Well it has come to this. You’ve seen it all around you. You probably knew that the Studio couldn’t be far behind. I have to say now that it’s true.

We’re dropping our values. The lessening of standards, the fascination with the quick and the cheap, yes these have infiltrated our walls as well. What’s new, what’s hip, what’s happening fast and now. That’s our Twittering. We have been swept along and now swept into the rush to mediocrity. Our woodworking is now pretty good.

Let’s lay out the facts. Those ideals of perfection were hard work to maintain. It takes effort to do things well. After so many years of holding up these standards our arms were tired. Those high standards of craftsmanship were heavy! Too much, we say. Time now to recognize what has been a reality all along.

Good Enough, our new motto. Get ‘er Done, our next bumper sticker. Pretty Good Woodworking our new standard.

It’s happening everywhere; we’re just band wagoning here. Yes, perhaps we’re a little late to the dance but we’ve been so busy being justifiably right and correct and precise that now we can afford to be unrelentingly mediocre. Pretty Good Woodworking is a new branding effort by us to instill in the public a sense of what’s just good enough to get by.

For instance, why hand cut dovetails, spending all that time fussing and checking and fitting and fussing? We have a jig now that you can use on your jointer to cut dovetails. It works, so why worry if the results need a gallon of putty? Get ‘er done. We’ll call it The Best Dovetail Jig Ever.

Wasting time sharpening chisels is also a thing of the past. We grind an edge now on the belt sander and call it good. That blue color on the chisel? That’s just mood lighting for your edges. As for how sharp we get things, now we check our edges, not on some silly softwood. We slam the edge down into a bench top. If it goes in 1/8″, it’s sharp. Hey don’t fuss, it works good enough.

How about sanding and planing? These are the Sisyphean efforts of the past. We now have a proprietary oil/ varnish mix that covers every sanding scratch perfectly and fills every bit of tear-out. Put it on with a mop and watch your free time flow back into your life. Once that stuff dries in a month or so you’ll swear that you’ll be able to shave by its reflection.

We’ve been working on this next thing for awhile and this will really save you time. The power conversion kit for hand tools will really speed things up for all of us in the shop. It takes a little retrofitting to get the power source held tightly to everything but once it’s in place baby I’m telling you that a 240 volt scraper works fast. Trust me on that. Or put your hands on a block plane with a turbo on it. We’re talking quick removal of material here.

So that’s it. We’re trying out this new approach in the Studio. I hope you’ll welcome this new era into your woodworking life as we have done into ours. It’s a relief really to be a part of the new century. Heck if anything that we make lasts three years, that’s a triumph right? Hair flying, standards thrown out the window like a sack of peanut shells. We’re free to be as mediocre as we like. Or foolish today.

Some years back I was designing a piece of furniture in the studio and I wondered how I could detail it, fine tune it. It was a nice piece but not outstanding. How could I make it my own? How could I give it voice and make it sing? Curiously I realized that I had all sorts of ideas in my kit and that really I just had to choose. I realized that I knew all sorts of ways of doing things. That I had at my disposal a vocabulary of design that I had tried and used, sometimes successfully. All I had to do was pick from this mine of ideas and try to find the right detail to add.

I taught one summer at a high flying art/ craft school in Colorado called Anderson Ranch. It’s a glorious place way up high in the Rocky Mountains, about 7000′ up. When a low lander like me gets up there you feel like your head is going to explode for the first day or so, but after that it’s exhilarating, living on so little oxygen. [You also feel like Superman when you come back down to sea level because of all the extra oxygen you now have in your blood.]

It’s the kind of school where famous people come to teach writing and painting and photography and digital imaging and yet they still teach clay and woodworking there. It’s an exciting atmosphere with lots going on. I was teaching the woodworking class for one week, not high falutin’ just some basic stuff.

Next to me in the clay studio was an older gentleman from Japan. He had been a potter for 60 years or so. He was what is known in Japan as a Japanese Living Treasure. These are artists who have preserved and carried on their craft traditions and have been honored by their country for their contributions. [What a concept! To honor living artists instead of feeding on the dead artists like a Road Show or road kill.]

He had, as his apprentice there, his daughter. A pierced spiky haired punk rocker who looked like no child of this craftsman. And yet there she was learning the craft of pottery at the hands of her father. An unlikely pair it would seem, but can’t that be said about most children and their parents?

