next year, we’ll fix that link so it actually reads “carved box”…]

Thinking about these carving classes coming up, I dug out some oak I split & planed in May and started in on some carved boxes. The photo below is 2 different boxes - the large panel at the bottom of the photo is a “typical” sized box, the other 2 boards are ready to cut into 4 pieces for a small box. I carved these today and shot some photos of the larger one.

This pattern is loosely based on one single small photo in Victor Chinnery’s book Oak Furniture: The British Tradition. I’ve carved several versions of it, none of them copying the English box verbatim, but following much of its format. This board is 7 1/2” high - so once I struck the top & bottom margins, I knew I had 6 1/2” to work in. I dug out some paper and a compass to work out some spacing. The pattern repeats so much there’s only a small section that you need to map out - in this case a 3 1/4” square.

Once I struck those arcs, I dropped vertical lines through the middles/between the arcs then a diagonal line left & right. Those 90° and 45° lines are targets for a pointed “leaf” struck with a narrow gouge left and right of each line. Then a large curved gouge defines the spaces between the diagonal and top leaves. Same gouge outlines the droopy bit from the diagonal line down to the middle horizontal line.

I traced a couple different gouges to get the shapes I wanted. There’s a pair of rounded shapes that almost form a heart shape - the point of which hits the diagonal line. I wasn’t sure about the size of the gouge I started with to define those shapes. Tracing the tools on paper is one thing, but the V-tool outline is wider than a compass-penciled line. So I quickly struck an outline with the V-tool on a piece of white pine scrap and sure enough, those shapes needed a narrower gouge.

That’s all I needed to know. From there I could go to the oak board and not have to guess about anything. So the first step is all the V-tool work to outline the arcs.

Then the leaves around those 90s and 45s. You want those to hit the marks, then what falls between them has some leeway.

I made a mark on each diagonal line to serve as the tip where those two rounded shapes touch. This made the pattern all the more consistent.

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But I have got some shop time in. After making parts for over 20 JA chairs, then assembling 3 of them - then teaching 8 people to make them (and as the demo piece making a 4th) - I decided to take a break from them and do some joinery. But first I did another bark seat, this one an X-pattern, or 4 half-diamonds tip-to-tip. I had done this pattern by accident once and wanted to do it intentionally ever since.

The biggest news in the joinery world concerns the Stent Panel…a carved panel that with Jennie Alexander and solo I’ve featured in articles and books every chance I get. I first saw it in Benno Forman’s book American Seating Furniture - but once I saw it, I found it in lots of places. This used to be the best photo I had of it:

The name comes from a 20th century owner - in 1960 it belonged to a Dr. John Stent, of Surrey. Before him it was his father’s, in Bath, England. The story now is that it’s in Colonial Williamsburg’s collection - to me, that’s huge news. It had been for many years in Australia (A place I once spent 3 weeks in & DIDN’T HUNT IT DOWN! AND I HAD THE OWNER’S CONTACT INFO! I wasn’t far from him…) Now all I have to do it get to Virginia to see it. Easy. For better photos and the current details, see CW’s site - https://emuseum.colonialwilliamsburg.org/objects/115326/stent-panel;jsessionid=1F00B3CBC80475954B95653F6152BDE7?ctx=4fd039508e606f3ea5368446c7a9b36eea11edb4&idx=0

Victor Chinnery once told me it must be English because the Dutch would have gotten the perspective right. Regardless, I love that panel. I’ve had photos of it in every shop I’ve had since I took up joinery. Now I’ll get a new print made from the CW photos…

And my joinery project for the past few days has been a joined stool. When I was finding places to stash chair parts I uncovered some joined stool stock that I had planed up over a year ago. So got out my 5/16” mortise chisel and got to work.

I chop all the mortises first, then do the turning. I was hot enough doing the turnings, so I skipped photographing any of it. Didn’t need more complexity to my day.

I still mostly make a joined stool the same way Jennie Alexander & I covered in our Lost Art Press book. https://lostartpress.com/collections/joinery/products/make-a-joint-stool-from-a-tree I was thinking of that when I got to the side stretcher lengths. I don’t know the length of that stretcher, but I know it’s right.

There’s a couple of measurements I have committed to memory - when I’m making a joined stool of my own design. (if I’m copying a period stool, things are a bit different) - the shoulder-to-shoulder dimension of the straight aprons & stretchers is 10 1/2”. Add 2 tenons at 1 1/2” each and you’re around 13 1/2” to 14” for rough lengths for those.

The short side aprons are 4 1/4” shoulder-to-shoulder AT THE TOP EDGE. Then the shoulder is angled to give the stool some stability. JA & I settled on an angle of 1:6. I don’t know what it measures. I marked a line on a cupboard door in the shop & when it’s time to make a joined stool, I go set my adjustable bevel from that line.

The length of the side stretcher is arrived at by a test-fit. Stick the tenoned apron in the stiles, draw things together with either drawbore pins or a clamp as I’ve done above. Then mark the 1:6 angled shoulder at one end of your rail blank. Then line it up in place so the top edge of the stretcher touches the stile right where the top end of the mortise is. Line up the other blank end of the stretcher in place in relation to the other mortise. Then mark where the stretcher’s top edge hits that other stile. That’s the shoulder-to-shoulder length. Use the bevel to mark the angle, lay out & cut the tenons and the stretcher will fit perfectly.

Because I’m working from the bottom of the stool in the photo above, the stretcher is upside down. The length is still right. If I worked from the top end of the stool, the stretcher would be in its actual position for scribing. You could do the whole thing from the bottom of the stretcher and bottom of the mortises, but sometimes my mortises run long and thus their bottom ends are less accurate as a layout point.

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Before I get to the post about the class - two things. One, my last class of 2026 is there in October, making a carved box. October 26-31 details here (disregard that the link says it’s a chair class) - https://www.petergalbert.com/schedule/2020/7/13/make-a-chair-from-a-tree-with-peter-follansbee-8brcj-7b62n-xafjp-mglkm-lrd5m-swyzh

The other is now that the chair class is done, I have some chairs to sell.

This is the first one, details posted here: https://pfollansbee.wordpress.com/2026/08/03/ladderback-chair-for-sale-2/

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Now - I can show you some of what happened at the chair class. The best class I’ve had in a long time. Here’s the group photo I asked for, a stack of chairs. There were 8 students for the week, one got away before the photo. Plus there’s a few of my chairs in that stack & one of Jennie’s.

Joel Paul assisted the whole week - and I was glad & lucky to have him around. The chairs came out excellent and the work was so smooth this time that we not only quit early one day, we finished early overall! That almost never happens to me…we’re often rushing with the slats on the last afternoon. I didn’t bring a real camera and I usually forget to take pictures with my phone - but during one demo the students reminded me of that option.

I was showing how I line up the front post to bore it & most of them got out their phones to shoot a photo. I felt left out, so I took their picture. But I missed any shots of the first few days. The format of the class follows what I learned from Drew Langsner & Jennie Alexander. We start with a fresh log, the students learn to split & shave the green parts, then steam-bend the rear posts. Once that’s done, I take all that work away & issue them parts made by the previous class. So here’s the green posts made by the 2026 crew, now waiting for next year.

At that point, they’re working on the stuff that will go into their own chair. Here’s Michael doing the heavy looking on while Rob lines up his rear post for the side-rung mortises. If you’ve not been to Galbert’s shop - note the windows - so much light in there.

For boring mortises and assembly, we have the students pair-up - it helps to have another set of eyes to double-check things and also slows people down a bit, which can be a good thing. Here’s Anne Marie & Lewis gluing up one or the other of their chairs. The blue tape is the depth stop - a clear visual to stop you from over-driving the shoulder-less tenons.

