After three years of near-drought conditions (twice last year, once the previous year) I am suddenly deluged with opportunities to teach and present this year. In addition to those I have previously mentioned, there will be a third Historic Woodfinishing workshop, this one at the Barn(!), commissioned by the regional chapter of the Society of American Period Furniture Makers. They’ve had a month to get their members into the class and now I can open it up to the general audience for the last couple of slots. My neighbor is coming over this afternoon to help me rearrange the classroom and move some workbenches down from the fourth floor.
I’m also going to be the banquet presenter for this year’s Annual Meeting of the Early American Industries Association, speaking on the topic of the incomparable Henry O. Studley tool cabinet and workbench.
I even declined a gracious invitation to teach out on the West Coast and another out in the Heartland, but my days of that kind of travel for teaching are over.
When it rains, it pours.
So, here’s what my upcoming teaching/presenting schedule looks like:
April 12-14 Historic Woodfinishing 3-day workshop for the Howard County Woodworkers Guild, Columbia MD
May 20 The H.O. Studley Tool Cabinet and Workbench banquet presentation for the Annual Meeting of the Early American Industries Association, Staunton VA
June 19-21 Historic Woodfinishing 3-day workshop for the regional chapter of the Society of American Period Furniture Makers, at the Barn
July 17-19 Historic Woodfinishing 3-day workshop at Wood & Shop, Earlysville VA
August 21-23 Introduction to Parquetry 3-day workshop at Wood & Shop, Earlysville VA
September 1&2 Handworks 2023, Amana IA (yes, I know this involves long-distance travel but I’ve been committed to this for several years)
I am delighted to be teaching a pair of classes for Joshua Farnsworth this summer, Historic Wood Finishing (July 17-19) and Introduction to Parquetry (August 21-23). The workshops will be held at Joshua’s place near Charlottesville VA. You can get the particulars here, and I believe he will be posting the course schedule imminently. I hope to see you there.
Last Saturday we were in Columbia, Maryland, first for my presentation to the Howard County Woodworker’s Guild, where a rollicking good time was had by all. I’ve spoken there twice before, most recently on the sober, memorable day of the second Space Shuttle disaster in 2003(?). There was no memorable public disaster last Saturday, other than the ongoing collapse of Western Civilization.
I had a such a terrific time! I sometimes forget how much I enjoy teaching traditional wood finishing. The large-ish audience was very engaged and I had some difficulty getting things wrapped up and loaded afterwards as person after person came to ask questions as I was packing up.
For this 75-minute demo I selected the highlights from my 3-day workshop Historic Wood Finishing. They might invite me back to teach that event, and I am pretty sure Joshua Farnsworth will ask me to teach it at his school near Charlottesville this summer. Check their respective web sites to catch any updates for that.
After this we met with long-time dear friends K and N to tour the moss art studio where she works, and consuming a delightful meal with them. We bought several of the moss art works as we were both enamored with them.
(I know, I am really lousy at taking pictures with my phone.)
After much noodlin’ and experimenting I wound up in the place of resolving the problematic silica flatting agent deposits in the interstices of the antique wood of Mrs. Barn’s clothes cupboard doors. Unfortunately the destination was a place I did not necessarily want to go — picking out all the offending material with dental tools.
A few hours of work (I did not keep track as I popped in and out on the process) was all it took to get things back to a good place from which to proceed.
I really did not mind, for most of the past forty years I became accustomed to delicate, tiny-scale work, frequently under a stereomicroscope. I guess if you find such work intolerably tedious, art conservation is not a good career path for you. At least in this case I was not tethered to one of my microscopes, reading glasses and good directional lighting were all I needed.
One project from the past came to mind as I was picking out all the bits of crumbly whitened varnish. It was a late 19th Century Alexander Roux cabinet that had been gifted to the Institution, needing a fair bit of work. The original base had rotted off due to the cabinet sitting on the mud floor of a basement, so it needed a new base along with all the bronze mounts. I sculpted the wax patterns for the new mounts and cast the bronze myself.
But, the most nettlesome aspect of the project was the intractable accretion of untold layers of linseed oil-containing furniture polish on top of all the surfaces including the patinated copper and bronze on a large cameo medallion that was the visual centerpiece of the cabinet (the main purpose of the cabinet was to hold either one piece of sculpture or a flower arrangement on the center of the top). Over the years the linseed oil had hardened into something akin to Scotty’s transparent aluminum due to imbibing metal from the substrate leaving an encasing residue essentially un-removable by ordinary means. The only effective technique was to formulate and slather an ultra-high pH Laponite gel, which coincidently removed the patination on the underlying substrate. That was not a desired outcome.
Eventually I wound up fabricating some ivory scrapers to chip off the deposit, working entirely underneath a microscope to protect the undulating surfaces of gilded bronze and patinated copper. The ivory scrapers looked like dental tools and were used because they would chip off the rock-hard contaminate yet not scratch the substrate. In the end I was exceedingly pleased with the outcome.
