an indigo bunting ready for James Prosek’s taxidermy workshop

The artist/author James Prosek arrived yesterday morning and led the Mildred’s Lane Fellows in a taxidermy workshop while I surveyed the land for materials. I walked the perimeter of the property’s 90 acres and was pleased to find an abundance of beech and hickory saplings mixed in with mature white oak, pin oak, hemlock and white pine. I chose a site for my pole lathe/bodger’s shack project and recruited a few of the Fellows to begin foraging materials to begin construction.

view of the Delaware from a clearing adjacent to Mildred’s Lane

artist/author James Prosek leads a taxidermy workshop

By the late afternoon we had gathered a collection of Y-shaped branches from fallen white oak and transported them to the site. We felled a straight sapling of shagbark hickory (Carya ovata) about 24′ long, and peeled the bark with a drawknife. This will serve as the pole for the pole lathe, the springy core of the human-powered machine.

a feast of Delaware River eels and cheese smoked  by Ray Turner, the Eel Man

Some of the Fellows accompanied James to visit Ray Turner, the Eel Man, who traps and smokes eels from the Delaware upstream from Mildred’s Lane. The crew returned with smoked eels, cheese and mustard for dinner, an appropriate feast and prelude to James’ after dinner lecture entitled ‘Eels‘, the subject of his forthcoming book. The lecture/slide show was fascinating, and we learned that eels migrate from freshwater to saltwater to spawn, hundreds of miles offshore, the babies returning to their native rivers. The Delaware hosts an abundant eel population up its entire length, being one of the few remaining large rivers with no damns to hinder eel migration, enabling Ray Turner to trap the fish in his stone weirs hundreds of miles from the sea.

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Tagged: contemporary art, deep craft, green woodworking, james prosek, mildred's lane, pole lathe, ray turner, scott Constable, taxidermy, the eel man

waterfalls of the Delaware Water Gap

The sky darkened as I arrived at Mildred’s Lane Friday afternoon, exploding into a violent thunderstorm with cracks of lightning and a drenching downpour. I was still damp from a mid-day swim in the river on my way up, after a tramp along a steep tributary to see the falls of the Delaware Water Gap .

bridge designed by Roeblin, originally used as an aqueduct

I stopped to walk across the country’s oldest cable-suspension bridge, designed by John Roebling decades before the Brooklyn Bridge, then paid my respects at the Zane Grey museum across the river before continuing on to Narrowsburg a few miles upstream. After a dinner prepared by some the Fellows of Mildred’s Lane we were treated to a provocative presentation of landscape photography by Jeffrey Jenkins called ‘Landscape and Perception’. Continue Reading »

Tagged: contemporary art, deep craft, mildred's lane, roebling, zane grey

seascape under a stormy sky off the coast of Brigantine Island, New Jersey

The Delaware River  drains about four percent of the nation’s rainwater into the Atlantic through Delaware Bay, about 20 miles South of the island of Brigantine, New Jersey, where I began my journey to Mildred’s Lane. Growing up outside of Philadelphia, I’ve crossed the river hundreds of times, but this will be my first exploration of its full length as I meander its contours in preparation for my residency on site at Mildred’s Lane, outside of Narrowsburg, PA. I’ll stop in small towns along the way, looking at architecture and regional antiques, thinking about what I’d like to make next week and how it might relate to the river’s rich history.

I traveled overland  through the heart of South Jersey’s growing region, and stopped at a farm stand for peaches and blueberries to eat en route to Trenton, where I’d pick up the road North along the river. Continue Reading »

Tagged: deep craft, delaware river, mildred's lane, milford, nj, pa, scott Constable, upper black eddy, vernacular architecture, wowhaus

Brigantine Beach, South Jersey

I will be taking a break from these pages for the next week or so as we head to the East Coast to see family and spend some time at the beach. I plan to resume making regular posts upon arrival at Mildred’s Lane on or near Saturday, June 27. Stay tuned!

Tagged: deep craft, mildred's lane, scott Constable, wowhaus

Today I discovered how the Purple Shore Crab (Hemigrapsus nudus) got its name.

Tagged: beachcombing, nature photography, purple shore crab, sonoma coast

modified Windsor chair concept with steam-bent, bundled parts

Most of my furniture design over the past ten years or so has developed either from a particular need or from the properties of a particular material, usually wood. Lately I’ve been wanting to broaden my target by channeling my resources into the creation of a signature chair, a Deepcraft icon that adds to the canon of classic chair design. One of the goals of this experimental site is to unpack exactly what that means and hopefully discover how to translate a design philosophy into a truly sustainable production model in the process.

If and when I succeed, the thinking behind the chair will fold into the chair’s broad appeal as one of life’s Simple Good Things and I will assuage any guilt about burdening consumer culture with yet more stuff. More ambitiously, the chair will stand in for a philosophy of design with the potential to more broadly influence the built environment and contribute to the (critique of) public taste. Ultimately, my interest is in how the natural and the built environments can work in congruency to suggest mutually beneficial loops. What follows are some of the discursive questions I have that guide my thinking in the process: Continue Reading »

Tagged: aesthetics, chair design, craft manifesto, deep craft, green design, mildred's lane, scott Constable, sustainability, windsor

Native to the state, the California Buckeye (Aesculus californica) grows prolifically along seasonal streams and south-facing hillsides, and was often planted as an ornamental next to barns and schoolhouses of West Sonoma County. The tree has been in bloom for longer than expected this year with the cooler weather, and its sweet smelling blossoms are a heady complement to the freshly harvested hay as we ride to the coast. Sometimes called the California Horse Chestnut, the Buckeye gets its name from its large, poisonous nuts, which feature a white spot resembling a buck’s eye. The Pomo Indians occasionally resorted to processing the nut for consumption, and famously used its toxins to stupefy fish. Continue Reading »

Tagged: california buckeye, deep craft, grill recipe, landscape, Matilija poppy, phenology, sonoma coast, wowhaus