And then you knock it together -

From there, we split out more green wood to shave the slats. I showed them how to determine the slat length, then shave them & bend them in place. Then go & make the next one.

I went looking for a hatchet to borrow and Maria said she & Brian had one of Julia Kalthoff’s hatchets…and when she went to get it out, there was another hatchet too -

I knew the shape immediately, then when I saw the handle I knew even more. This hatchet was imported from Sweden by Drew Langsner/Country Workshops for sale. Drew used to bend the handles from red oak - I think he’d do two together as one double-bend, then crosscut them and fit them to the heads. It’s a prized axe - Maria asked Brian where he got it - “in a lot of tools…” that’s quite an accidental find!

Pete was in & out of the shop during the week. One thing he had to get done was the turning for a chair class later this month. So anyone got to rubberneck as he turned the parts:

Here’s 7 students & their chairs where you can see them:

What a blast! And great results. Best class ever, best chairs

I recently sat down and chatted with (and talked at) Kyle Barton and Sean Wisniewski of the MWA podcast, my first time being on their program. If you care to listen to me blather on - have at it, or scroll through the unbelievable list of previous episodes.

https://www.modernwoodworkersassociation.com/5339/episodes/19510459-mwa616-peter-follansbee-the-17th-century-essex-county-cupboard

This blog post was going to be about making JA ladderback chairs as I’ve been getting ready for next week’s class. But I wasn’t happy with the photos & video I shot to illustrate it, so it became a case of “no time to do it right, but time to do it over.”

Then it was going to be part 2 of looking at Plymouth Colony furniture - and it sort of still is - but it became different once I sat down & looked at photos. So here it is, the third attempt at a blog post. Plymouth cupboards.

The one above is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Others are at Winterthur Museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY.

Here’s a gallery of the Met, Winterthur & Wadsworth examples -

If you saw the first post, you’ll recognize right away many of the features - the applied turnings and moldings, the “sawtooth/serrated” decoration on the large moldings. Rows of dentil chisel chops - you can infer the lipped tenons on those large moldings above and below the drawers.

Most of them are pretty much the same - 4 drawers in the lower case; two small side-by-side drawers in the top row then two large drawers below, a fixed panel in the middle of the upper case, flanked by doors left and right. Large turned pillars supporting the cornice. Flat-fronted upper case, unlike the trapezoidal cupboards often seen. Many of the turnings on the Wadsworth one are replaced - the pillars are distinctly different from the others.

There’s one at the Met that’s open below - many period cupboards follow this format.

But this one is restored, here’s a photo before the restoration.

It clearly followed the format of an open base, but we’re still left with conjecture as to the details. It’s not terrible, it’s probably very close to what it was...but we don’t know for certain.

Which brings me to one I saw in pieces nearly 30 years ago - which came up for sale in 2021. (All the photos of it are from Brunk Auctions)

https://live.brunkauctions.com/online-auctions/brunk/rare-pilgrim-century-american-court-cupboard-2088116#mz-expanded-view-688561795391

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When I first had that book, I consumed its contents - not so much the written essays, but the images and captions of the objects and the appendices about tool inventories. Over and over I read those sections. The broad subject is the 17th century furniture made in what is now southeastern Massachusetts. One sub-set of this group is Plymouth Colony furniture - Plymouth Colony was for most of the 17th century separate from Massachusetts Bay Colony to the north. By the 1690s it was subsumed into Mass Bay…here’s a map I copped from Wikipedia:

The Plymouth Colony furniture is pretty distinctive. Once you learn some of its features, it’s easy to recognize. I’ll start with the joined chests with drawers.

First - no carving, this is applied molding and turning style decoration. One distinction is the drawers are side-by-side - not a full-width drawer like many period New England chests. Smaller drawers are easier to handle in use - but can’t hold larger textiles like a full-width drawer. More on that when we get to the cupboards in a future post.

Above and below the drawer section are two large moldings, often called “serrated” moldings, a term coined by Wallace Nutting a hundred years ago to describe the sawtooth decoration on these rails.

The main thing about these moldings is that they are not applied as we might expect, but an integral part of the rail. The thick rails are cut with a “lipped” tenon that has an extended section that fits over the stile that the rail meets. That joint is in all the molding-decorated Plymouth Colony joined chests and the large cupboards from the same shops.

I’ve only seen this joint used in one other New England piece, in that version it had an applied molding attached to it, so was done to make that molding appear thicker than it was.

The chests share many more common features. There’s a small rabbet at the edge of that molding with pairs of chisel chops spaced across the length/width. These are considered versions of dentils - they show up on every version of these rails, but on other molded rails too. The first joined stool I studied had them, as did the first table I saw - both seem to be from either Duxbury or Marshfield - towns along the North River near the northern end of Plymouth Colony.

The applied turnings, usually in pairs, but some singles, follow one format with only slight variations.

And the panel decorations formed by the applied moldings fall into a few different designs - some diamonds, some arches - here’s an example:

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You can maybe make out the cleat-and-pintle hinge used to fix the lid. This shop used pintle hinges on a lot of chests - but this box & its relative both started life with iron hinges - what I know as “gimmals” and many of you know as snipebills. Somewhere along the line this one got a replaced lid and switched to a pintle hinge. In the chests, it’s perfectly fine. Here’s a chest from that shop - with the round-headed pintle driven through the cleat and into the side of the rear stile. A loose fit in the cleat and tight fit in the stile results in a nice wooden hinge:

One thing that makes this work is the thickness of that rear stile. It’s about 1 3/4” x 3 1/2”, so there’s enough material there to bore that hole without interfering with the joints there from the top rails. That’s not the case in the dressing box - those stiles are 1 3/8” square, but have their inside corners cut out. So there’s only about 3/4” to 7/8” of thickness there. Here’s my first version (sorry MG):

There’s so little material there that the hole for the pintle interferes with the tenons in that stile. So this time I waited until I had some gimmals. Installed them the other day, before assembly.

I always bore a test hole for these, once that’s done I drive them into the rail to then clinch them over on the inside. This is best done before assembling the box.

That photo with the hammer is the 2nd hinge - but it should have been the first. There’s an elevated compartment at the other end and I didn’t think I’d have room above it to clinch the hinges 90 degrees to the fiber (as I’m doing above.) So one hinge is clinched this way, the other that way. As it happened, there would have been enough room. Made a note for next time.

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First - a carved & painted panel for sale. I worked it up a while ago, then set it aside for the paint to dry. Then forgot about it.

it’s red oak, painted with iron oxide and carbon pigments mixed in linseed oil.
8 3/8” x 13 1/4”
$500 includes shipping in US. ($518 through paypal) Email me if you’d like it PeterFollansbee7@gmail.com

OK - now onto the rest. Last week I had a chance to see a Hungarian (or maybe Romanian) chest in person. I only got a few snapshots of it, here’s a detail of the front and lid:

The chest above is pretty small - maybe knee-high. Might have lost some height as the feet wear/rot. The wood is beech - all riven radially, like clapboards. Thin. Most of the connections are tongue-and-groove, fixed in place with wooden pins. The boards are drawknifed - no perfect flat surfaces like we get with a plane. Nice undulations from the riving and drawknife work. Here’s some of the compass-generated carved decoration:

Most of what I know about these works stems from my electronic friendship with Tamás Gyenes https://acsoltlada.hu/index_en.html - he & I connected 11 years ago when I wrote about a German book documenting similar chests found in a church in Romania. https://pfollansbee.wordpress.com/2015/11/30/tamas-gyenes-riven-beech-chests/

I’ve been working with him recently, helping proof-read an English translation of an upcoming book he’s working on. He is the font of knowledge about the long tradition concerning these riven beech chests. They’re just astounding things. In a note to me he wrote: “My only purpose with the English book version was to let you and your friends know how exciting riven chests are here in the Carpathian Basin, here in Hungary. My purpose was to let the world know that we exist; sometimes I feel like our world here is a hidden-lost world for international woodworking literature.”