But back to Mrs. Barn’s cabinet doors. After removing all the deposits with the dental tools and scouring the surface with a wire brush, it was time to try applying a new coat of gloss oil resin varnish.
Whew. I can now proceed to completion, building up the finish to a matte presentation.
On Saturday morning I will be making a presentation to the Howard Co. (MD) woodworker’s club on the topic of shellac finishing. Somehow I’ve got to cram enough content from a three-day workshop into 75-minutes to make true believers out of them.
The only way I can think to do this is to “Julia Child” it, so for the past couple of weeks I’ve been spending a few minutes here and there creating in-step sample boards, allowing me to jump into each step for a couple minutes and start with raw plywood and end up with some highly polished surfaces.
I’m also taking the tack of using only (well, at least mostly) locally available supplies, including Bulls-Eye shellac, fine artist’s brushes, good rags from the thrift store, Woodcraft or a good hardware store, etc.
I am a complete sucker for a sublime artist’s brush and probably own ten times as many as I need (well, make that definitely, not probably; I’m getting ready to order a few more Kolinsky’s right now).
Recently my friend JoeA sent me the link to this video and I have watched it more than once already. Aspirations must have a focus target, and this is certainly one of those for me.
High quality tools both bring out the best work and require the most attentive care. Hence, the Special Feature on cleaning and caring for brushes in my woodfinishing video (currently out of stock but more copies are in the pipeline).
Last winter I started to finish the doors for Mrs. Barn’s clothes cabinet I built many moons ago using recycled chestnut lumber, warts and all, from an old, dismantled shack on the hill.
After preparing the doors (built as a single unit then sawn apart) with some scraping and burnishing with a polissoir, I laid down a seal coat of gloss Pratt & Lambert 38 varnish, a long-time favorite of mine, which I sanded lightly once it was hard (oil/resin coatings do not dry so much as they harden via chemical reaction).
I applied what I thought would be the top coat of Pratt & Lambert 38 “Dull” varnish because that would leave the surface looking most like raw wood, and set the still-wet doors aside to resume work “some day.” Well, “some day” was a couple weeks ago. To say the least I was surprised at the outcome of my previous work.
The evidence of age and deterioration that I had purposely left on the surface as an aesthetic design element had turned completely white. What happened was that the wet varnish pooled in the recesses and the flatting agent, almost certainly a microscopically fine silica, was present to such a degree that it imparted total opacity to the finish film in those areas.
I’m pretty sure I know how to solve the problem, but I have never encountered something like this before.
My compewder is working after a manner. But I am definitely in the market for a new one.
I’ve spent much of the past few weeks readying for tomorrow’s presentation at the SAPFM Mid-Year Annual Meeting in Fredericksburg VA. I’m now packing up everything and will hit the road shortly.
It’s all been about making sample boards based on the likely finishing resources available to colonial craftsmen, which by definition means it has been non-stop fun. The variety of finishes possible with a small menu of materials is astounding. Colophony, beeswax (shellac (of course), turpentine, whisky, naphtha, linseed oil, walnut oil, are all it takes for a party to break out.
How could anyone not love finishing?
One added benefit of the exercise is that I am getting re-enthused to knock out the book. It has been hanging over my head for far too long!
After two years of mostly inactivity teaching-wise I’ve got several now on the calendar, all more or less in the vicinity. Over the next couple weeks I will be diligently preparing for my presentation at the SAPFM Mid-Year in Fredericksburg VA, on the topic “The colonial craftsman’s finishing kit,” with a special emphasis on locally available materials. If you are there you can come and see it, if not, not.
For this presentation I am creating a set of sample boards to reflect the information I am presenting.
No sooner do I return home from that than I will be assembling all the materials for the three-day Historic Woodfinishing Workshop near Charottesville VA. I’ve done this workshop several times and have settled on a well-defined syllabus to leave the students with greater confidence in the finishing process.
Over Labor Day weekend my friend Tim, for whom I built the ginormous workbench a couple years ago, will be hosting an 18th century craft shindig at his place just a few miles form here. He has asked me to demonstrate historic wood finishing and tordonshell work. Ought to be a boatload of fun.
It’s the best of all worlds in a way. I get to teach and interact with talented people in a range of skilled trades without having to even travel!
Even though I have decided to de-emphasize (read: discontinue) scheduled workshops at the barn, I am not inclined to give up on teaching altogether. Recently I was approached by Joshua Farnsworth of Wood and Shop, inquiring about my interest in teaching at his traditional woodworking school near Charlottesville VA. My answer was an enthusiastic, “Yes,” and after some conversations we decided that I would teach one class this year and perhaps more next year if things work out well.
My first offering for Wood and Shop will be “Introduction to Traditional Woodfinishing” this coming July 14-16. You can contact Joshua for registration and course details. I am not entirely sure when the announcement/registration goes live on his web site.
I will still teach at the barn by request. If you and a few friends want to commission a workshop at my place, just drop me a note and we can talk about it.
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