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.

Ginormous

You probably know this about me, or have figured it out if you have read my blog for a while.  I was born in the fifties, was too young to truly understand the sixties. I graduated from high school in the seventies. I tell you this simply to put a time frame around my comments today. I think it will be important.

Garbage. Let's talk about garbage. The world I was born into handled garbage in a very simple way. Everything was disposed of through the trash can you hauled to the curb once a week, or it was burned. At my house, we burned paper from the house and the office in an incinerator. It was basically a barrel on wheels set up to provide air to a fire and elevate the temperature and rate of burn to turn everything you put into it to ash. It was very effective. One of my jobs around the house was to empty the trash cans in mom's home office and burn all the paperwork. This was the most effective way to deal with the personal and confidential information from the clients.

So, garbage/trash left our house primarily by being burned or via the garbage truck,. Oh, and a couple of other things. We had a public dump we could always take things to. It was an old rock quarry you could unload things into and the city would manage the process from there. We also had a hole at the bottom of my grandparent's horse pasture we would dump things into and then once a year, hopefully on a calm day, we burned it all in a big fire. It was typically exciting as there were usually aerosol cans in the mix resulting in explosions or in the alternative. The fire might get away from us a little bit - another story all together.

I know, that's a lot about garbage, right? I think the information is important as I need to compare it to today. Today, in my garage there are two trash bins. They are the same size and one is for "single stream" recycling and the other is for trash. The trash is picked up once a week and the recycling every other week. The interesting part is the recycling bin is always overflowing. I could probably use a second container for the recycling. As a comparison, my garbage container could be a quarter of the size it is and there would still be plenty of space. Many weeks the container only has one trash bag at the bottom, only because we went around the house and collected everything.

How did this all change from the seventies until now? Was there a moment in time it was legislated or ruled to change? No, it happened a little bit at a time, one small step, continuing to move toward the point we are at today. I am also sure we're not at the end of the process. Products will continue to be made more recyclable and recycling will continue to get easier. 

Now, how does this all tie to the word ginormous? When the movement moved from hauling and burning garbage to recycling a large part of it, the overall problem was ginormous. There was no way one person could take it on and have any success. What it took was a significant percentage of folks deciding they would do what they could. It would have been easier to throw up their hands and say it was impossible for them, as a single individual, to accomplish anything around recycling. Interestingly enough, I know there are people who still take this position. In the USA, the latest number I could find was 80.1 million tons recycled in the latest reporting year. This is far from nothing. It is still only slightly over a third of the trash produced, but it is a far cry from where we were in the sixties and the seventies. Trash was a ginormous problem back then, and it is less of a problem today.

What I am trying to get at today is a way to think about the ginormous problems of the day. Pick one. Whatever is most important to you. The odds are you are not able to "fix" the problem by yourself. It may take years of starts and stops, of taking two steps forward and one back, to actually have an impact on the problem. But personally doing something about a ginormous problem today will have an effect on it down the road. Don't wait. Decide you are going to do something about the ginormous problem you see as critical today.

I am reminded of an old expression: you can only eat an elephant one way; one bite at a time. I encourage you to think about which ginormous problems is your elephant and take the first bite. You may never even see the change, but it will be there, because of your involvement. I know collectively we can improve our world and make it a better place. And it starts over again, every day. Every day there is the opportunity for each of us to change our world in incredible ways.  

Go ahead, began a change today, or move a change forward.

Optics

In this historical time, as we are all "learning" our way through new and different situations/things, I am sure you have hearing and thinking more and more about the way we look at situations and people. I know I've really had some things which stopped me in my tracks. In a time in my life, when I thought I was pretty set in the ways I looked at the world, there have been moments which shook me deeply. 

In the middle of this I want to say thanks to Sigourney IA, and the family and friends who raised me. I count myself as blessed for all that community and its people put me through.  This includes, but is not limited to, my mom and grandparents, Bill and Leah down the street, the county sheriff, the state trooper, my Jr High and High School principals, and a ton of friends and family.

