The other project I found was an unfinished turned spoon, or scoop really. Dad turned the shape on the lathe, cut it in half, and hollowed it. I cleaned up the surface and applied an oil finish, before realizing this is not a very useful shape for a spoon: it has no crook, and the bowl’s sides are too steep to make it easy to cook or eat with. So it continues to sit around and not be used, but at least it’s complete. I had no idea dad had tried to make any spoons, but I expect this object contributed to me becoming interested in spoon carving later in 2020. It’s made of Black Cherry wood.