December 08 Issue

Ross Day: Furnituremaker

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 stayed. One year… »

Variations on a Bowl

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 is an… »

Mukta’s Lotus Desk

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 computer. So, she… »

Gallery

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 is Willem Evett-Miller…. »

Flotilla

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, using a… »

The Beauty of the Warm and Familiar

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 story vernacular house built in… »

The Stickley No. 306½ Dining Chair

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 directly in… »

Kaidan Dansu

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 the United States with… »

Hunting for Equipales in Mexico

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 I entered the… »

DELIBERATELY NATURAL WOODWORK

“…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 wood always has… »