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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Last fall, when I was making plans for the winter, a gallery owner I've known a long time happened to mention something about hall tables, and for some reason the idea took root. It struck me that a simple one-drawer table at counter height, which one might place in...
I frequently make tables out of slabs of wood. When slabs are cut from a log, the long edges typically have an irregular curved shape, showing where the edge of the log was. Those irregular edges are something special, since they remind you of the living tree that the...
My father was an engineer, who spent most of his working career in the aerospace industry, and what he did was completely mysterious to me as a child. I knew it had to do with making rockets work and that things had to be figured out and tested, and that it all had to...
I was asked recently to give a gallery talk about my woodworking, and I decided to select a small number of images and organize the talk around them. Here are the eleven images I picked and roughly what I had to say about them. I usually tell people that I started...
We have not had broadcast TV in our house for about 15 years. We live under a hill and don’t get a TV signal, but up until 15 years ago we had cable. Then, for some reason having to do with raising a teenager, we got rid of the cable. We would watch movies...