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First, thank you for all the nice posts and letters I’ve received since my new job was announced last week. I’m excited to be joining the team here at Popular Woodworking Magazine. After eight years of building furniture and writing for various magazines, it’s nice to get back on the editorial side, especially at a magazine with such a great history, talented staff and promising future. With the dedicated team here, I’ll work to make sure Pop Wood continues to bring you quality projects, techniques and clear guidance from some of the best makers working in the field today.
Magazines are hectic places, and the easiest way to figure things out is to step right in and start working. For my part, I’m diving in with a project that will appear in an upcoming issue. In magazines, articles shift around constantly, so I’ll resist the urge to tell you in which issue it’ll likely appear. I will say that a few days before I formally started my job at Pop Wood, our managing editor, Megan Fitzpatrick, e-mailed me to tell me that I was late with copy. I’ve spent enough time in magazines to know that being late is less of a problem than when no one notices that you’re late, so I found the note oddly reassuring. (And yes, I realize she was also being funny.)
As I sweep up shop and sharpen chisels for a new project, I’m running through design options for the wall cabinet I’m planning to build. With furniture design as with magazines, without a solid plan for how to proceed you’re guaranteed inferior results. For my wall cabinet, I know that while a solid plan is necessary, it’s also never enough. No matter how well I plan I’ve got to remain open to new ideas (turn this into a cabinet on stand) and welcome surprises (the arching grain just begs to be bookmatched) that present themselves along the way. Toward that end, I welcome your thoughts and ideas for Popular Woodworking Magazine. Feel free to contact me (matthew.teague@fwmedia.com). It’s my hope that you’ll be eager to see more of the great woodworking information you’ve come to expect from the magazine, as well as a few happy surprises.
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Congratulations, Mr. Teague. I’m a fan of your projects and writing and look forward to reading your contributions to PW. Also, great to see you are still using the bench you constructed in your workshop projects book.
The project looks like it’s coming along well. It also looks like another thing that is pushing me to get a good shoulder plane for myself for Christmas this year. I’ve got a project that I’m working on right now without one, trying to use a router plane and paring chisels for replacements. I don’t think anything can really replace a good shoulder plane though.