DEPARTMENT OF TANGENTS
The Further Adventures of a Hydrology Table
Six years ago we salvaged a piece of local maple which had seen better days and repaired it with bits of epoxy filler in various shades of blue. The result reminded us of a desert landscape in the aftermath of a rainstorm, when the creeks are temporarily filled with...
Wedding Coasters
This project was an unusual departure for me: making something small in quantity. Specifically, we needed coasters for our daughter's wedding, which is coming up in June, for guests to use at the reception and take home as useful souvenirs. The coasters are veneered...
Winter Commissions
The aftermath of Open Studios 2021 kept us busy all winter, with a series of commissions that curiously all involved walnut. One of these was featured in our last newsletter. This- picture shows part of a more recent commission, a set of home office furniture. It's...
Mini-Slab Tables
About a year ago we started on a set of mini-slab tables, inspired by a collection of small slabs that had come our way from a variety of sources. We have now finished the lot; it's a varied collection of five different pieces. Our only rule was to start with the...
The Small Cedar Chest
Last June I got an email inquiry from someone in Ohio. She had a small cedar chest imprinted Zlomke-Calvin Furniture Company and was curious about its history. I have written before about my grandfather George, who started selling furniture in St. Paul, Nebraska in...
Some Local Claro Walnut
Northern California has its own species of black walnut, Juglans hindsii, which is commonly called claro walnut. It's noteworthy in its own right, but also because it is frequently used as rootstock for English walnut. Claro walnut grows mainly in northern California,...
Repurposing Rosewood
A pair of repurposed rosewood benches that we made about a year ago have found a new home. At the end of 2019, at the dawn of the Covid-19 pandemic, I got the idea for these benches from some old Amazon rosewood given to me by a Napa friend, who happens to share my...
A Token of the Live Oak Tree
In July 2014 I returned from a backpacking vacation to find a telephone message from an engineer I know who designs vineyards for a living. He wanted to tell me about this California coast live oak tree, which was in the way of a new vineyard project south of the...
Oak Woodland Table
At an Oakland lumber yard several years ago, Evelyn and I ran across a pair of California native valley oak boards that offered vivid evidence that wood is, after all, biodegradable. They showed the dramatic effect of fungal decay, not a usual sight in a commercial...
The Live Oak Tree Revisited
I wrote about this live oak tree in 2014. I found out from a local engineer working on a project near Napa that this very striking tree was coming out to make way for a new vineyard, and he thought I might be able to use the wood. The base of the tree seemed like...
Good Karma Cabinet
Telling the story of the Good Karma Cabinet, which sold earlier this year: This mahogany cabinet combines antique curved glass with a thoroughly contemporary design: all four sides of the cabinet have an irregular natural edge, with the frames for the curved glass...
Finelines Tables: Draw a Crooked Line
This is a detail of our first Finelines Table, made in 2014. I have been gluing thin pieces of wood between wider ones to create a kind of striped effect for decades, but this table was our first piece with actual veneer sandwiched between the boards. As the...