I’m all for that, I can’t wait to see and hear more about this work. I’ll keep you posted.

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I got word recently that vimeo-on-demand will be shut down. November 20th it will go poof! I still have all my files, etc - so I’ll find a new place to stick them. I had planned on making one this summer on the carved boxes - but now I’ll wait til I sort out where/how to host them. So if you’ve purchased any of those videos - first, thanks. Second, download them if you haven’t already. You paid for them, get ‘em.

Here’s a webpage where I have links to several of them - https://www.peterfollansbee-joiner.com/videosondemand

This one came after I made that webpage - https://vimeo.com/ondemand/honeychurchpattern

OH- HOW COULD I FORGET? THE NEWEST, THE CUPBOARD ONE!
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/504407

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Now - some actual woodworking. I was pegging the slats in three ladderbacks today and thought if I’ve shown that process, it hasn’t been recently. I learned to install the slats after the chair frame goes together. Jennie Alexander termed it “popping” the slats in. They’re green and I even steam them to get them pliable enough to over-bend and then wriggle into the mortises. After a day or two they’re dry enough to pin in place. Here’s some of the steps. First - I groove a scrap of white pine to back up the rear post where I’ll bore the holes through the posts & slats:

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These are great for this work - and abundant when chairs are underway in the shop. I try to keep a pile on hand all the time regardless. They’re especially good burnishing turned work on the lathe.

This afternoon I wove the first session of the seat - the bark I used is stuff Brendan Gaffney & I cut a year ago - it’s the perfect-est bark I’ve ever made. The warp strip was 34’ long - the weft was 39’. It will take about 6’-8’ more to finish it off. I had trimmed the width of these strips to 3/4”. So about 80’ to do the chair. One thing to remember, my rungs are shorter by a fraction than the sizes listed in the third edition of Alexander’s book. There, she switched from what we used for years to whole-number dimensions - 14” and 17” rungs. The reason for the switch was to accommodate 1” wide hemp tape that she used on some chairs late in her career. Because I make my seating material, I never switched.

As I’ve been weaving the seat I thought again of the hickory bark references in Mark Twain’s writing - and just yesterday found another Twain reference to hickory - this time about green wood used by coopers. In chapter 54 of Life on the Mississippi, “Past and Present,” Twain was visiting his boyhood hometown, Hannibal, Missouri and reminisced about his youth there. The section of the chapter is called “Dutchy’s Mishap” - about a good boy who drowned:

“Circumstances gave to his death a peculiar impressiveness. We were all bathing in a muddy creek which had a deep hole in it, and in this hole the coopers had sunk a pile of green hickory hoop poles to soak, some twelve feet under water. We were diving and ‘seeing who could stay under the longest.’ We managed to remain down by holding onto the hoop poles. Dutchy made such a poor success of it that he was hailed with laughter and derision every time his head appeared above water. At last he seemed hurt with the taunts, and begged us to stand still on the bank and be fair with him and give him an honest count...

Treacherous winks were exchanged, and all said ‘All right, Dutchy - go ahead, we’ll play fair.”

There’s a long section about how the boys were going to hide and thus play a prank on Dutchy - except once he dove under, he never came back up...after a while, they decided someone had to dive down to see what happened -

“Somebody must go down and see!”

Yes, that was plain; but nobody wanted that grisly task.
“Draw straws!”

So we did - with hands which shook so, that we hardly knew what we were about. The lot fell to me, and I went down. The water was so muddy I could not see anything, but I felt around among the hoop poles, and presently grasped a limp wrist which gave me no response - and if it had I should not have known it, I let it go with such a frightened suddenness.

The boy had been caught among the hoop poles and entangled there...

I started reading the new biography of Twain, where the author writes that Twain’s mother “recognized his instinctive tendency to embellish the truth.” She is quoted as saying “I discount him ninety per cent...the rest is pure gold.”

The other Twain/hickory bark references are in a post I did a couple years ago - when I was seat-weaving of course.

https://peterfollansbeejoinerswork.substack.com/p/hickry-bark-seats

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THE BOX IS SOLD - BUT I’M STARTING MORE. IF YOU’D LIKE TO BE NOTIFIED AS THEY BECOME AVAILABLE, LEAVE A COMMENT/SEND AN EMAIL. THANKS, PF]

I showed this box underway a while back. It came about because I was cleaning the shop and ran across some nice, but short, oak boards. Once I decided to make a box, then came - which one? What pattern will fit? I ended up adapting a familiar pattern:

These linked “rosettes” form what art historians call a guilloche - discussed late last year: https://peterfollansbeejoinerswork.substack.com/p/another-look-at-period-carvings-the

I know this particular version quite well - the joined chests with drawers from the Savell shop in Braintree use this across the drawer fronts. In that application, it’s always on drawer fronts 6” high. In this case, my board was only a little smaller, just 5 3/4” high. So I set about seeing how I could adjust it to fit this particular space. The length was really the limiting factor - I ended up with just one full rosette, flanked by two halfsies. And it then worked perfectly.

Here’s a detail from a period drawer front:

I’ve done it as a full-sized box before - but it was, like this instance, “made-up.” By that I mean I’ve not seen a 17th-century box, by this shop or another, with this pattern. With one exception. There are only a few boxes surviving that we’ve been able to connect to the known works from Braintree. Here’s the one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, their photo:

That front board is about 6” x 24.” A near-mate is at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and a third, a desk box, in a collection in Hartford, Connecticut:

The front board of the desk box is just a bit smaller than the others. Not enough to matter really. One thing I wondered about - why didn’t they carve the drawer front guilloche on any box fronts? You can make it fit - here’s one of mine from 2004:

To ask why did they not do this or that - is about as dumb a question as it gets. So I’ll move on to another long-running question about the Savell shop that I got a partial answer to after nearly 30 years. Their chests are extremely consistent - the variations from one to another are so slight that you have to get obsessive to notice them. So I often wondered and long searched - where are the English antecedents for their work? William Savell, Sr didn’t get his obsessive traits on the boat over here…so there must be English works we can tie to the Braintree stuff. Never found a chest like the New England ones. Eventually did find one tantalizing image of a related carved box - not like the New England Savell boxes - its front is carved with the drawer front guilloche!

They also had a detail - with an awful patch where the lock had been:

So there you have it - someone carved that pattern on a box front before me. Makes sense. Somewhere there must be more..

Meanwhile, here’s some shots of this week’s version. Red oak box, white pine lid & bottom. Wooden pintle hinge. Till inside.

The end carving - and the wooden pintle hinge

And the till inside, a leftover molding for the till lid

Dimensions are H: 7” W: 15 3/4” D: 11 1/2”

$1,100 includes shipping in US. If you’re interested, send me an email at PeterFollansbee7@gmail.com and we can sort out payment details…if we use paypal a slight additional fee.

A few years ago I made a how-to video about carving this pattern as part of the series on making the whole joined chest. The trailer about that carving is here:

and the links to the series- the “chapters” are also available separately.

