I spent Election Day in the shop making a pencil post bed as a distraction from the culmination of my combined worry and excitement for the returns of the day.The bed will occupy the ‘Outlaw’, our guest home/vacation rental where my parents will be living when they arrive next week from Philadelphia for an extended Thanksgiving stay. I’m using materials at hand and improvising the design around two complimentary motivators:

The first of these has to do with only using the tools that enable me to stay sharp but detatched at the same time, using my entire body in a simple gesture. Cutting long tapers on the bandsaw is a little like practicing Tai Chi combined with driving across Wyoming, and my thoughts can meander as my body tends to the work. Next I’ll hand plane the tapered surfaces and move on to cutting a ‘bead’ detail by hand on the rails. I will leave the wood raw with all toolmarks visible to avoid the toxic stress of sanding and finishing.

The second motivator is the feeling I want the bed to communicate, especially in light of the forward momentum of this most historic election and the waning legacy of ineptitude and cynicism in its wake. I want the bed to feel light and high, but also noble and solid in a minimalist way, using materials with an intentional frugality, whose mass and volume are suggested by the emptiness of the air around the bed. I want the lines to reflect a focused, loose hand in balance with the story of the grain of the wood, occasionally revealing the wane or live edge of a board to articulate a detail. I’d like the bed to conjure an early American rusticity informed by a more global awareness, primitive colonial with hints of African sculpture and French baroque.hot squash soup on the walnut headboard

As I make the moves in my shop, I’m soothed by the smell of my hot squash soup simmering on the stove, and the blend of acorn squash, hot peppers, garlic and curry combines wonderfully with the rich overtones of white oak as it yields to the blade.

Hot Squash Soup

Bake one large or two small acorn squashes, sliced in half with pads of butter in the cavities, in the oven at 375 until tender. Scoop out the flesh and let cool. Chop one clove of garlic, one hot chile pepper and one banana pepper and saute over medium heat in olive oil and butter. After about 4-5 minutes add curry powder to the vegetables and stir the mixture thoroughly. Add the squash, blending it with the pepper and garlic, and bring the mixture to a low boil. Add 2 tablespoons of chicken broth and about a half teaspoon of salt, stir, cover the mixture and reduce the heat to let it simmer for 15-20 minutes.

Blend the ingredients in a blender and serve with a dollup of Greek yogurt and several sprigs of fresh cilantro.

Tagged: election day, four post bed, pencil post bed, recipe

Over the past few weeks my focus has shifted to developing new projects for wowhaus, my public art and design collaboration with my wife, Ene Osteraas-Constable. Many of our projects have their origins as ’social sculpture’, where we create structures and situations designed to bring people together in convivial exchange.

Yesterday we introduced MIX, our human-powered, urban compost tumbler at Southern Exposure, a community-based gallery in San Francisco, temporarily sited in a residential block in the Mission District. We’ve been working in collaboration with a group of artists to develop a curatorial component for the gallery’s tiny garden, and proposed to kick things off with a community ‘pot luck’ around the topics of compost, soil and urban gardening. We set up tables and chairs in the gallery, decorated with hand-embroidered tablecloths, and invited neighbors to bring a home-cooked dish to share as well as their kitchen scraps to feed the composter. Most people arrived with a salad or fruit, and we spent a lively afternoon hanging out, swapping stories, feeding the composter and discussing the garden’s potential.

Kristin Palm, a San Francisco-based writer who recently wrote a feature on Deep Craft for Metropolis magazine’s POV project, showed up with clippings of her own hair for the composter. Human hair is loaded with nitrogen, a key ingredient in making fertile soil.

With the help of my friend and neighbor Steve Shoulders, I designed and built the composter with ready-made materials culled from the waste stream, including a Spanish-made exer-cycle, an olive barrel, and a bicycle wheel donated by The Recyclery Bike Shop of Oakland. Pumping the handlebars pulls a ratcheted cable, which spins the wheel with barrel attached, mixing and aerating the contents for rapid and even decomposition.

Much of the discussion centered on how to optimize the pedal power potential. Our original plan was to spin a 12 V generator to charge a battery to power a laptop or equivalent, but we decided to allow the site and situation to determine the best use. This method of composting produces a liquid ‘tea’ that, when drained, is very nutritious for growing plants. A few of the garden-savvy participants suggested collecting the ‘tea’ drained from the decomposing matter, and using the pedal power to pump it to a mister which could be moved around the garden. Regardless of the thing powered, simply providing exercise for the gallery staff during a stessful restructuring and growth cycle is a worthy outcome of ‘pedal power’ for now.

For the event, I made cole slaw from cabbage and carrots grown nearby. I sliced 3 heads of cabbage, chopped up 2 bunches of carrots, and mixed in a sauce made from 1/2 cup Vietnamese garlic/chili sauce (sambal oelek), 1/2 cup rice vinegar, 3 tablespoons sugar and 1 cup of olive oil, slowly whipped in.

The MIX composter will be installed in Southern Exposure’s garden for the entire summer, and the gallery’s community will determine how best to utilize the soil generated from neighborhood kitchen scraps. MIX is the latest in a series of wowhaus’ community-based interventions; others include Friesel, Tree Trust True, Life on Market Street, and the Ecology/Expedition Survey. Wowhaus public projects model community production strategies, a hallmark of Deep Craft.



Tagged: appropriate technology, compost, social sculpture, southern exposure gallery, urban gardening

Wooden chair frames traditionally have a bent back leg. The legs need to splay out towards the floor to carry the load back and keep the chair from tipping, and they need to splay out upwards to ease the sitter back to a comfortable angle of repose. Round stock is often steam bent to achieve this, and square stock is band-sawn. Band-sawing requires a wide board in order to yield the curved or raked part, and produces quite a lot of waste material in the process, often exceeding the yield of the final part in volume.

In developing the Elder Chair, I invented a technique to make a bent back leg out of a single piece of square stock, dimensioned to the final part. Making a single cut to the stock at a carefully chosen angle (see the video clip above), then flipping and laminating the upper portion to the back of the lower portion yields a stronger leg while producing no waste, saving time and adding a compelling visual feature by reversing grain patterns.

The technique requires designing and building a ‘jig’ to position the piece and secure it in place for a safe pass over the table saw. It is best suited to small production runs and may not be suitable for one-offs due to the time invested in building a jig.

Rough stock is graded and milled to produce the most seamless effect while ensuring structural integrity. Even in a fairly automated process, the chair’s design is strongly informed by a knowledgeable maker.

I have designed a ‘Jig-Cam’ to illustrate this simple process, and will continue to incorporate a camera mount to my jigs in the future.



Tagged: DIY, woodworking