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Gustav Stickley and his furniture company were a complex and paradoxical lot. Stickley was a design icon, yet no drawings or work-notes in his hand seem to have survived (although the work of a [...]

View the full instructions for this project here. My favorite project is usually the last one I’ve finished, or the one I’m about to start. The cover project for the April 2011 issue [...]

In the mid-1860s a carpenter in Sussex, England named Ephraim Colman had a brilliant idea, to make a chair with an adjustable back. The idea was sketched by Warrington Taylor, and adapted by [...]

I read a column about “professional blogging” the other day that mentioned a blog is the one place in journalism where it’s accepted practice to start with an anecdote about [...]

It’s easy to talk yourself out of doing something that’s out of the ordinary. Woodworkers tend to worry and analyze things so much that they often settle for less, when doing things [...]

Whenever I teach a class, at least one student will say to me “you really don’t like measuring, do you?” I don’t dislike measuring, but I try to avoid it whenever I can. [...]

Working on a magazine has some elements of science fiction, particularly in relation to the space/time continuum. Even though it’s late November, I’ve been working on a project for [...]

Pegging through-mortise-and-tenon joints is an excellent way to reinforce the already strong joint. Good dowels can be hard (if not impossible) to find, so when I need the right size and the [...]

A large part of the appeal of Arts and Crafts style furniture is the apparent lack of decoration. This project, a reproduction of a Gustav Stickley No. 70 music cabinet and a detail I’ve [...]

In early Gustav Stickley pieces, doors with divided lights were joined with mitered mullions. It’s an intriguing look, but was used only for a few years. My next project for the magazine [...]

One of my favorite movies is “Little Big Man”. The characters spiral in ironic orbits that periodically intersect each other. Each intersection finds them more tattered as they age, [...]

The Cover That Almost Was Our December issue is on its way to subscribers and should be appearing on newsstands any day now. Sometimes we aren’t sure what to put on the cover, and for this [...]