And every day, he would have her throw the same pot. The exact same pot and it takes very little time for someone who is skilled to throw a pot. She would throw the pot and then when it was finished, when it was perfect, she would crush it. And start again. This was her job. To learn to throw this pot so well that it became a part of her, a part of her fingers, her mind, her breathing. This was her task. To become so immersed in this technique that she was one with it. What a concept! To practice one’s craft until you became so proficient that you could move on to actually making something. Until that point, you were only making yourself into a potter.

It is a very difficult thing to do to become proficient at something. It takes time. It takes patience. And yet when the time is spent well, it offers something back that is so unexpected. You don’t just suddenly arrive at some spot either. There is no destination that is abruptly reached. No corner of a wall ever gets turned. What one realizes is that the wall is curved. You just keep going. But one day, one day you’ll be working and you’ll throw that pot so well or handle that chisel so well so as to make just the right cut, and you’ll look up and say: Oh, I’m here. And then you’ll also say: I have so much further to go.

I had a Mastery Student who put down floors for a living. He is, appropriately enough for a floor layer, a down to earth kind of guy. He works on multi-million dollar homes but he’s just a straight shooter. Anyways, we were talking one day about having employees and the headaches and he used to run a big crew of dozens and there were always problems to be solved. He said that everyone pretty much came into his crew pretty raw but in a year they were acting like they knew everything. Everything there was to know about wood and floors they acted like they knew it inside of a year. But if they stuck it out, if they stayed around for five or ten years or so, they finally got to the point where they could say: I know a lot. But there’s a whole lot more I don’t know.

That’s when you are on the road to becoming proficient, when you can say that.

Isn’t it curious how so much of our woodworking world now professes to sell perfection. What’s so great about perfection? Where in your life is anything perfect? And where is the life in perfection? In our world of woodworking we now have so many jigs and incremental systems and ideas and notions that this time we’ll have Perfect glue-ups or Perfect finishing or Perfect results Everytime! This pursuit of perfection is different in so many ways than the pursuit of excellence.

Perfection, at least in my shop, is not possible. Perhaps it is in yours. In mine, mistakes are the loud children of my profession. They run around, make noise, tip things over, dent finished pieces, crack wood in unexpected places, dull a rubbed out finish. Tools dull by leaping off my bench to the floor. This is a normal day.

Perfection in my shop is simply a concept, fleeting or fled. It is a vision perhaps glimpsed across the room if I squint my eyes. [Oh wait, that’s a flashback.] No perfection is a chimera, a ghost, an idea of an idea that I try every day to dispel. For it is perfection that is my ball and chain. It is an endless sentence of disappointment and finally a movement of the standards when I realize I cannot achieve it.

Think about this. Greene & Greene are so admired now because their aesthetic or perhaps that of the Hall brothers, the builders of their work, admitted to imperfection. The square plugs in the Gamble House aren’t all square. Some are out of square, some are rectangular. They are not perfect but you can sense in them, the hand of the craftsman, the skill with which they were produced. But they are not perfect or regular. The edges of their work are rounded, eased like it was the work of the wind and sand on the beach. The builders who try to make perfect reproductions of this work miss the point of the aesthetic.

So let me just say that I pursue excellence every day in my work. But on the days when I can let go of perfection and do good work, I am a happy woodworker.

Compromise and Failure

Design is about things that most new designers don’t expect. They expect design to be about success and formulas. Do this, do that, do this and that and you will have a good design. Show me the tricks and I’ll be a designer. Not so fast. Design, it turns out, is more about compromise and failure than surety and success. The curious amongst you might tip your head here and answer, Hunh? But it’s true. Few things about a design are set in stone. You can have proportions that are 4:5 or 8:9 and how do you decide? And what if you design something and it looks wrong?

I struggle with good design as much as any of my students. How does one make a good design? And what the heck is a good design anyway? Who decides that? There are ways to work through a design challenge that help you focus on the pertinent issues. A student recently was stumped by a design project and how to proceed on it without just stealing someone else’s idea. The issue at hand was making a bedside table.

