{ Category Archives: daily handwork }
I’ve always liked to use chalk when roughing things out on wood. Lately I’ve taken to scouring the beaches during negative low tides in search of seashells for making my marks. The Pacific Razor Clam is ideal, softer than the East Coast equivalent, but hard enough to make a clean scratch, and loaded with calcium carbonate to leave a crisp white line.
I can relate to the work style of a 1930’s American cabinet shop (public domain)
After over a year of design development with the architect and client, selecting logs of deodar cedar and having them custom milled and cured to outfit the interior of a new guest house down the coast, I’m regaining perspective on my original thinking behind how I approached the project: Shuffling the Tree.
As my cabinets, doors and built-in furnishings take shape, each part of the tree finds its corresponding use in built form, the planks having been painstakingly graded for grain character, color and structural integrity. The process of hand sorting thousands of board feet of air-dried, rough sawn lumber has been slower than I had anticipated, but well worth the effort, and I’m feeling less overwhelmed as I convert my neatly stickered piles into glowing wooden furnishings. I’m taking extra pains not to use any laminated sheet materials, constructing all casework in solid stock.
I’ve found that designing and building this way automatically bestows a building with a feeling of belonging-ness, as though the house stands in honor of the tree it displaced. When the material is locally sourced from the waste stream, diverted from horticultural salvage that might otherwise be burned as firewood, the building’s interior has the added benefit of reducing carbon emissions to the atmosphere. I call my approach ‘bioregional vernacular’, and I’m glad for the opportunity to test its scalability.
cabinets of deodar cedar w/face frames, stacked up while I prepare doors and drawers
To follow my progress on designing and building the guest house interior, please click here and scroll down.
Sayulita, Nayarit, Mexico
Spending time in Sayulita always restores my faith in humanity. For whatever combination of reasons- its remoteness through jungle along the Pacific Coast, cut-off from major roads until relatively recently; its consistently overhead, left/right break; its laid back balance of bohemian surf culture and traditional fishing village- everyone is unabashedly happy in Sayulita. Like guests at a well-hosted party, everyone has a unique role to play, the machinery oiled by mutual trust and respect. When the ‘little things’ that comprise daily life take precedence over the ‘big things’ outside our control, everyone takes charge. When the inverse is the case, the opposite is true.
‘Le Corbusier meets Gilligan’s Island’ characterizes the playful architecture of Sayulita
At a certain scale, production woodwork requires a lot of time spent physically sorting and grading material, then processing it through a sequence of noisy machinery. It can be dull, monotonous work, but I still get a thrill watching grain patterns emerge and generally enjoy the physical labor as a kind of meditation. I find it helps to begin a day of milling wood with an exercise I call balancing the brain. In the past, this has taken the form of a commute by bicycle to my shop, or practicing Tai Chi. Lately, I’ve been spending a few minutes each morning juggling and relearning to ride a unicycle, both familiar activities from my youth. The activity reminds me to be present and aware of my stance, which protects me from injuries associated with repetitive motion, and helps keep me safe and sound when working with dangerous tools.
I love my salvaged, battered unicycle and antique wooden juggling pins
someone left a rose in a driftwood log
I can’t think of a better way to recalibrate after an intense week of studio woodworking than a morning of beachcombing after a string of storms. I appreciate more and more living and working so close to the shore, and find daily release and inspiration being able to take a walk, a run, or an occasional dip in the surf when the waves are rideable. I always return to the studio refreshed, having put things in perspective simply by tuning in to the flotsam of the day.
beach erosion has uncovered an old engine block
I found a great piece of wood for my first driftwood skate deck
rows of mature olive trees at the Urban Tree Farm (photo: Ene Osteraas-Constable)
I’ve asked Ene to write an occasional post for Deep Craft, and am proud to share her first story (all text and images by Ene Osteraas-Constable):
I greet the deluge of the season’s first heavy rains with relief and contentment, knowing that all the bare root trees I planted are securely in the ground, benefiting from the deluge. Cherry, peach, plum, pluot, fig; the trees all look the same when bought in this juvenile, leafless state; bare branches with a flurry of fine roots beneath. This is, however, the ideal time for planting, while the small trees are dormant.
There is a sense of excitement and exuberance in the nurseries during January’s grey, wet days. Gardeners converge for this eagerly anticipated event: the bare root trees are in! As we mill about the saplings, I smile happily at the elderly couple that proudly share their bare root plum tree: “Isn’t it beautiful? We may not make it long enough to harvest the fruit,” they say, “but isn’t it a beauty?”. Planting a tree is truly a gesture of hope; an investment in the future that I can understand better than any stock or bond.
bare root trees, shipped while dormant, ready for planting
I leave the nursery thinking there should be a holiday, a national day of planting trees. Then I remember Arbor Day. Julius Sterling Morton had the prescience to establish this holiday in 1872. While each state has their own date for Arbor Day, I advocate a National Holiday, allowing everyone a single day off from work to plant or tend to trees in their community.
“I can’t live without the green trees, and nor can you. I’m humbled by the understanding that they could get along without me though! They sustain us, not the other way round.” -Wangari Maathai
Click here to read more about the revolutionary impact of planting trees in Africa.
a sea lion briefly beached itself on Doran Beach this morning as we were walking by
During our morning walk along Doran Beach, Ene and I were greeted by a friendly sea lion, who watched us from the surf before proceeding to briefly beach himself within yards of us as if to say hello. We’ve made hundreds of trips to this beach over the past few years, but have never seen this kind of behavior. Of course, this would be the one time I forgot to pack my camera- luckily, I had my trusty cell phone. As a corollary to the Murphy’s Law adage, anything that can go wrong will go wrong, I would add, be equally prepared for when things go right.
As any crafts person can attest, there are occasions in the course of making that deliver uncanny coincidences, yet we most often do not prepare for success with the same ardent fervor that we do calamity. I’m not advocating unbridled risk-taking when it comes to safety or security, but suggest making room for the little successes that share equal probability with failure.
the sea lion returns to the sea after about ten minutes of staring us down
Note: After some thought, my theory about why the sea lion would behave this way is that he thought we might have food for him, mistaking me for a Bodega Bay fisherman, whose boats the sea lions are known to trail. Bundled up in my yellow slicker and ‘Sitka sneakers’ for a chilly morning hike, with a two week beard, I kind of resemble those ‘old sea captain’ carvings (see below). I’d love to hear if anyone has had a similar encounter.
I’m beginning to make an image archive of ‘old sea captain’ carvings