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/follansbeejoinedchest

I made a couple of terrible videos about weaving a bark seat. At least one of them, maybe two, has me sitting on a low stool, wedged in between the chair in my lap and the workbenches in the shop. I don’t know why it took me a few chairs’ worth to rig up this simple plank jutting off the front edge of my workbench. I forget what I used to do decades ago. Once the first strip is ready, I wrap it on the chair as the “warp” strip - the front-to-back section. I tie one end to a rear rung, near the corner post. Come under the seat rungs and wind up & over the front rung. Then back-to-front, winding the strip pretty taut but not tight.

These warp strips don’t wind out to the front posts, they run square to the rear rung. I’ll fill in those front corners later.

The woven strip(s), called the “weft” runs across the warp. I tie it to a side rung, near the rear post. Start the weaving underneath the seat…then the real action happens up on top. For a couple of years now I’ve been weaving a diamond pattern on my seats instead of the herringbone/twill pattern. This pattern requires a bit more planning than the herringbone, but it’s not hard to do. The planning works from the center out - but you weave the seat from back to front. So I had to know how many rows I’d end up with from back to front.

I’ve done it several different ways - but for me, they all start with a graph. This pattern requires an odd number of warp strips. I drew this one out with a broader pattern than my chair would fit - so I taped off the number of rows that will actually fit on my chair - 13 warp strips - in the end one more weft strip than that - I’ll get to it. You might see that I didn’t bother taping off the right-hand side of the drawing -I usually weave seats from my left-to-right. From there, all I have to really keep track of is the center strip in both directions and make sure to weave the same pattern on each side of the center. hopefully.

I weave my seats (regardless of the pattern) in two stages. The first fills the main section of the seat. Then I stop and let the seat dry out - as it dries each strip shrinks in width, leaving gaps between them. The photo below is the seat at the end of session 1, before the drying happens. At this point, you can still barely discern the pattern - it often depends on the lighting and the angle you view the seat from.

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This post, free-to-all subscribers, is about some research for my Craft Genealogy project. Maybe some of you can help identify the source of the term “swing lines” - just don’t use google. I did & the only hits were this blog and some AI blather. I hate that…]

Just like some winter days that are too cold to work in the shop, each summer there’s a few days that are too hot - in the middle of the day anyway. Yesterday I got out to the shop early, started working about 7am - so I could hide away mid-day. And write. Today I’m going to weave a hickory bark seat, sloshing around in a bucket of water is easily done in this weather.

As I’ve been sorting and cleaning up the shop, I ran across some really nice, but short, boards of red oak. Rather than try to find where to store them I decided to take some time to make a small box from them.

And while I’m working on that box, I’m thinking about making Windsor chairs. I made a couple of Windsor chairs before I met Curtis Buchanan - and they were awful. A Windsor chair leg (or most spindles, etc) tilts from vertical in two directions, to the side is the “splay” and to the front or back - the “rake.” Those first instructions I followed pretty much said to bore these compound angles by eye. Then working with Curtis made things so much better and easier. He gave me plans for several chairs - I still have them 39 years later. And scribbled all across those seat plans are a bunch of lines with designated angles recorded on them. Curtis told us those plans came to him from Dave Sawyer. (I got some from Drew Langsner too, also stemming from Dave Sawyer.)

Those angled lines, the sightlines, are the key. The sightline turns one of these compound angles to 90° and an adjustable bevel set along or parallel to the sightline, set at the “resultant” angle, creates the proper orientation for the boring tool. [see Drew Langsner’s book The Chairmaker’s Workshop and Pete Galbert’s Chairmaker’s Notebook for a full explanation of how these lines work and how to create them.]

I found out that Daniel O’Hagan used sightlines when he made chairs & benches. He called them “swing lines.” I’ve been trying to learn the origin of that term. I searched through Daniel’s notes on Windsor chairmaking and found his earliest dated use of the term swing lines is from May 31, 1965:

Several mentions of this method are undated - this one, about the “horseshoe” type Windsor, (which I assume is a bowback side chair) includes a seat plan sketch showing the position of the rear legs’ swing line.

As a general rule, it seems the undated cards are very early in this system Daniel used, so could be c. 1964 or earlier. Up to this point, all I really had was that the term “swing lines” appears in Daniel’s notes out of the blue in the mid-1960s. I think that means he learned to use these lines and an adjustable bevel before he kept detailed notes. But where did he learn it? His notes don’t say.

UI was visiting Dan Faia https://danielfaia.com/ one day & asking him what he knew about the terms rake & splay. He searched through his book collection and lent me The Cabinetmaker’s Treasury by F.E. Hoard and A. W. Marlow (New York, The MacMillan Company, 1952). That book turned out to be a good step toward learning more about sightlines. I knew the name Andy Marlow - but didn’t remember much about him, just that he was from York, PA. Looked up Fine Woodworking’s archive - John Kelsey wrote about him in an early issue:

Andy Marlow chuckles and says a lot of people think that’s him standing there grinning on the cover of his book Good Furniture You Can Make Yourself. The large man on the cover is wearing a neat, pin-striped apron and would have you think he has just made a Colonial-style rocking chair with a plane and a box of screws.

Marlow is a short, wiry man of 72 who wears old clothes and a peaked cap when he works in his shop out behind the house, and dons a necktie when he quits for dinner. Not only is the cover guy not Marlow, the chair isn’t in the book. It looks as if it came from an unpainted furniture warehouse. The chairs that are in the book are much finer.

Although the work was all done by Marlow, the book has gone through so many changes that he stops just short of disowning it. For one thing, he never met his co-author, F. E. Hoard. For another, it was a nicer book when it was first published in 1952 (in hardcover) under the title The Cabinetmaker’s Treasury. For a third, the co-author and the later resale for its current paperback reincarnation have chipped the royalties away.

I’m glad Dan lent me the earlier book! There, chapter 1 “Essential Processes in Cabinetmaking” has a section titled “Seat Boring” (p. 12). He bores before saddling the seat, from the bottom. Marks the positions of the mortises from a seat plan.

Draw pencil lines from the marked positions, as shown in Figure A, Plate 4. You will find the exact placing of these lines indicated on the seat plan for the particular chair, by broken lines labeled “direction of brace.” The correct angle for the leg holes is stated on the same drawing.

Now set a bevel gauge to the number of degrees suggested for the particular chair, and place the bevel gauge parallel to the pencil line on the seat. This will give the two angles for lining up the brace. Figure B shows the gauge and bit in position, at a sample angle of 63 degrees.

Here in this initial plan, Marlow calls those lines “lines for Lateral Angles.” Chapter 11 is about chairs and includes a few Windsors, under the heading “Cottage Chairs.”

In America, Windsors were apparently first made in Philadelphia, about 1725. Although inspired by the English style, American makers introduced some differences; the central splat of the back was omitted, and the legs were more sharply raked, with the top ends placed farther in from the seat corners.

His plate 19 is what he calls a “Sheraton” Windsor, something like a fanback side chair with a serpentine crest rail. Included in his instructions for this chair:

The holes for the side turnings are bored completely through the seat, as are the leg holes. These joints are also wedged. The detail drawings of the seat show the positions of the holes and the plan for the saddle shape. After cutting the outline of the seat with a band saw, holes should be bored before any shaping is done. Exact instructions for seat boring are given in Chapter 1. The angle for the leg holes is 68 degrees. The seat is then shaped with hand tools and sanded.

Marlow’s plates 21 and 22 are of a double-comb-back chair. He writes a page or two of instructions and refers to the earlier chapters for boring the seat, bending the arm and combs, etc. Here, the lines on the seat to assist in boring the leg mortises are called “direction of brace” - a phrase he uses on a couple other chairs as well. The text says “the angle for the leg holes in the seat is 64 degrees.”

