As always, thank you very much for visiting my website. I appreciate everyone’s interest, whether you have just stumbled on the site or returned a number of times to see what’s new.

Andrew, no longer a twelve year old computer whiz, has taken some of his precious Christmas break to tweak my site. I asked him to add some pages listings the articles I have had published, as well as those that have been written about me. I will admit straight up that this could smack of hubris. However, since I first created this site, I have attempted to make the site folksy and welcoming for web viewers, just as if you had actually driven into my door-yard and walked into my shop. Listing both the articles by and about me, as well as some of the recognition I have received as a craftsman, will I hope give you a better sense of who I am. None of this is insignificant when you are considering the purchase of chairs or other furniture from someone you have never really met. Andrew has also added the ghost image of one of my chairs as a background to the pages of the site. I have wanted to do this for a number of years, but have received conflicting advice from ‘people-who-know’ that it was a bad thing. So please give me feed-back if your browser hates the page and you can’t read the text. I am hoping to make the text more appealing. Anyway, thank you Andrew for your hard work.

Every year when I update this page I mention the MOFGA Common Ground Country Fair in some way or another. This year, like so many in the past, I have loaded up a work-bench, my spring-pole lathe, a bunch of chair seat blanks and turnings, and spent three days demonstrating the craft of Windsor chair-making. For three days, I talk to thousands of people. By the close of the fair I’m wrung out and hoarse. One of the things that make the fair so much fun is the presence of the other craft-people I share space with. The crafters, weavers, chair caners, quilters, blacksmiths etc, have become a real extended family. We each pursue different traditional crafts, often working alone at home or in a small shop. But we share, as crafts-people, many of the same issues; running a small business, marketing our products, raising families, and increasingly worrying about how to pass on the knowledge we have acquired.

The subject of apprenticeships was a major topic this year. We have discussed this in past years as well. But, this year I talked with folks from the Maine Arts Commission, as well as Lance Lee, founder and instructor at several Apprentice Boat Shops over the years. Wooden Boat folks will recognize his name. The basic problem revolves around the craftsman instructor, or “Master,” in the older terminology, getting a pay back on the amount of time taken to teach his apprentice. Traditionally, an apprentice signed a contract obligating him-self to work for a set period usually six to seven years. The Master was obligated to cloth and feed his charge as well as to see that he could read and write and attended religious services. To date, I have had three “apprentices.” Each have been wonderful to work with, and I have enjoyed the opportunity to teach my craft. My wife has very pointedly told me more than once; “when you’re teaching, you aren’t working.” Or, rather, I am working at teaching. If I am lucky, I am working at fifty per cent of my regular rate of production. So, I am in effect taking a pay cut, in terms of pushed back delivery dates, when I take the time to teach someone.

Several Arts agencies are looking into the problem. But the existing grants system at the state and national level is too slow and ponderous. Grants are awarded once a year. The process is not timely enough to help the eager young men and women, whom I speak with every year, who need help now, not in nine months. The reality of putting bread in one’s mouth forces them to move on and find work elsewhere. The problem is compounded by the small size of the grants typically awarded. The amount awarded never truly cover the cost of time spent by me in tuition, nor does it provide adequate funding of room and board and other living expenses for the apprentice. The grants programs appear to me to be geared toward generational teaching, where grand parents pass on a craft like Native American basket-making, or Franco-American fiddling to grand-children. White guys needn’t bother to apply. The craftsman is left where he has always been, on his own and able to depend only on himself.

On a lighter note, one of my best friends is Stephen Zeh, the Basket-maker, of Temple, Maine. Each year at the fair we set up our booths next to each other. Stephen and his wife Tammy demonstrate traditional Maine split-ash basket-making. Stephen has won numerous awards for the high quality of his craftsmanship. In a craft world without degree programs or traditional guild requirements when do you know that you are really who you say you are? When in the last thirty years have I gone from being a cabinet-maker wanna-be to actually being a cabinet-maker? Can I call myself a master craftsman? I once told Stephen that I knew I had achieved a professional level of craft as a furniture-maker when I found myself working next to him. He laughed loudly, and replied, “I knew I was good when I got to work next to you.” In the end, my work has to speak for me. Please visit Stephen’s web-site at www.stephenzeh.com.

Speaking of unassuming modesty combined with jaw dropping talent, an elderly friend of mine, Buster Prout was featured in the October issue of Down East Magazine. In an article about the large arts and traditional craft community in our village, Bowdoinham, Maine, a photo of Buster, with one of his hand built Merry-meeting gunning floats was prominently displayed. What, you ask, is a Merry-meeting gunning float? Bowdoinham lies next to the Cathance River, which empties into the Merry-meeting Bay. The bay got its name from the fact that it is the confluence of six rivers. The bay is tidal. We have salt water down at the landing even though we are thirty or more miles from the ocean. The Bay is on the North-South migration fly-way for water fowl, and hunting both private and commercial is a continuing part of local life. Buster and other guides from the village hire out as guides to visiting duck and goose hunters during the hunting seasons in the Fall. Here the guides, and other local duck-hunters, use a low, round bottomed, melon-shaped skiff to skull up on a rafting flock of ducks. The “sport”, or hunter lies hidden in the bow of the float, while the guide, also lying a low as he can, skulls the float using a large sweep. Creeping slowing up to the rafting ducks, the hunter sits up, and the action starts to look like U-boats inside a convoy screen in the North Atlantic.

Buster started making his Merry-meeting gunning floats, when visiting hunters, impressed with the beauty and handling abilities of the craft started offering him startling amounts of money to build one for them. Now whenever I stop over, there is always at least one float upside down on the molds in Buster’s shop, in the process of being strip planked. Buster also makes one inch-to-the-foot miniatures of the larger floats. These sixteen inch long skiffs come equipped with a brace of miniature hand-carved decoys, as well as scaled shot-guns and other equipment standard on these boats. I want one of these for my mantle. The Bath Maritime Museum commissioned Buster to build a quarter-scale gunning float which is now on display in the museum.

For those of you interested in woodworking, I have an article coming out in the February issue of Woodwork Magazine. In it I describe how to make a wooden hand-screw clamp. I started making mine from scraps of wood that other wise would have gone into the wood stove.

Again, thank you for visiting, and wading through this screed. And, as always, whether you are considering buying a chair or are just another woodworker wanting a peek inside my shop, you are always welcome to stop by if you are in the area. Ginger, the dog agrees. She’s already heard all my stories, and is tired of them.

You can see the old news from the shop page here