Why am I thanking these people? For pushing me to look at the world without blinders on. They taught me through word and deed to listen to and learn everything I could. We sat at the kitchen table, or at the table at Bill and Leah's, or in a booth at Spaghett's and talked about the world events and how to think about the world. How to think about it with an open mind. They taught me this within a community backdrop that was pretty homogeneous. In my own way, I saw the world much the way a horse wearing blinders does, only seeing part of it. The thing I thank all the people I grew up around was they pushed a bigger world in through my ears, even while I only experienced a small slice.

Then I had the opportunity to go to school at Drake University. I know there are a ton of great schools out there. Drake is where I landed and it was a tremendous decision for me. Many of you know I had trouble leaving there, it only took nine years. The reason I speak to my Drake years next was this was the time in my life I found out how many different kinds of people there are and the variety of situations they come from. Early in my freshman year, I found myself shying away from others different than myself - their color of skin, religious background, speech pattern, sexual orientation, any number of things. In the middle of it, when I was seeing only with my eyes, I found the words those who raised me had pushed into my head. Honestly that was the moment in time I decided I could learn from all of these people I lived with. So, I worked to take off the blinders. I listened and questioned. I tried foods and music and dance and religion. Thing I had never experienced. I learned a ton. things that would never really be important, but I also found out I was, and still am, a lifetime learner. I am still this today, and honestly, sites like YouTube were absolutely built for me. So, as long as I am able, I will work to take the blinders off and look/listen and learn based on what is around me.

Now, here is one of the points I have a huge blind-spot for. It seems to me that given the rest of my commentary today, I should share at least one. Without question, if someone comes to me looking for a job, while wearing a set of pliers on his belt, I am inclined to hire on the spot. Now, this can't be someone who purchased a brand-new set on the way in to the interview. No, those pliers have to feel like they belong and the person wearing them is comfortable. In fact, in a perfect world, I would want to believe the person wearing them could rewire a nuclear sub with those pliers if they needed to. I've hired people in the lumber business, the distribution business and now the petroleum business with this "badge" and I have never had it go wrong. It might someday, but so far, so good.

When you read this, think about the way you look at the world around you, and the people within that world. Saying that you will "walk a mile in their shoes" is just not possible. We are never able to understand everything going on for another person, or what got them to the point they are , but we can recognize their experience is different from ours, and they have the right to feel the way they want about it. Try where you can to take off the blinders and look at the world the way children do, "through new eyes".

Have a great weekend and learn something.

The Right Thing

In this time we currently live, I find there are many stories about people doing the right thing. Unfortunately, there are a bunch of stories about the darker side of the world as well. I have personally decided to work diligently to ignore those. When I can do this, I find myself feeling brighter about our world.

Of course I have a story or two that make me smile as I think about people doing the right thing. The first story happened after my grandmother's death. She lived in her own home, the house on the hill, until her death at the age of ninety-four in 2000. Grandma had been a force in all the lives she touched, particularly those of us in her family. When it came time to figure out what to do with personal and real property, we did what families do. We gathered. None of us expected that time to be joyous, but we found items that caused each of us to remember Grandma with a smile or a laugh. It was wonderful in its own way. 

In the middle of all we were handling, someone noticed Grandma's car wasn't in the garage. That was odd. So we did what you do in a small town. We called the garage we knew had done Grandma's repair work for years. They'd taken care of the family's vehicles clear back to when she and Grandpa had been over-the-road truckers. Phelps Motors, uptown on Main Street. It took a while to sift through the people and all the information there, but in the end, we discovered the car was there, and had been for a while. At this point, I'm not sure if it was for months or years - doesn't really matter. 

Anyway, somewhere along the line, the people at Phelps had decided that Grandma probably shouldn't be driving. Not driving wasn't a loss of mobility for Grandma. Folks came and took her to dinner or to the Historic Society where she worked. No car didn't mean she wouldn't be able to live her life. 

The thought at the garage was she may not be safe to drive anymore, even though she still had a current driver's license. So, they handled things the way you handle them in a small Iowa town where you care about the people you live with. They told Grandma the parts she needed to repair her car were unavailable and they would have to source them. And then, interestingly enough, they were never able to find them. Ever! So her car sat very peacefully at Phelps until we asked about it. They let us know that we could pick it up any time.  Thinking about it now, I have no idea what happened to the car after that, but the information is unimportant. The community took care of my grandmother's safety and well being and allowed her to maintain her dignity. No one had to tell her that she couldn't drive.

