Arts & Mysteries

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is hosting another open house at Mount Pleasant in Fairmount Park Philadelphia Sunday, April 26. I believe the event is free and parking will be available at the [...]

Of course yesterday’s blog post was an April Fool’s joke. Work continues on my chair. And recent cuts while demonstrating aside, I almost never cut myself. I think the worst injury I [...]

As you all know, I’m building a Chippendale chair in a series of articles for Popular Woodworking Magazine and I’ve been having some troubles with it. In the first article, I undercut [...]

 I cut myself twice during demos at Kelly Mehler’s (both times on the same finger).  I’m fairly clumsy, but I don’t cut myself often in my shop. I didn’t [...]

Day 3 at Kelly Mehler’s school of woodworking started with a rousing discussion of Journeymans’ wages, servitude, and slavery. Period furniture was not “build to print”. [...]

We looked at 18th c joinery at Kelly’s shop for day 2 for our examination of 18th c cabinetmaking tools and techniques. We started the day with an off the top of my head rant/furniture [...]

Kelly Mehler graciously invited me to teach a class at his school. We put our heads together and came up with a basic 18th c hand skills class. Kelly’s well lit hand tool only second floor [...]

A fellow at the Philadelphia Furniture Workshop Open House video taped my demo and posted it to YouTube.com. It’s here I thought it was nice of him to ask permission to tape me and ask [...]

I got a kick out of Mona Oster’s letter to the editor entitled “Saw Safety Ignored” (April PW #175). Thanks for the chuckle, Mona. Mona referenced this shot: Mona reminds us of [...]

“If Chippendale had power tools, he would have used them” is an addage I hear often.  I guess folks need to defend their use of power tools and this makes them feel better about their [...]

Shannon at The Renaissance Woodworker blog taped some of my freak show at Alan Turner’s. He reported what I said there very carefully and very accurately (thanks Shannon). For those of you [...]

  Alan Turner and Mario Rodriguez are hosting an open house January 30-31 at Alan’s shop in Philadelphia. See Alan’s site for details. I’ll be there with Christopher [...]