JA, PF & Joinery

I’ve been making 17th-century style oak furniture since 1989. It was a slide lecture by Jennie Alexander that got me on that path. I had seen JA’s presentation a few times around 1987/88 and was ready to tackle something new and seemingly complex. I wrote to JA in 1989 with some questions about the construction of joined oak chests. When we published our book Make a Joint Stool from a Tree we included a short history of how we came to be working together on this subject. There, I inserted a photo of some diagrams JA scribbled on some junk mail as she was answering my first letter on the subject. Now framed in my shop. Thus began a flurry of correspondence that lasted until her death in July of 2018. 

For my Craft Genealogy project, I have been poring through the JA notes, both the collection of notebooks now at Winterthur Museum’s research library and my files here at home. The notebooks began about 1973/74 - that’s where I’m getting information about the early years before I was involved. I have JA’s incoming letters starting in 1989 and both sides of the correspondence once she encouraged me to keep copies in early 1990.