If one story were not enough, fast forward to 2012. When my father-in-law passed away, and the kids gathered to take care of the contents of his town-home, the most interesting thing happened. While they were working, his neighbor from across the street came over carrying a ladder. When asked what was going on, he explained that after watching Keith on the roof the last time, well into his eighties, he decided to borrow his ladder and not to return it. He didn't want to tell Keith that he shouldn't be on the roof. He didn't want to tell the kids that their father shouldn't be on the roof. He had just decided to go ahead and do the right thing. He took care of Keith in the way he could.

Today, tomorrow, make the decision to do what you know is right, even if it is not understood or supported by those around you. When you look in the mirror at the person you are, you will be happier if you have done the right thing. It's not always the easiest, but when you think about it, your choice might be pretty darned important.

Drapery Hooks and Tape Measures

As you have aged, do you occasionally feel you don't remember things as well as you used to? I am here to tell you with almost certainty this is not the truth. You forgot as many things when you were younger as you do now. The difference is you now have more things in your head to keep track of. When you were young and forgot something, you didn't even think about asking if you were forgetting because of your age.

I think a story is in order here. I graduated from high school in 1975. I was raised in a house where knowledge and intellect were important, but some of the more everyday things were less critical. For example, my mom believed dust on top of a piece of furniture didn't count unless someone made a mark in it. So, writing your name in the dust on the top of the console TV had consequences. And ... writing my sister, Jaye's, name brought comedy.

Anyway, I convinced mom it would be appropriate to have some type of graduation party. I didn't want a "cake and mints" type of event, I wanted something with real food people would come to after they went to all the other parties. We started the plans and process of getting ready.

One of the things mom wanted to do as part of the preparation was to clean all the drapery in the house. This was a big undertaking, but it was important to mom, so we dug in. We took all the drapery off the rods and took the drapery hooks out of the drapes. We put the hooks in a bag as we would need them when the drapes came back from the dry cleaner. This process took several days, so there was the period of time when we were living in a house with almost no window coverings. It was just part of the fun. Finally, the drapes were cleaned and picked up. We were ready to reverse the process. Obviously, the first thing we needed were the drapery hooks. They were nowhere to be found. We looked in all every single place you would expect to find them. We knew they had been put in a place "we would all remember." Eventually, mom had to drive to Ottumwa to buy new drapery hooks, a time and money drain we hadn't expected. All ended well as the house looked great and the party went off without a a hitch.  We never found the drapery hooks.

We lost mom in early 1988, so in the middle of that year we started cleaning out the house. One of us, Jaye or myself, cleaned out the junk drawer in the kitchen. Clear in the back corner of the drawer was a bag full of drapery hooks. Yes, they were exactly where we would have expected them to be, exactly where we had looked for them in 1975. Why had we not been able to see them then? I have no answer to this question, but I will tell you with certainty they had much more value in 1988 than they had in 1975. In 1988 they brought laughter to a couple of kids who really needed some relief. We didn't agonize over how it had happened. We didn't ask ourselves if we were getting old. We howled at the situation and thought about how funny Mom would have thought this was. We didn't question ourselves, we just lived the moment.

In my workshop, I have six tape measures. There are times I can not find a single one of them. Frustrating, yes, but I know at this point it is part of my process. I tend to walk around with a tape in my hands and then I'll set it down to work on a piece of the process and don't think about it until the next time I need it. When I need it, I expect it will be "right there" and if it isn't, I start searching the eight hundred square feet of my shop. Typically, I find multiples. It always makes me laugh, especially when I remember Mom and the drapery hooks. When I worked for Payless, on a very regular basis, I'd take a tape measure home on my belt and always forget it the next morning. That usually meant I would take a bunch of them back to work one day.

Long and short, give yourself a break. Just because you do something differently now than you did in the past, or sometimes you think it may take you longer, be okay with it. It is part of the journey we are on and part of the tapestry making up our lives.  I hope you enjoy today, and find a little quiet way to laugh at yourself, just a bit.

