Hello! I want to start today’s newsletter saying thank you for taking time out of your day to be here. I love writing and fill notebooks with my words (they will make excellent kindling in the apocalypse) but have only shared my writing more broadly in the past six months of this Substack. It is nerve-wracking and humbling, but also delightful to connect with you.
I want to make the reading experience as pleasant and effortless as possible. (Part of this is simply more editing.) So I’ve been thinking of ways to improve the visual experience and am going to be making small tweaks in the coming newsletters to try to do that.1
I’d love to hear from you: Are there topics you’d like to read about? Even if you’re not a woodworker, are there connections you’re seeing between your work and the woodworking craft?
In today’s newsletter:
Update: New newsletter
Essay: Firewood until proven otherwise
Learning notes: Cutting green wood blanks for bowls
A brief update
In the coming weeks, I will have a few items for sale; a friend suggested I share short stories about those projects, the ideas behind them, the choices made during the work. Do I have more stories? Why, yes. I created a “Shop” newsletter for this. The publishing of that newsletter will be more sporadic, because it will be contingent on me finishing projects.
If you’d like to receive that newsletter, you can sign up for it by clicking on the link above and entering your email to subscribe or by viewing your subscription settings and switching the toggle to receive notification for the "Shop” newsletter.2
Firewood until proven otherwise
Some days I don’t know if I have the nature of a woodworker, a component of which I think is being someone who appreciates the journey as much as (or more than?) the destination.
You might not love every task in the shop equally, but you have to enjoy being in the shop more than the showroom to make a go at this craft.
However, I love destinations. My whole life I’ve enjoyed completing projects, moving on to the next. I find it deeply satisfying on a superficial level to get things done.
Prior to the last year or so, much of my neural activity was attuned to the present so that I could get to the next step. Even my present focus had a future tense to it.
“Life needs direction,” Keiran Setiya wrote in Midlife. “You must have desires, aims, projects that are as yet incomplete. And yet this, too, is fatal. For wanting what you do not have is suffering.”
I learned about cutting bowl blanks from logs this past week.
On Monday, Dad, a friend, and I stood outside in the brisk day (it’s amazing how warm 30 degrees feels after a week in the single digits and lower) looking at eight-foot-long Black Walnut logs Dad had cut up with a chainsaw and pulled into the old cow yard. The tree had fallen in his woods not too long ago, and Dad retrieved it recently.
The friend was the master bowl turner from a couple weeks ago who showed me bowl turning techniques. I want to try green turning, so I set up a time to check out this log with him and Dad.
Several of the logs had crotch wood (why do so many woodworking terms conjure the most juvenile humor?), which can produce beautiful figure.
Crotch wood is the area where a branch splits off from a trunk. The figure can look cool because as the branch is forming, the wood fibers are growing and moving in various directions and knitting together even as they move off to form a branch. (At least this is how it is with Black Walnut; I believe that the grains don’t necessarily knit together the same way in other species.)
When cut into boards, this part of the wood looks like a feather and is somewhat prized, as I understand it.
Trees are full of water. Their cells are stuffed with it (like the bags under Moira’s eyes, for Schitt’s Creek fans). Even after it’s cut down, the water remains. When a log is cut up into lumber, it has to be carefully stacked flat on stickers so that air can circulate all around the board while it dries. Try to use it before it’s sufficiently dried and your project will fail—the boards will warp and twist.
My friend is teaching me how to turn green wood—wood that isn’t dry. You want to turn it while it’s still wet and then let it dry in bowl form before doing the finish turning once it’s actually dry.
You do this because it’s easier to turn green wood than dry wood. For green turning bowls, you want to cut out blanks from the wood—essentially blocks of wood that you can put on the lathe and shape into bowls.
I don’t know where the term “blanks” comes from. But there are all manner of blanks. When I’m going to make tapered legs, I first make a blank and then shape my piece to the width, length, and taper I want. The woodworker I’m apprenticing with made roughly 1” square x 7” long rectangular blanks that she then cut and shaped into curved legs for boxes.
I like this idea of starting from blank, which can be any size, and conjuring a shape from it. Isn’t that what writing is too?
Bowl blanks can be different sizes, but you want to maximize the wood you have. Which requires a lot of standing and assessing the log.
Dad breaks up the silence with, “It’s all firewood until proven otherwise.”
The untouched log is like a wrapped present, but you don’t know if it’s from someone who knows what you like or if it’s from your begrudging aunt known for gifting detritus. Best not to get too emotionally caught up in anticipation.
On Monday, we ended up with six bowl blanks, thanks to the chainsaw work of the bowl turner. More than enough to keep me busy.
There’s all my flowery notions and writing about woodworking, and then there’s reality: the log might hold gorgeous figure or it might be fit only for the wood stove. While you can look at the outside of the log and guess as best you can what’s on the other side of the bark, you don’t actually know until you cut into it.
So you make your cuts and examine what you have.
You make your designs and find your material and repeat the same motions over and over again until your muscles and joints ache from the repetition that is going to become your whole day.
You feel bored or engaged or irritated or happy or frustrated. You stay at the bench or bandsaw telling yourself you’re just going to get this last batch done.
If you’re like me, you tell your family you’ll be inside in just 15 more minutes, and then you arise from your fugue state of concentrated work to realize that well more than twice that time has passed.
You pull yourself away from the unceasing work like ripping a bandage off tender skin, both wanting to stay and wanting to go. Sometimes a whisper in the back of your mind says you might as well go because you’re not doing any good here. Sometimes you step back, look away, then give it one more glance and are satisfied.
It’s not perfect, but it’s progress.
And it all comes together or it becomes firewood, sometimes through your own mistakes, sometimes because that’s all the tree had to give.
No matter, though, because this is the journey and on some cellular level, you find enjoyment in it because this is today, tomorrow, and all the tomorrows after that.
Learning notes: Cutting green wood blanks for bowls
The log’s pith is the enemy of the bowl. The pith is the center of the log and it’s devilish, prone to causing cracks and is best avoided. Cut off a piece of the log and then cut it in half down the middle of the pith (roughly). With luck, there will be two pieces that can be turned into bowls. Or maybe just one. Or it’s all firewood.
No end grain on the top of the bowl. So no cutting off a section of the log and calling it a day, thinking the blank will come from there. Split the piece in half so that the end grain is on the side of the bowl. This also deals with the pith issue.
The end of the log often has cracks in it, which form as the water dries out of the log. So make the first cut back from the end (maybe 6–12”) and check for cracks (which are also called checks) in the grain. If the piece is solid, then cut out the chunk for the bowl(s).
Crotch wood is tricky because it naturally has more than one pith, so it’s all about figuring out the best way to maximize the solid wood while cutting around the piths and sometimes that goes better than others. Honestly, it will take me a long time to learn how to (a) use a chainsaw and (b) efficiently cut bowl blanks out of logs.
If I ever figure out how to make it work, I’ll create anchor links to make scrolling to the different sections easier.
I made the Shop newsletter opt-in, because I don’t assume that everyone who is here reading about woodworking is necessarily in the market to buy my work. The upside is that you can ignore it if it’s not your jam; the downside is that it’s an extra step if you do want to sign up.
I like the picture with the Overseer perched on his / her post ;-) Cats are so sensible. It's obviously the best place to be when the ground is cold but the sun is out and your fur is black. Every degree counts !
Nice workshop, too. Sorted.
Catching up on some reading! This is perfect for this day. Thank you!