Pieces

Trivets (Etsy) From large to small to perfectly-sized pieces.

One thing I love most about working in my shop is taking large pieces of rough lumber, turning those into smaller pieces and then, in many cases, putting them back together to form larger pieces to create an interesting finished product. 

It is actually the milling of the parts where I find the joy in the work. Of course, delivering finished pieces and knowing they will be around for decades to come is a great part of the process as well.

I also have quilters in my world. Watching their process, I find the experience and the joys are the same. Taking large pieces of raw fabric, turning them into small pieces, followed by recombining the small pieces into a finished project. Then handing off the finished project to someone who will love and cherish it for a long time to come.

As I was thinking of this last weekend, while standing in the shop cutting up pieces of plywood for a library project I am working on, I wondered if there were other examples of this same kind of work. I am sure there are, but the situation I really landed on was with intellectual quilting.

I hope we've all had the opportunity to know some really smart people in our lives. I have known some who are very smart from the point of view of "book" learning, and I've known some incredibly gifted with the practical world around them. But when I consider similarities between the groups, I discovered that they have the ability to take small pieces of knowledge and quilt them together into bigger and better understanding. 

The other thing I was struck by is the variety of potential sources of information we have today to learn little things we can  turn into larger pieces of information. I'm not talking about sources of opinion out on the Internet, but true information sources. The best examples and comparisons of this come from a couple of different acquaintances and conversations years apart. 

The first is from a family who decades ago bought a funeral home. When I asked how Brad how a person learns to run a funeral home, I was told they had gone to the bank, signed the paperwork, and  realized there was no choice but to figure it out. They obviously did, as the business has been successful for years now, but that's a really tough way to learn.

On the other hand, a friend decided to open an embroidery and screen-printing business. When I asked how they had decided to start the business, I discovered that he and his wife watched over sixty hours of YouTube videos, and then bought the necessary equipment. They had learned the best ways to be successful at it. And, by the way, they are successful.

These two stories, separated in time by decades, point out what we have available to us in the time we now live. What is available to us is literally unbelievable. Of course, like everything else, the real question is how we use the information. I believe it is up to each of us to take the time, do the research, and come away with the best understanding we can find.

Now, I am as guilty as any at finding a bite of information and going off believing that what I found is the truth, but this is the point when we all need to be intellectual quilters. We need to know there is not one unequivocal source of information. We take bites from all of it and piece it together just like building a quilt, or a piece of furniture. When so many voices are trying to move us one way or the other based on a comment or a picture, we must look deeper. Do the research to inform ourselves as well as possible. Do the hard work of quilting the information together.

After the research and work is complete, it is still possible we will come to the wrong conclusion, but at least we have a much better choice than believing everything we hear. As I said about my woodworking, it is the work of milling the parts to fit them together I enjoy the most, and I need to be more comfortable with doing the same with the information presented me on any topic. It is my responsibility, nobody else's, to make sure I am armed with the best and most complete information possible.

I am committed to be the best intellectual quilter I can be. Will you commit with me to do the same?

Practice

We all look at the world through a particular lens developed over the experience of a lifetime. I am no different. Now, don't laugh, but today I'm thinking about Gingher replacement blades for rotary fabric cutters and flour. Take a minute to try to put those together. 

Here is the way it works for me. I have several items I buy through Amazon's Subscribe and Save. If you aren't familiar with the program, the way it works is you identify items you would like shipped automatically on a scheduled basis, and Amazon ships on the schedule. Part of the incentive for this plan is a better price; hence, Subscribe and Save. For the last couple of months, the Gingher rotary blade has been unavailable. Although we have inventory in the sewing room, the sewers in my world are concerned about this. 

Now let's turn to flour. This began with a discussion with my sister, Jaye, a couple of months ago. She told me there was a lot of baking going on in their house. Although flour had become difficult to get around the country, their local Hanaford Grocery had remained in stock so far. Since she sometimes sends me the results of the work from their kitchen, this was concerning. I had flour delivered to her. With freight, it may have been the most expensive flour in the country, but we have to do the necessary to keep things going.

To me, the common theme what people are doing during this pandemic. We are in our homes, like we haven't been in generations. With this comes everything people had meant to do, but before this moment in time there were too many distractions. When all of the peripherals are removed, we focus on the things right in front of us. In a conversation with my son last night, we talked about doing puzzles, and cooking at home. If this discussion had taken place a year ago, I would have wondered if we were both all right.

I've found extra time to spend at the Toybox. I've worked on some infrastructure projects, making the shop work better, as well as creating projects for others. I even made a couple of sales through Etsy. It's kind of nice to think about projects I have completed being out there, making others smile or telling a story about how they found this woodworker in the middle of Iowa. 

When I moved back to Iowa and set up the Toybox, I thought of myself as a decent woodworker. I am much better today. This has been driven by the simple fact that I am doing more woodworking. In the past, when I wanted to work, I had to move cars out of the way, and then pull tools and product out of the spaces they were stored in to get work done. It took a large commitment of time and energy just to set up and tear down. All time taken away from actual woodworking.

One day about ten years ago, Dan Keller and I had a conversation. Dan owns an architectural casework and millwork shop, and I've known him for years. He told me that if I wanted to be a better woodworker, I needed to do more woodworking. Wow, right? This is nothing we have not all heard in the past, in many forms, but the day Dan said it to me was the day the information struck me with real impact. So, I got my shop set up and started doing more woodworking.

I believe, but time will tell if I am right, that at the end of this pandemic, we will be a society of people who are better at crafts and talents from generations before. We are going to have more and better seamstresses and quilters. Heck, Gingher can't even keep their replacement blades in stock on Amazon right now. We will have people who thought cooking and baking was voodoo, and now they have the ability to be successful at it. I know I am a better cook today than I was six months ago. We will have better woodworkers because there has been more shop time. It is all about practicing the skills we want to become better at. 

Don't let this opportunity escape you. Do not just sit around and complain that you are unable to see friends and go out for a pizza. That will all return, but it has to be in the right way. Take the time to decide what you have always wanted to get better at, and start practicing the skill. The first time you do something, it will probably not be great. There may be a few bad meals, dry bread, or bad sewing outcomes ahead of you. But if you commit and practice, I know there can be real success in areas you have always wanted to be better in.

Here is a picture of a potting bench I built and finished for Sara last weekend. Ten years ago, this would have been a month-long project and I'd have returned to the lumberyard multiple times as I cut things wrong, or just didn't plan ahead. 

This project came together with one trip to the lumberyard and two days in the shop. 

Practice really matters. 

Now, go work on something you always wanted to master.