Education

As I mentioned in the introduction, I don't have a formal education in woodworking. I started out the popular PBS series: The New Yankee Workshop. Norm Abrams takes a lot of heat from purists for his approach to furniture building, but they miss the point. His goal was exactly what the effect he had on me: it was a gateway.

The projects were approachable and avoided the requirement of expensive and specialized tools. The show's introduction quickly became my favorite part of the show. Norm would travel to a museum and with a curator, examine a piece, pointing out the important details. This set the piece in context and showed what the actual antique furniture looked like. Then it was off to the shop to build a reproduction. In most cases, this was not a faithful reproduction as such. It was simplified for the aforementioned reasonable tool kit and skillset of his viewers.

Norm's other show, This Old House, was another favorite. As the owner of an older house, learning about renovations sometimes on a pretty massive scale, was educational.

From there it was books and magazines. You can find a list of my favorite books in the bibliography section. Most of the magazines have died in the Internet age and live on as gigabytes of PDF scans on my hard drives.

Around 2005, I discovered an annual conference that was close by and affordable. Colonial Williamsburg hosts Woodworking in the 18th Century