Smaller Town

I never expected to type the word "pandemic" but we experience the oddities of a lifetime, one at a time. I think of events in just my lifetime like: the Vietnam war, the oil embargo, various housing crashes, Y2K, 9-11, avian flu, swine flu. economic crashes, and probably several I haven't remembered. The one absolute similarity of all these is that I am still here today, and can look back on each of these events. When we were going through them, nobody was sure what the end looked like, and yet, here we are. I am confident that as a society, we will be here after the Pandemic of 2020.

When we are past this, looking back, we will recognize we learned some things and changed some things which may have been needing to change for a long time. One thing I've been watching is how we are interacting with each other. Sure, I miss going out for dinner or meeting friends as much as the next person, but what I am talking about is bigger. When I drive out to the Toybox, I see more people walking with their family. I see families taking bike rides together and I know we are figuring out ways to connect like never before. One friend talked about playing Yahtzee with his wife, and for the first time, I've had a couple of conference calls with my grand-kids in the last month. These are all different from the way we behaved only a few months ago. Some of this will go away over time, but I think some of it will stick for years, maybe decades to come.

I believe in small ways this is taking us back to a time of smaller towns. Not in actual square footage, but in the way we behave with each other. When I grew up, I was like many of us. Looking back, we did not have an excess of much. In fact, there were many ways we were really challenged. But in the middle of the situation, the communities we lived in took care of us, and we took care of others.

Let me provide a couple of examples. The house I grew up in had chain-link fence around half the yard, and picket fence around the rest. Why? Because mom and dad knew someone in need of work and he couldn't do chain-link fencing. So, the half he did was wooden picket. The same thing happened when they got the ceiling of the shop/garage finished. They had no intention of finishing it, but someone needed work, so they created a job. In the same way, our local grocer took care of my family. He was willing to carry what we owed for almost a year until mom hit tax season and she could catch up. The other thing he did was he gave mom credit for every coupon she brought into the store, whether she bought the item or not. So, even through college, I took our local newspaper and clipped every single ad and sent them home to Mom. I didn't think about how wonderful this was of them to do for us until years later. Finally, my friends in college LOVED the cheese I brought from home. It was great for burgers and grilled cheese sandwiches. I never really considered it was "government" cheese and what it really meant that we were receiving it. Part of what I see us doing now is moving to a new time where people are more engaged and more helpful to each other. We have to have each other's backs.

What I really want you to take away from this is that half or more of where we are in any situation is in our head.  Makes me think of the following story.

ABOUT ATTITUDE (author unknown)
It all depends on the way you look at things.  One day a father and his rich family took his son to a trip to the country with the firm purpose to show him how poor people can be.  They spent a day and a night at the farm of a very poor family.

When they got back from their trip the father asked his son, "How was the trip?"

"Very good Dad!"

"Did you see how poor people can be?" the father asked.

"Yeah!"

"And what did you learn?"

The son answered, "I saw that we have a dog at home, and they have four.  We have a pool that reaches to the middle of the garden, and they have a creek that has no end. We have imported lamps in the garden, and they have the stars.  Our patio reaches to the front yard, and they have a whole horizon."

When the little boy was finishing, his father was speechless.  His son added, "Thanks Dad for showing me how poor we are!"

Isn't it true that it all depends on the way you look at things?  If you have love, friends, family, health, good humor and a positive attitude toward life -- you've got everything!  You can't buy any of these things, but still you can have all the material possessions you can imagine, provisions for the future, etc., but if you are poor of spirit, you have nothing.

We need to look at this time from the perspective of the son in this story. I remember a dear friend who talked about a period of time he and his family had to live in the hayloft on an uncle's farm. He talked about it as being the best time of his life. I know I need to look at all this odd event in 2020 with a different attitude. When I look back at my childhood, I would tell you without question I had the fullest, most wonderful of years, with family, friends, and community. We didn't have much, but we had that.

Keep looking for the wonderful stories and opportunities in the midst of what we are going through. The good/wonderful is there, you just have to be on the lookout for it.