On Tuesday, for the first time ever, I felt my hand skills fade a bit. I was chopping half-blind dovetail sockets and I could not get the tail board to lock smoothly and at 90°. I looked down and noticed my hands were trembling. Weird. It could be that I’m still recovering from a nasty…

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This Irish-inspired stick chair is built specifically for reading and relaxing. With a back that is pitched at 28°, a seat that tilts back at 4° and the sweeping curved backrest, this is one of the most comfortable wooden chairs I make. The seat is 16” off the floor, which is 2” lower than a…

Woodworker Neil Cronk of Nova Scotia has begun making Melencolia-style squares as shown in Albrecht Dürer’s famous print “Melencolia I.” The square, shown in the bottom-left corner of the print, is of a style that has all but vanished. I’ve been making quite a lot of these squares myself and really like them. They are…

A blacksmith nails from Black Bear Forge (foreground) and one of the machine-made nails. This post is bound to anger some and delight others. Oh well. I just work here. While in England earlier this month, a student came in with a curious bag of nails that his parents had bought him as a gift….

We may add another class or two, but the above is what’s scheduled for now. Just a reminder that at 10 a.m. Eastern today (Nov. 29), classes for the first half of 2022 open for registration. Click here to see the shortlist of all the classes; click on any of the class title for more…

Katherine Schwarz and I spent some time this afternoon making a large order of soft wax 2.0 for her etsy store. It was the fastest and most consistent batch she has made since she started making wax several years ago. After years of using homemade contraptions to heat and dispense the soft wax, we got…

John Brown demonstrating how he saddled a seat. In the summer of 1997, Drew Langsner held a Chairmakers’ Symposium at Country Workshops with John Brown and Dave Sawyer in between classes from the two chairmaking legends. (JB had just wrapped up a Welsh stick chair class and Dave was about to teach an advanced Windsor…

Anarchist’s Tool Chests Though we’ve dialed back the number of classes we’re offering at the storefront, we do have a few scheduled for the first half of next year (mostly because Chris is kind to me and – despite the havoc a class wreaks on his shop and life in general – knows I a)…

We will be open for visitors from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, March 26. We will be selling our full line of books and tools, of course, and we’ll be happy to answer your questions and talk about woodworking. We have free Lost Art Press yardsticks and pencils (not the ones we sell)…