On Becoming a Craftsman

I love the journey to becoming a craftsman. Not sure if I will ever arrive or if I want to, but I am having a ball in the meantime.

There is so much to learn to make a beautiful, lasting and functional chair. Take the act of hand splitting maple and oak for legs, stretchers, arm posts, arm bows and spindles. I make a lot of firewood with my blank splitting activities. I understand what is happening but sometimes am unable to finesse the wood or control my tools well enough to avoiding wasting what looks like a perfect piece of wood. It pains me a bit to burn clear oak or maple, but I chalk it up to learning and am happy for the heat in the winter. Since splitting happens early in the relationship with a new piece of wood, I am not attached and the mistakes are mostly painless.

I don't break too many arm bows these days in the bending process for a continuous arm windsor, but I still work hard to scrape beads that meet my standards. I use a beading tool that I made from scrap oak and a piece of a saw blade. The tool needs improvement. My technique is pretty good, but I am still refining the sharpening process. It is always a bit scary to mess with a nicely bent and formed arm bow because I am getting close to a finished product, but mess I must. I have had to improvise a few slips, but practice and risk taking does indeed guide me closer to the road of mastery.

This post is about fearlessness. Are you willing to grab a skew and go back to clean up the "good enough" leg and make it great? Sandpaper is easy and mastery is hard. The lines between good enough, great and perfectionism mark a slippery slope, but one where each craftsman has to find and hold his own personal lines. No question that it stinks to ruin 30 hours of work with a split second mistake. I don't think you find the line by nibbling at it.

Growth is about risk and loss and rebirth. Some of my favorite pieces are ones with mistakes that demanded an improvised fix. I see them as signposts that I am heading the right direction.