My upcoming video series

I’ve been working a lot lately at my series on carving strapwork patterns. Carving these designs uses a lot of tools and editing videos of carving them is even more labor-intensive. I’m getting there though. There’s 3 examples that I carved, plus an intro to the project and to the gouges. All in all, it’s around 3 hours of video, broken into chapters. Each of those will be between 15 and 40 minutes. It will be available through vimeo-on-demand. I’ve done three others there - so in theory I won’t have to learn something new to post these. I hope.

the first example in the series, based on one from Ipswich, Massachusetts

I write a lot here about Thomas Dennis (c. 1638-1706), a joiner/carver in Ipswich, Massachusetts. But there are a lot of new readers here too - and I’m sure I leave them awfully confused tossing off these names of people & places that are embedded in my brain…but completely new to others. (that can apply to my discussions of 17th-century joinery and to my separate craft genealogy project…)

a pattern from Exeter, England

For this video set, I decided to include a slideshow about the history of the patterns. Some won’t be interested in the history of these things, but just want to learn how to carve them. But others might like to know how we discovered them and traced their histories… (that’s the royal “we” - I have had little to do with the research of Thomas Dennis…)

Today I was working on it - and after a few hours of work I had all of 15 minutes of a presentation! But it covers the New England examples, complete with their histories where we know them.

I appreciate all the subscribers to this blog - both free & paid. I’m flattered that anyone wants to hear from me about my little corner of the woodworking community. As a particular thank-you to the paid subscribers, I’m going to load today’s video slideshow below the paywall. The next section I have to assemble looks at the English antecedents to these New England examples. Once that’s done I’ll be ready to post them, hopefully in the next week or so. Paid subscribers will get a discount on the video series when it’s released.