Fun With Mortises and Tenons

...e “workshop.” I will neither confirm nor deny this. But back to the table. Mistakes were made. While routing out one of the mortises I hit a hidden screw resulting in a shower of sparks and a ruined bit. And then there’s those more pressing chores I was ignoring such as fixing broken irrigation lines, finding a decent house painter, rehabbing our forlorn garden etc. Rome is burning and I’m taking the wobble out of a ugly breakfast nook table. But...

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Misadventures in Laser Cutting

...ing periods of triumph, self doubt and pain. Hopefully you learn from your mistakes while acknowledging that you’ll never un-see the flaws nobody else will ever notice. My latest episode of DIY mountain climbing involved a laser cutter. When I found out that the LA Central Library had a laser cutter that you can use for free I jumped on the opportunity. As an experiment I thought I’d try making a woodblock for printing as well as etch a few images...

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A William Morris Pilgrimage

...rne-Jones. It’s kind of refreshing to know that even talented artists make mistakes. In this case they painted on fresh plaster and the murals began degrading instantly. The murals are very dark and hard to make out. What does work is Morris’ pattern work on the ceiling. While in Oxford we stopped by the Ashmolean museum which currently has a really great show of Pre-Raphaelite drawings. From Oxford we headed towards Morris’ Kelmscott manor. On th...

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There she goes, my beautiful world

...used to, are just as precise if not more so and lead to fewer catastrophic mistakes. Lastly, I can’t minimize how important it is to have a proper workbench. Other crafts such as sewing, metal work, electronics etc. are greatly facilitated by a proper and dedicated work surface as well. While expensive to set up, the workshop has paid for itself many times over. I’ve used it to make reproductions of furniture that would cost tens of thousand of do...

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GM and the Red Cars

...s like the one above, taken from a Los Angeles Department of Transportation report, I can’t help but think of Fisher’s book and what Nic suggested, that we might be repeating the mistakes of the past and selling our future to short term corporate interests. We would do well to work on changing this trajectory....

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