Gifts for Christmas?
Have you gotten enough offers to sell you stuff for Christmas yet? Had enough people recommend gift ideas to you? My email box overfloweth. I don’t really mind much as it’s fun to see what everyone is offering and I admit that some of the pricing right now is enticing.
I’ve also noticed that many of the blogs are presenting their own “Gift Lists”, like “Five Affordable Tools for Christmas” or “Stocking Stuffers for Your Favorite Woodworker” or something similar. Lots of fun in my view but there sure is a lot of it this year.
And so I wondered, “Should I do that too?” I just confessed in a previous post that I have no imagination so I’m not sure I could add much to what everyone else is suggesting. Perhaps, however, I could recommend a couple items for someone interested in getting into miniature woodworking, or maybe someone wanting to raise their miniature furniture-making skills.
It’s easy enough to recommend high dollar tools, like a Preac table saw, mini-lathe, or a good scroll saw but I don’t see that as being of much value. We all dream of such things if we don’t already have them. Nothing new there.
But a miniaturist, wanting to create high-quality miniature furniture needs more than tools. They need more than the skill required to work wood. They need to know how furniture is constructed and why its built the way it is if they want to create a true miniature. Yes, we all live with furniture but most of us haven’t studied cabinetmaking formally and thus, when it comes to orienting wood grain or knowing what joints to use and why, we’re at a loss as to how the real thing is constructed.
If any of that describes you, I’d recommend you put in a Christmas request for a copy of Illustrated Cabinetmaking: How to Design and Construct Furniture That Works by Bill Hylton. This book has a bunch of basic chapters that cover basic cabinetry that give you a pretty decent foundation for what follows. The best part of this book, however, are the hundreds of expanded furniture drawings (like the cover) for pretty much any kind of furniture type you can imagine. Want to know how a demi-lune table is really constructed? How about a Pembroke folding leaf table? Stickley chair perhaps? This book will show you the parts. It’s not a book of plans but rather a book that lets you see what parts go into the real thing and how they relate to one another. I’ve spent hours pouring over the diagrams and refer to this book often when creating miniature furniture. There is no better road map than the real thing.
If you’re a real wood fanatic and want to treat yourself to the definitive text on wood, consider Understanding Wood: A Craftsman’s Guide to Wood Technology by R. Bruce Hoadley. This book is downright juicy. Not only is it full of wonderful photos and diagrams, it’s jam-packed with everything you ever wanted to know about wood, its properties, what all the jargon associated with wood means, and it even covers plywoods, particle boards, MDF and such.
And of course, if you can get Santa to bring you those fancy power tools, more power to you. Ok, ok…I know…bad pun.
Full Chisel Blog
Logan Cabinet Shoppe
Renaissance Woodworker
Tom Fidgen's Made By Hand
Village Carpenter
Wood Whisperer
Fine Woodworking Magazine
Popular Woodworking Magazine
Wood’n Bits
Near the top of the screen, on the right hand side of the display, there is the standard RSS logo under a header that says Subscribe. Pressing on that should allow you to subscribe.
Cheers — Larry
Just got my Illustrated Cabinet Making and it is incredible! Great stuff! Some of the pages are getting wrinkly from drooling on them. Will help a lot with a contract job I am doing.
Thanks for the suggestion!