Joiner's Work & More

I’m Peter Follansbee. I began woodworking in the mid-1970s, first making picture frames with a tablesaw and gradually broadening out from there. I made my first chairs in 1978, working from John Alexander’s book Make a Chair from a Tree. I met Alexander and Drew Langsner in 1980 when I took a class with JA at Langsner’s school Country Workshops. Over the years I learned a lot of aspects of “green woodworking” there, Windsor chairmaking, basketmaking, timber framing, coopering and bowl and spoon carving. 

About 1989 or so I began studying 17th century New England furniture with Jennie Alexander.

She lived in Baltimore and I lived in Massachusetts. Most of our collaboration was through the US mail, we worked together a few weeks each year. Very early on, JA convinced me to keep copies of my letters, together with her replies. And taught me some basics of photography, so we could illustrate our shop experimentations. And so we could photograph period pieces we studied in museums and private collections. I still have some of that correspondence, JA’s copies are now housed in her papers at Winterthur Museum & Gardens’ research library. 

Thus from pretty early on I was writing about woodworking, though for an audience of one at first. Through JA I met Bob Trent who taught me about furniture history, how to study the surviving artifacts and how to do documentary research. And it was through Trent that I was first published. JA & I had an article in American Furntiure in 1996. I continued to write and publish there for the next several years. From 1994-2014 I worked in the museum field, specifically making joined furniture in a living history museum. As part of that job I did a lot of research into furniture forms and the 17th-century craftsmen who made them.

(a joined chest with a drawer, 2022)

I started writing my wordpress blog in 2008 and by now (2023) I have written just over 1,500 blog posts. Some longer, some shorter. A whole mish-mash of subjects, green woodworking, joinery, chairmaking and more. Some on period documentary research too. One function of that blog was to keep Alexander engaged as her health was deteriorating. She got a lot of enjoyment from it and now I sometimes look back and can see what we were bantering about at various points between 2008 and her death in 2018. 

Nine years ago I left the museum work and began working from my own shop here at home.

I also spent a lot of time traveling to teach classes here and there. These days for various personal reasons I have limited my travel, which means limiting my teaching schedule too. As I try to figure out what sort of schedule I might get back to (not this year…) I’ve been looking for ways to patch together my livelihood without so much running around. This new blog is part of that effort - the plan is to make the longer, more involved writings here part of a paid subscription. At first there will be no charge for this, so readers can see if it’s something they like. My plan is to turn subscriptions on after 10 posts, we’ll see what happens. Shorter stuff will be free as is my blog on wordpress - Joiner’s Notes.

I’ll be writing about many of the same subjects from my blog Joiner’s Notes. Carved oak furniture done with hand tools. Chairmaking - mostly ladderback chairs, but some others too. I plan on regular posts drawing on the research I’ve collected over the past 30 years into 17th century joiners; their tools, their furniture - some snippets of their lives. Another theme I plan on exploring is one I’m starting a book about - stories of the people who taught me woodworking. That subject is maybe the most prominent in my thoughts these days.