I was very pleased to learn of Marlow’s use of these lines struck on the seat blank. His book pushes this method, or the roots of it anyway, back to the early 1950s. Probably earlier, I assume he’d been working for some years prior to writing this book.

Nowhere that I have seen does he describe either where he got this method or how to establish the lines. His books are simply for the reader to build according to his plans. These are not chair-design books (furniture design, really. There’s more than chairs in these books.) When I saw the first couple of chairs in Marlow’s book, I wondered if Daniel O’Hagan had this book or if he had read it. Once I saw plate 22, I had my answer.

A piece of paper filed with Daniel’s index cards shows his copy of plate 22 - it’s not dated, there’s no citation that he’s looking at Marlow’s book, simply a copy of most of the details in that plate. Daniel omitted the side-to-side cross-sections of the seat. It’s not one of his typical index cards, just a folded sheet of paper. The only “text” on it is that the holes in the seat are bored at 64°. I had hoped the reverse side would shed some light - nope. A shopping list and a couple of sketches for wedging the legs in 3-legged stools.

That’s the only time I’ve seen Daniel use the term “direction of brace” for what he called “swing lines” - our sighting lines. So my search continues to see if I can discover where he got that term. Another post on this subject will look a a few named influences on Daniel’s chairmaking, but thus far those have not covered this topic.

OK - not much to go on I know. Here’s what I know - many of us today use sightlines drawn on a seat plan to easily align the boring tool for Windsor chairs. They came to most of us through Dave Sawyer, Curtis Buchanan, Drew Langsner, Pete Galbert & others (Greg Pennington, Elia Bizzarri & others I’m missing) but mostly through that one connected thread. (do you know some who use it from outside that line?) Daniel O’Hagan, who first taught Sawyer about green woodworking, used them, but called them “swing lines.” Andy Marlow used them back in the early 1950s (maybe earlier) and labeled them “direction of boring.”

If you’ve seen something in print from before 1965 - or have any leads, I’m all ears.

Today after shaving some chair stock and sorting various parts I had a little bit of time before I had to go out - so I painted this carved panel.

That had been my intention all along - reaching back to when I carved the panel a month ago - just hadn’t got to it. And today I did it as a spur-of-the-moment thing, so I shot no photos. But I can tell you what happened and more about painted work in 17th century joinery.

My goal was to create an effect like I got on this - my 2nd-ever joined chest, back about 1991 or ‘92.

When I carved the panel, I oiled it with a thinned coat of linseed oil. These days I use good quality refined linseed oil and citrus thinner. I probably wiped two coats on that panel, then set it aside to dry.

Once it was dry enough, the next step was to mix some thin black paint - that same oil and thinner mixture with some carbon pigment dissolved in it. I made it very thin, maybe too much so. Then with a very fine brush wiped the black paint into chopped & incised areas - those inverted Vs flowing around the arch for example. Let that dry - a couple days would be enough. As it happened I let the panel sit around quite a while.

Today I mixed some iron oxide red into the oil/thinner combo. Then with a narrow flat brush wiped a swath along both edges of the arch, both sides (above & below) each S-curve cut in the inner part of the panel. The narrow gouged-out area that follows along inside the arch and so on. Once that paint was laid down, then I dipped the tip of a small rag in the oil & wiped it along all those places I applied the paint. That gave the panel that effect of being sort of blended - in the end it creates a VERY thin wash over the whole surface with stronger applications highlighting the carving.

I can’t say for certain these panels were painted this way - I have seen some of them that appear to have pigment in those highlighted areas. Here’s a detail of one - refinished, but some darkness/color in those areas:

Maybe the whole panel was painted and a refinishing/stripping removed the surface paint and left it in those recessed areas. Without a conservator doing a paint/finish analysis we won’t know. There aren’t many objects from this particular group that would be a good candidate for that analysis even if there was funding to do it. So all is conjecture. But I like the look of this - even if it’s not period-correct.

Paint was often used to highlight/accent carved work - it’s just that there’s not a lot of surviving examples. Usually it’s the background that gets colored - we’re not sure then what the foreground gets for a finish. The box below, from Devon, has remnants of original paint in background - one of those colors looks like a bright red now. That bright color is perhaps red lead. Perhaps is the key word here. I’ll stress again, without analysis, all is speculation. Informed speculation, but not proof.

Here’s a short snippet about red lead - note the part about it being stable in oil, but darkens when mixed in water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minium_(pigment)

Years ago a collector we know bought a carved chest that was over-painted in the late 19th century - solid black. When that paint was removed the color looked like this:

the conservator who worked on this reported that the background was carbon black - but the foreground was colored too. With a dye made from either logwood or Brazilwood. Bright red again. Now muted to this brown color. Brazilwood is more likely to make a red color - https://cameo.mfa.org/wiki/Brazilwood_dye

I’ve never fooled around with dyes - usually they’re worked on cloth, I don’t see much mention of them applied to wood.

Many years ago I worked on a project for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to create a plausible replacement for a missing upper case to a cupboard. This was the result - displayed hanging above the original lower case:

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And a special offer - my friend Peter Lamb has an old French hewing hatchet to sell. I’ve not worked with it, but it looks to be an excellent hatchet - Peter knows what’s what. I’ll post the whole story of his hatchet and how to proceed if you’re interested in purchasing it - below the paywall. There’s only the one hatchet, so I’ve set it up so the paid subscribers get first crack at it.]

My joinery work requires lots of flat surfaces in riven oak. Even the best, flattest split sections sometimes need hewing to bring them close to the finished size. For that work, I use a large, single-bevel hatchet, variously called a hewing hatchet, broad hatchet, side hatchet and more.

It’s a tool I’ve written about a number of times on my old blog, I’m not sure how much we’ve focused on it here. (I looked, October of 2023 - so I will re-hash it again) Start with Joseph Moxon discussing the joiner’s hatchet c. 1678-83:

25. Of the Hatchet.

The Hatchet marked L, in Plate 4- Its use is so well known (even to the most un-intelligent) that I need not use many Words on it, yet thus much I will say, its use is to Hew the Irregularities off such pieces of Stuff which maybe sooner Hewn than Sawn.

When the Edge is downwards, and the Handle towards you, the right side of its Edge must be Ground to a Bevil, so as to make an Angle of about 12 Degrees with the left side of it: And afterwards set with the Whetstone, as the Irons of Planes, &c.

Well, I might be un-intelligent, but twelve degrees? That would be as weak as a kitten. I wonder what on earth Joe was getting at. Randle Holme, writing perhaps shortly after Moxon uses some of Moxon’s text and adds some of his own:

…an Hatchet…the use of the Hatchet is to hew the Irregularities of such pieces of Stuff which may be sooner Hewn then either cut with Chissels or Sawn, for that end it is used as an Instrument of Execution for the Beheading of great Offenders, and Rebellious and Irregular Livers: The right side of it (in its use of cutting) is ground down to a Bevil, or edge, which is afterwards set or made more sharper, with a Whet-stone as other Working Tools.

Setting aside Moxon’s edge geometry, both men seem to be describing a single-bevel hatchet. Double-bevel hatchets will work too, which is good, because they’re easier to come by. So here goes my lowdown on the hatchets I use. It’s a bit unfair, because I’ll be telling you about two close-to-perfect tools that fell into my lap decades ago & are very hard to find. But lots of hewing hatchets will work, so don’t despair.

