Ross Day Gets Ripe BY JONATHAN BINZEN Ross Day grew up in a scattering of towns out West in the ’50s and ’60s and early ’70s. From Denver, where he was born in 1954, his family moved to Pueblo, Colorado, then to Boise, Idaho, and, when Ross was ten, on to Seattle, where they...
TEXT AND PHOTOS BY CHRIS CHILD When you have reached the stage in woodturning when basic bowl turning no longer provides the challenge it once did, you might like to try your hand at making these two examples. One is a bowl with sides which curve round and form a stand, and the other...
Mukta’s Lotus Desk TEXT AND PHOTOS BY PETER ROBERT PRESNELL This piece was commissioned by a lady from India who now resides in Napa, California, and prefers to write letters by hand. She explained that her favorite relaxed position was sitting on the floor, whether writing by hand or working on her lap top...
Wornick Scholarship Award SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA The Wood/Furniture program at the California College of the Arts recently awarded its Ronald and Anita Wornick Scholarships. Now in their ninth year, the scholarships were established by the Wornicks to encourage excellence in furniture design and craft at the college level. The winner of this year’s competition...
TEXT AND PHOTOS BY TOM LOESER This series of “bad boats,” formally know as “Flotilla,” came out of a summer project in the woodshop at the University of Wisconsin in the summer of 2006. Two graduate students (Matthias Pliessnig and Ben Wooten) and I built three copies of a real boat, the Whitehall 12,...
The Furniture of Walker Weed BY EDWARD S. COOKE, JR. ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF WALKER WEED EXCEPT AS NOTED Walker Weed working on a dining table in his Gilford, New Hampshire shop, 1956. Nestled above the Mink Brook in Etna, New Hampshire, a half mile from the Appalachian Trail, sits a small, red, one-and-a-half...
BY PAUL SELLERS At first glance I thought to myself, “Another broken chair.” The chair, I soon discovered, was an early Stickley dining chair, catalog #306½, with triple-hoop back rails tenoned into the back leg posts on each side, the top one of which had a vertical “green-stick” fracture that had sprung slightly apart...
The traditional Japanese step-chest BY DAVID JACKSON PHOTO BY JAY WEILAND I still wonder what Edward S. Morse was thinking when he saw a step-chest for the first time in his journeys around Japan. Morse, who originally went to Japan in 1877 as a zoologist, would by dint of curiosity and draughtsman's effort provide...
Finding an ancient chair design in the modern world TEXT AND PHOTOS BY TOR FAEGRE Zacoalco de Torres is a small town, just south of Guadalajara, set on a flat lake plain surrounded by low mountains of scrub forest and agave fields. I came here to find the fabled “Montezuma's chair,” the equipal. As...
“…the richest vein is somewhere here abouts”—Henry David Thoreau TEXT AND PHOTOS BY RICK MASTELLI Shaping a Windsor chair seat would seem a straightforward task. Though the blank can be twenty inches wide and two inches thick—a substantial piece of wood—it’s typically straight-grained pine or poplar and only sometimes a more figured species. But...