He wanted something long and with straight lines. But he also thought this was too boring.  My first question to him was: what does the piece need to do? What are the functional requirements of this table? So tell me: how tall is it, how wide, how deep? Does it have drawers, doors, or shelves?

We had some limitations in place like where the wall was. So that’s good. That gives us something solid to measure from. We had only 20″ maximum to the bed but our first limit was in place. This is very freeing in a way. Instead of being able to make anything of any size, which is terrifying in its infinity, we had a limit. The table needed to fit between the bed and the wall so the table could only be 20″ long. Limits are good. Limits give us a place to start.

He also wanted a table 34″ in height. So great, we played with those numbers and with the depth of the top coming up with a compromise that worked. Now we had a box to play in. A box with numbers and proportions. We could fuss with those proportions if we wanted and we did, coming up with a box that seemed right. [Note: feeling right is sometimes as much a part of the logic of design as numbers.]

What was going into this box was our next question. Doors were out as they were too busy and a nuisance in the middle of the night. But a drawer was in. He wanted that. Not too deep or the bottom layer of stuff inside the drawer would get lost. We measured some drawers and came up with what seemed like a good size. He also wanted a shelf in the bottom section. This would give us two areas for storage. We had everything then that we needed in terms of the function of the piece.

The next consideration was the principal view. If, as in this bedside table, the principal view will be from the front, well make sure the front has the juice, the sauce, the pizzazz. No point in putting inlay or carving into the side of the piece when only the wall has a good view of it. So what can you do with a front view? Well remember that as a furniture designer you’re creating sculpture and not 2-d work. So be aware of your materials, texture, and shape. These can add an enormous element to your work.

What was the wood going to be? What color? Light or dark? Heavily grained like oak or more restrained like cherry? Mostly we would be seeing the edges of this cabinet. The top would be covered with a lamp, books, magazines, and stuff. The insides of it would not be lit so mostly what we would see would be the drawer face and the edges of the cabinet. No point in using rosewood for this piece. Back to the question: what color wood? Decide that and move on.

We then went back to the principal view. What you ask yourself what are the important things, the really important things a design, this design needs to do? It needs to be sweet but not showy was one decision. So inlaying the front of the drawer with a celtic dragon pattern was out. But that left so many other possibilities.

The drawer face itself was an opportunity. We could shape it. Cut into it, or let it be rounded or bowed out in the front. We could carve across it, texture it, the pull! The pull on it was critical. It directs not just the hand but the eye. So we needed a good pull on the drawer. We came up with some ideas for the drawer or at least some directions.

What about the legs or the sides of the cabinet as it headed towards the ground. Were they straight, tapered, curved, shaped in any way? Was there room for inlay on the front edge or carving? Then we considered the feet. How a piece meets the ground is always important and usually overlooked. It could be up on tiptoes or heavy footed and clawed. The legs could be wrapped in metal or clad in another color wood. There could also be a bottom rail with shape to it. Something that pulls the bottom shelf up off the floor and gives us some movement down there.

By this time, my student felt that he had a way he could go with this, options to explore, ideas to ponder. Well we could go on with this one design and its many choices for awhile. But I hope you get the picture at least of how to approach a design problem. You will have to make allowances for what the piece does and how you want it done. Compromise is a part of the game. You can have some things but you can’t have it all.

Failure is also a part of design. You will try out some ideas and try to make them fit the piece but they won’t. Just because you design it and it took you a long time to do so doesn’t mean it will work. Play with ideas, come up with sketches, work with models, build a prototype. All these things will help make you the designer you think you oughta be. Just remember that failure is another word for opportunity.

A,

Instead, what you need to do is take some time every week and exercise your design brain. Take it out for a stroll. Give it some air. Let it see the world and absorb some new information. Here is something which I encourage you to do. It is an exercise just like a 5 minute dovetail or sharpening your small chisel before taking on a 2″ wide plane iron. Draw. Draw with a pencil. Draw with a pen. It doesn’t matter. [Do not be too hard on your drawing skills either. It does not matter if your drawings are not good. Good drawing skills will come with practice. Shut off that critical voice and just draw.]

Draw for form: pick and draw out shapes that intrigue you. Draw for balance: frame the scene in your mind and draw the interesting shapes within. Draw for rhythm or pattern: look for the patterns you see in buildings or nature and use them as decoration or the central theme of a motif.