My first hewing hatchet was a medium-sized German one, sold by Woodcraft Supply back in the late 1970s/early 1980s. It was marked FWB - which I much later learned stood for FW Busch - you can read about the company here, very detailed rundown of the history -

https://www.holzwerken.de/museum/hersteller/hirsch.phtml

I’ve had a couple of those axes, gave my first one to a friend when I got an upgrade from Jennie Alexander - and then sold one of hers at some point. They’re excellent - if I was looking for a good hewing hatchet and one of those came around I would grab it.

The upgrade I got from JA was my now-everyday hewing hatchet by JFR Fuchs, also German. Made before 1933. I first wrote at length about my joinery hatchets in 2011. That post had close to 30 comments on it...and revisiting the subject over the years still generates discussion.

First - like I said, these tools fell into my lap. I didn’t have to search for them, bid on them or go to any real trouble to get them. Just opened a package in my mailbox decades ago. As I have said many times, I’ve been remarkably lucky in my career. And yes, for some reason, they’re rare. And yes, they are as good as I say they are. That doesn’t mean “lesser” axes won’t do. If you can get & keep it sharp, many axes will work just fine for hewing green wood for furniture work. That goes for single-bevel hatchets AND double-bevel hatchets. BUT - some work better than others. And these early 20th-century German ones work great. I don’t see any way they could be better.

The hatchet weighs 3 lbs 7 oz. and is about 7 ¾” along its cutting edge. The edge is curved, and further - when you lay a straightedge along the “flat” side, you see it’s not flat, but ever so slightly cupped. The corners won’t dig in that way. A mistake some make when re-conditioning an axe or hatchet like this is to flatten the back. Don’t do it.

You might see some hatchets that are listed as right-or-left handed hewing hatchets. But they often have a centered eye - and the handed-ness is determined by the width of the bevels. For spoon and bowl carving, Wille Sundqvist developed hatchets with asymmetrical bevels, a longer, wider bevel against the wood; shorter, narrower on the outside. But the eye (& therefore the handle) is still centered on the head. That’s not the case with a single-bevel hewing hatchet (or axe). There, the eye is not centered in line with the cutting edge.

I have a related hatchet with a canted eye, lifting the handle up, saves your knuckles when hewing wide stuff. That’s pretty rare, I can’t remember seeing another hatchet this way.

I’ve been asked many times for specs on my everyday one - here’s a sketch/tracing I made of the head with some of the specs. I guess you could print this so some of those marks are on the money - the 1 1/4” thickness of the eye would get you to the height of that part. The cutting edge is about 7 3/4” long.

I long ago retired from being an axe-tester so I can’t say if this-or-that one is any good. Some I’ve tried were more bulky in the head than these two and that felt out of balance to me. But it might be what you get used to.

These two hatchets were made in Canstatt, Germany before 1933. The only reason I know the date is someone looked up the company & told me they moved to Stuttgart around that time. How did they get here? Well, there’s a story. Maybe 2. I got mine (& 2 more I’ve given away) from Jennie Alexander. The way she told it is she got them as payment or partial payment for a lecture/demo she did at Woodcraft Supply in Woburn, Massachusetts in 1980. I was at that presentation, even brought an early chair I was making & we worked on it together - our first dog-and-pony show together. She was unimpressed. Rightfully so. The legend is they told JA “pick something out” and there was a box of hatchet heads that she picked from. How many? No idea.

Drew Langsner did the Woodcraft gig the year before - on that trip north to Boston Drew stopped in Baltimore and met JA for the first time. Part of that story is in the 3rd edition of Make a Chair from a Tree. Drew got the “pick something out” line too - got it first in fact. JA wrote to Drew about getting those hatchets - saying she bought them - BEFORE her trip up there in 1980. So maybe the legend is bunk.

In her letter to Drew, JA wrote:

“I bought some of those old lot hewing hatchets from Woodcraft [by the way I got a reduction, tho it was not intentional, so I guess I’m getting over on them] One of the hatchets is a beauty - probably older - with an inlaid steel edge. I haven’t sharpened it yet - but have a handle on it. The eye is radically tapered like in the old prints. So I just made a tapered handle like this and drove it home, no wedge, no nothing.

It seems to hold - but have you ever seen this kind. It would be hard to get a wedge in from the top and it would be too small [the drawn taper is no exaggeration] I guess I could back wedge from inside - but I’ll leave it as is for a while. The bottom of the blade is funny and beveled - probably a factory second; that hung around. Views invited.”

Her drawing is not far off the mark:

Now - I know one more thing about those hatchets at Woodcraft. They had boxes of them in 1979-80 - heads only. But they advertised axe heads for sale in 1971!

First 100 orders filled. Did they not sell 100 hatchet heads in 9 years? Did they sell out & get more? Where did they all go?

below is the lowdown on Peter Lamb’s French hatchet - which has many of the same features of the German ones…

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To get right to the book, you can skip this post & go to LAP’s site - https://lostartpress.com/products/17th-century-essex-county-cupboard

One stipulation the first customer had was that the project be “well documented.” I told him that I’ve kept a tripod and camera in my shop since about 1989 - when I first began studying joinery along with Jennie Alexander. So I shot hundreds and hundreds of photographs as I was working. Wrote many blog posts, many of you were there for those. And Anissa Kapsales from Fine Woodworking came along and we did an article about some of the work - they were kind enough to put my cupboard (& my photograph) on the cover.

In addition to the photos, I shot a lot of videos too. The book takes you through the whole process of making the cupboard(s), starting with the log. The video series, one of my vimeo-on-demand offerings, is different. I couldn’t possibly shoot the whole process - I didn’t have the time, resources or space to pull that off. But I got a bunch of stuff captured and have edited about 10-12 videos showing different aspects of the build, ranging from the applied turnings and the carved drawer front to the more oddball work of shaping the upper case stiles and joinery for the lower case’s overhanging framework. Those videos are also for sale, I think of them as complimentary to the book. I still have a couple more to sift through and edit, so I’ll add to this collection soon. The link is here - https://vimeo.com/ondemand/504407

Here’s one of the videos as a sample. Most are around 30-45 minutes, this one came in shorter, fitting the pintle hinge on the door.

Paid subscribers can access a 15% off discount code at the end of the post, below the paywall. Now for the blog post itself.

………………….

I didn’t set out to be a writer. When I was six, I wanted to be Bill Russell. Turns out the world already had one and there was never going to be another.

Same outcome for some of my other intended occupations - Andrew Wyeth was already taken, etc. Along the way I became a woodworker, but my principal cohort/teacher/mentor lived 400 miles away - Jennie Alexander.

And she & our circumstances propelled us to write down a lot of what we were doing back & forth in the US mail. So I became a writer of sorts. Not the “It was a dark and stormy night” kind of writer. Very specifically writing about woodworking. And a small slice of that pie to boot.

My first book took 20 years, Make a Joint Stool from a Tree, with Alexander. Part of the reason it took so long is that she & I would argue about it repeatedly, to the point where I’d drop out & leave it to her. Then her health took a turn and I was back on board to help make it happen. While we were wrapping that book up, I was starting in on my joinery book, Joiner’s Work. That one was a look at how I make some of the “standard” fare of a 17th century New England joiner, mostly carved boxes and chests and variations thereof. But while writing that book, I dropped out of my long-held museum career, so it was interrupted a few times. There’s at least 3, maybe 4, different shop setups in that book. I finished it after building my own shop here at home.

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Details here https://www.peterfollansbee-joiner.com/loftform

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This post continues some stuff about chairmaking and some more content from my Craft Genealogy. If you read about the white oak log I got some time ago, you might remember it was uncooperative. Once I had it cut down to 3-foot lengths it got much more agreeable. At that stage, it was destined pretty much only for ladderback chair parts, which is fine. I needed some for student work and the rest will be chairs for me until who knows when.

