Archives

Let’s continue the story of my student Chad’s coffee table built at a live edge class at Peters Valley. In this entry I will show how we found a convenient way to trace the shape of the shelf, [...]

Walnut is probably my favorite wood. It is rich in color and texture, easy to work with, grows domestically and has the right density and strength to serve well in almost every woodworking [...]

After surfacing the Y table slab, cutting the tenons, excavating the mortises and sanding and painting the legs, Colm mixed some slow setting epoxy adhesive in a cup and was ready to glue the [...]

After Colm created all the tenons, he attached a clamp to the foot of each leg and staged a few options for leg locations: closer to each other, further apart, etc. After a few trials he settled [...]

Colm was one of the students at my Peters Valley live edge class and his table stood out both in terms of design and height. On the first day of class, he showed me an impressive looking walnut [...]

Live edge boards, like so many other organisms, can also suffer from stress. And while stress in humans can be mitigated with a moderate consumption of alcohol or a visit to the shrink (or both), [...]

Last week I showed the first part of Mark’s project that was completed during my live edge class at Peters Valley. This week I will show you how Mark finished building his table. Turning [...]

Last week I showed the first project that was completed during my live edge class at Peters Valley. This week I will show you Mark’s table. The Top Mark found a rugged cross-cut slice of a [...]

In early July I had the pleasure of returning to Peters Valley School of Craft in New Jersey to teach a class on live edge furniture. Live edge furniture, also known as natural edge furniture [...]

Anyone who has tried to vertically clamp a long object, such as a furniture leg or a rail, at one side of the bench vise knows that tightening the jaw over the object will put tremendous [...]

In late June 2016 I visited Israel and attended Paul Sellers’s Fundamental Hand-Tool Joinery Workshop which took place at Gil Arad’s Woodworking School outside of Jerusalem. For Paul it was his [...]

What do you do when the critters outside eat your flowers? If you ask Jon Slaton, he will tell you that the best thing to do is to make some wooden flowers and stick them in your pots. Jon, who [...]