New Project: Making Bitters

...I’ll share the recipes I develop as I follow this path. In the meanwhile, making your own bitters is really easy. You may be able to throw a few experiments together just using things you find in your spice cabinet. Since these are flavoring, not medicine, you don’t have to be as careful with the quantities and timing as you must be when tincturing herbs for medicine. Yet at the same time, it’s a great introduction to that essential herbalist’s c...

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There she goes, my beautiful world

...ve, unintentionally, managed to assemble a work practice that blends power tools and hand tools. While I enjoy the convenience of a table saw and band saw I much prefer “fighting the power” with an over 100 year old hand plane that works as well as the day it was made. I’ve slowly begun to shift to using hand tools more often. They are safer, produce less dust and, while taking some practice to get used to, are just as precise if not more so and l...

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Kelly’s New Desk

...es for the legs). In my tiny garage workshop I use a mix of power and hand tools: power tools for the rough milling and hand tools to shape, finish and finesse the joinery. In the stressful weeks leading up to Kelly’s surgery it was therapeutic to spend time in the workshop shaping the four legs of this table with an inexpensive, 100 year old Stanley plane that works as well as the day it was made. I used readily available hard maple for this proj...

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Make Your Own Furniture

...some classes and a subscription to Fine Woodworking. Put all these things together and you’ll be down a rabbit hole deeper than those weird Q Anon folks. From the Lost Art Press book, The Anarchist Design Book. My Trad Life If hand tools are your thing or if, like me, you use a blend of hand tools and power tools, Lost Art Press has some beautiful and useful books one of which I used to make a desk for Kelly. I’d also recommend By Hand and Eye and...

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Adventures in Extreme Making: The White Rose

For reasons I can’t fully articulate, I often think about an obscure film by the artist Bruce Conner called “The White Rose.” Conner’s film documents the moving of a huge and mysterious painting by the artist Jay DeFeo. The painting is so large that the moving company had to cut a hole in the wall of DeFeo’s second second floor apartment to get it out. Perhaps the appeal of this film is the problem solving or the obsessiveness of DeFeo. Or maybe...

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