But I’ve never approached a log this way, making so many multiples of the same thing. Once my bending forms were filled up I made a rig shown to me by Brendan Gaffney. Think of it as a drying rack for the posts that have spent some time in the bending forms. I guess you could use it as a bending form in its own right - but I like having the full chair leg bearing against the shape of the actual bending form.

I made the drying rack with 2 oak boards, a closet pole from the big box store and no measurements. Laid a bent post on one board, traced its curve and found the position for 3 sections of the closet pole - one right behind the bend and then one each at or near the ends. I don’t have a bit large enough to match the closet pole, so I made rectangular tenons on the ends of the 3 sticks. Bored and chopped the mortises to match. That made the task take a bit longer, but it was not unreasonable. So as I make more rear posts I free up some bending forms by filling up the drying rack. Seems like a system that will work.

The weather turned hot as soon as I had a lot of oak on hand to work up. This time I’ve painted the ends of the bolts with a thick coat of latex paint - to stem the tide of checking. It’s working so far. I did notice some checks in the sapwood even through the paint, but I’m mostly discarding the sapwood anyway. It’s especially helpful on these short bolts - there’s little leeway there. Those are for the front posts and slats; I keep them covered when not being photographed...

Speaking of front posts. I had so concentrated on getting out the rear posts and bending them that I got ahead of the front posts. So I dug out some of those shorter bolts and made up a bunch of them. Almost caught up now to 17 chairs’ worth of both. I have a few bolts that are too short for front posts, so those will become rungs and slats.

I finished one chair (from an earlier smaller batch of white oak parts) - all that’s left is cleaning up the slats, oiling them and then trimming the feet. I went ahead and assembled the next chair too. Assembling things versus making dozens and dozens of parts makes me feel more like something’s happening in the shop.

My Craft Genealogy Project: sightlines and checklines in Windsor chair seats

I’ve been mentally chairmaking too, working on the Craft Genealogy story. I was poring through some of Daniel O’Hagan’s notes recently and found one I missed the first time around. First, I’ll touch on a bit about how and maybe why he made his notes. They are on index cards - it’s funny, now that I’m aiming to describe them, I realize I never measured them and a search tells me index cards come in a few sizes. I assume his are the typical 3” x 5”.

Now, what were they for? I have always assumed the point was for him to refer back to, “how did I do this?” sort of a thing. He would also use them as note-taking when reading something he felt worth keeping track of. Sometimes he cites the source material, more often he doesn’t. One way I learned about this is from reading some of his notes on coopering. This particular note, dated Sept 19, 1974, is about some Swiss methods:

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When I teach my carved box class, I bring lots of tools to the workshop. Some are for students to borrow/use. “These are open season, I just need them back at the end of the week” is what I tell them. Others - my everyday tools - are “invitation only.” And there’s a small category that is “invitation only, but you’re not getting an invitation.” I don’t lend these tools out. Period. This plane is one of those - and I keep it off-limits not because it’s any fabulous thing, it’s purely sentimental.

It was Jennie Alexander’s scrub plane. You can see it here on the cover of Make a Joint Stool from a Tree.

https://lostartpress.com/collections/joinery/products/make-a-joint-stool-from-a-tree

So why am I telling you about this plane? Because my daughter Rose is an artist. Here and there I’ve posted some of her work occasionally. About 6 years ago she drew this colored pencil portrait of our friend Heather Neill’s dog Finn:

My opinion of Rose’s work is naturally biased, I’m her father. But I’ve told her many times that if she keeps at it she can get paid to make artwork - citing Heather as a perfect example. Heather never wavered from her dream of being a professional artist, she works harder than anyone I know - but her results prove that she’s been on the right track all these years.

https://heatherneill.com/

For a long time, Rose concentrated on portraits - also in colored pencil. I asked her to pick one to illustrate here, this is a character from some science-fiction movie. I think. She told me & it went right out of my head.

She’s recently taken some art classes in the local community college, a couple of drawing classes, painting, printmaking - things like that. One of these drawing classes included drawing a still life set up. Seeing her still-life gave me an idea; one that I’ve had knocking around for a long time but never acted upon

What about a still life of some tools? What about a still life of some of Jennie Alexander’s tools? So I talked to Rose about drawing Jennie’s tools and showed her several. She picked out just a pair of them, the scrub plane and a mortise chisel. Little by little she picked away at this drawing and finished it up recently.

So now this post is my attempt to test the waters. We’ve talked of different methods by which to offer it for sale here on the blog. One being an auction, another just post it for sale & take the first person to respond. And - the one we’re trying - in case more than one person is interested, taking names & plucking one out of a hat.

I’ve mounted the drawing in an acid free mat, overall size is 11” x 14”. Image size is
7 3/4” x 10 3/4”. Price is $400, including shipping in the US. We’ll sort payment out when we get to that stage, the buyer can send a check (to Rose, not me) or we can send a paypal invoice for $415.

If you’d like your name in the hat, leave a comment or send an email to me at PeterFollansbee7@gmail.com We’ll pick one out Friday June 12 at noon. Eastern.

And just in case this jump-starts Rose’s career, there’s another tool still life underway. Pertaining to my Craft Genealogy project.

Because I knew I was going to be interrupted a lot, I switched gears to chairmaking, instead of making chair parts. I dug out some chair parts made back in March, set up to chop the slat mortises, and from there carried on to assemble the chair. Got half of it done Wedmesday…

…then the final assembly Thursday. Slats today. This is where it all really began with me, I made my first chair from Jennie Alexander’s book when it came out in 1978. The whole process of making the JA chair got refined over the years, mostly through Jennie and Drew Langsner teaching it at Drew’s school Country Workshops.

Chopping the slat mortises is one place where things have changed since the beginning. In JA’s first edition she’s sitting on a low bench and using both mallet and hand pressure to chop (or dig) out the slat mortises. I had never chopped mortises before reading that book so did just what the book said. Much later, I learned about joinery and chopped hundreds and hundreds of mortises. That made me both better and worse for cutting those in the chair posts. Faster, easier. But more slap-dash. In joiner’s work that doesn’t much matter. The tenoned rail covers the mortise, so you only see the shoulders of the rail meeting the mortised piece. I got real fast at those mortises, knowing I could hide any sloppiness. That’s part of learning what you can get away with.

In the chair, there’s no place to hide - the slat has no shoulders. So neatness counts. Here’s a look while I was test-fitting a slat-tenon:

In addition to trying to be neat, there’s the reminder to not chop all the way through to the other side. So I’m trying to slow down from my joiner-mentality to chop these slat mortises. Once those are done, it’s spokeshave work to round off the posts and get them to their finished surface prior to boring the mortises for the rungs.

When I got to the first sub-assembly, I got to thinking about how we make JA’s chairs - assembling the sides first.

This order of work started at Country Workshops. It’s pretty much guaranteed that anyone making chairs this way is following what Alexander & Langsner taught all those years - whether they know it or not. Andy Glenn noted in his book Backwoods Chairmakers that none of the other chairmakers he met worked in the same order as JA & Drew. You might be interested in how it came about.

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In the past few days I got back to the dressing box I’m making. It had been stalled for a bit, then log-splitting took priority over it. But now I’ve pushed it forward and began assembling it. One holdup was the top front rail - I had to finish its decoration before I could begin assembly. I’ll back up & talk about what that decoration entails - it’s one aspect of this body of work that gives me the most trouble. I’ll start with this related cupboard, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

The decoration on the two drawers is what we’re looking at. Irving Lyon, writing in the 1930s about this work, called this “the small panel” feature. It’s 2 rows of molding flanking a flat-bottomed groove. Then applied inserts are mitered to split the rows up - making it look as if it’s a series of small framed panels. It’s a hallmark of this unidentified shop - they’re not the only ones to do this, but they use this feature a lot. Shows up well on the drawer of this chest at the Museum of Fine Arts - disregard the early 20th century paint job -

I had cut the moldings on my top rail before cutting the tenons - first a plowed groove then a scratch stock running alongside both edges of the plowed groove. Here’s that rail in an early test fit:

So I took it apart and made a strip of very thin oak, about 1 1/2” wide. The thickness should match the depth of that flat-bottom groove - in my case, 2 1/2 sixteenths. Now comes all the fussy details. I mitered the corners on one end of the “muntin” blank - then held it in place to scribe where the opposite end would be. From there, two more miters laid out with a miter square. The overall length of the muntin equals the distance from the outer edge of the top molding to the same point on the bottom molding. It should be the same on all of them, but usually isn’t. These moldings are made by scraping - so some sloppiness creeps in.

I don’t bother with a miterbox for these pieces, they’re too short to hold in the miterbox. I cut the square ends with a backsaw, then pare and chop the miters with a long paring chisel. The material is so thin it’s not difficult. I use a levering action to slice across the miter - taking small bites until I reach my scribed line.

Then comes chopping into the molded rail to make the cavity these muntin pieces drop into. More scribing, then more chisel work. First chopping into the molding:

Then detail cutting to reach my scribed lines and bring the cavity down to a flat, even depth.

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This week I had a couple of short sessions in the shop - enough time to do something, but not enough time to get too involved. So thinking about that upcoming auction that has a William Savell carved chest - I thought I’d carve one of those panels. I made this chest for a customer last year - adapted from the Savell shop’s chests - with one of the carvings from their boxes on the top rail & drawer front…

So it hadn’t been that long since I’d carved these panels. They’re different from most New England carved works of that period - there’s no actual background. Here’s one of the period panels, from John Savell:

That’s what I aim for. Sometimes I get close, sometimes less so. This panel I’m working is narrow, about 8”, the margins reduce its width some more. That affects what you can fit in the design. After the compass & marking gauge work for the layout, it’s V-tool outlining, then shaping the outer arch and on from there.

that photo above I’ve cut out the outline and taken a shallow gouge to begin shaping the arch & its “columns” then inside the arch a small gouge hollows around the whole thing. Then V-tool work that runs down the middle, then splits out to the two bottom corners; this also gets some shaping. I knew I didn’t have time to carve the whole thing in one session - so I aimed to get the shaping done and begin the gouge-cut accent work. Below I’ve carved one spandrel (the sort of triangular section outside the arch) and then started chopping the series of “birds” all along the arch & border.

The next thing after that is starting in on the blank spaces left & right of the center ribs:

The originals always amaze me because of these shaped reverse curves - I isolated one section from the same chest the previous panel photo comes from -

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This post is about the 17th-century chests that I studied as preparation for my first published article https://www.chipstone.org/article.php/222/American-Furniture-1996/Seventeenth-Century-Joinery-from-Braintree,-Massachusetts:-The-Savell-Shop-Tradition

co-authored with Jennie Alexander. I had worked on the research and writing of that subject for several years under the guidance of Bob Trent. I knew nothing of how to do documentary research, combined with the examinations of the period chests. I kept (& still have) tons and tons of notes, wrote it all down in letters to Jennie Alexander & Trent.

I’ve probably told the story before of how I got onto that project, for years JA had been consumed by the study of a fragmentary piece in Winterthur’s study collection. And the carved panels on that cupboard tied it to some chests in well-known public collections.

Trent had kept track of one that sold at auction to a private collector and put me in touch with that collection - this one was the first with a history from Braintree:

And off I went to see as many of these chests as I could. By the time our article was published in 1996 we had recorded 10 of the chests, 3 boxes (1 of them a desk box) in addition to Winterthur’s cupboard. At the same time, I was learning the ins and outs of documentary research to learn about the histories of the chests and tracking who/when/where as best we could.

During our research I found two of the chests, one in a private collection and the other sitting at the Smithsonian unbeknownst to us til I found a published photo of it in some general overview of American furniture history. Since then, I’ve tried to keep up with the ones that have come to light. There’s been five that we know of that have come through the auction houses, both large and small - and now a 6th one has come out of the woodwork. Last fall I was searching online for images similar to the Savell chests, I’d drag a photo into a search bar and see what comes up...and one day this one popped up:

A recently-ended auction in Kentucky, listing the chest as:

American, 19th century. A Pennsylvania Dutch blanket chest in oak, having a rectangular hinged surface board that is not original to the case, panel constructed case with carved foliate decoration throughout, rising on straight legs; ht. 23, wd. 55, dp. 22 inches. Overall good condition. Top not original but does have old iron strap hinges. Peg constructed case and legs joinings. Case original and period. Single left til.

Well, they didn’t research that chest at all when writing that description. I’ve written so much about them over the years that it would be more difficult to miss what they are than to make up what it ain’t. The first thing I saw - no drawer. There were technically three in our original study that were built without drawers - but the Smithsonian’s isn’t a proper joined chest, it’s a board chest with a joined front. Another whole subject.

But here was a joined chest, no drawer. Its carving and molding assign it to the subset of the group that JA & I attribute to the younger son, William Savell (1652-1699/1700). The previous no-drawer chests are by his older brother John Savell (1642-1687) - like this one:

So the auction was over, the chest had sold - how could I find out where it went and if it was actually a chest without a drawer or had it been cut down? I wrote to the auction house, but decided to also write to someone in “the field” - and Erik Gronning got a hold of one key photograph - showing the panel groove in the lower edge of a bottom side rail -

That groove is for a horizontal panel that fills beside the drawer - here’s one at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum showing that lower panel :

So, yes, the “new” one originally had a drawer and has been chopped down. Erik also found the selling price back in November - $475! Even I could afford that...

I had forgotten about it but then last week Trent found it now listed in an upcoming auction at Pook & Pook https://live.pookandpook.com/online-auctions/pook/rare-massachusetts-pilgrim-century-joined-oak-blanket-chest-9362853

Based only on the photos, it looks to be in excellent condition - the lid probably is a replacement - those cleats are made up - but the lid is hinged with snipebills/gimmals poked through the original holes in the rear top rail. It’s odd that the till lid has no molded edge - all the others do.

I had one in my shop one time so I could make a replacement lid for it - got a shot of the till lid:

The cut-down on the recent chest must have happened a long time ago because the “now-foot” of the chest is rotten - so it sat at some point in a damp condition.

Not long after the article came out I got a lead on a piece of 20th-century homemade furniture that had two drawers from a Savell chest incorporated into it - complete with a family history from Braintree - all I have is a poor scanned slide of the drawer front and my notes on the family history associated with it.

The object was a sideboard someone had made & reused the two drawers. Our original study included two chests with two drawers - one of which sold a few years ago - well, 2012. So maybe more than a few…I see this one has molded cleats too, but it had a lot of restoration, new lid, new floor boards - without digging out my notes, I forget what else.

Well, as I said, I’ve written endlessly on this subject - here’s a post from last year with some repeats of what’s here, but some other details too.

………………..

and here’s the links to the reduced prices on videos, including one on building a chest like these:

Setting up the page for the cupboard videos got me off my duff to put my older series (plural) of project videos on sale - there’s three of them, the JA chair, an Alpine brettstuhl and a carved joined chest.

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/jachairpf

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/follansbeebrettstuhl

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/follansbeejoinedchest