Special Report

From the Oct 22 - Nov 4¸ 2002 issue of Woodworker's Journal eZine

Furniture Society: Friends, Facts and Fun

By Joanna Takes

Woodworker's Journal associate editor Joanna Werch Takes, far left, was busy at this summer's Furniture Society Conference. Besides all the other sessions she attended, she moderated a panel discussion focused on "Women Woodworkers," with Carol Reed, Bonnie Bishoff and Gwen Marshall.

As those of you who read the Woodworker's Journal print magazine know, I spent part of my summer at the Furniture Society conference in Madison, Wisconsin, acting as moderator for a panel discussion on "Women Woodworkers." Woodworker's Journal was one of the sponsors of that session, as were JET Equipment and Tools and Rockler Woodworking and Hardware.

Plank Chair by Stu Sherwood, who had just finished his first year in Wisconsin's MFA program, was on display at the students' exhibit. It's made of ash, walnut and fiber.

You can read more about this panel and the conference in the November/December issue of Woodworker's Journal, but I wanted to share some of my experiences with the eZine readers, too. For one thing, it was a great place to meet new faces in the woodworking world. One of them, Sylvie Rosenthal, was the audiovisual assistant for our panel (in other words, she helped me turn the lights and the Power Point projectors on and off) and who is featured as this eZine's Today's Woodworker.

It was also possible to meet and get tips from woodworkers around the world. Robert Ingham, for example, gave a presentation titled "A Workshop to Die For: Setting Up the Ideal Working Environment for Furniture Making." While it's unlikely that many of us can have a shop exactly like Robert's (I really don't think the Welsh countryside is big enough to accommodate every woodworker who wants a view of it), he did have some ideas that could be applied anywhere.

Osamu Shoji, founder of the Shinrin Takumi Juku woodworking school, demonstrated traditional Japanese woodworking techniques during a session at the Furniture Society 2002 conference.

These were things like putting your tools on casters so they'e mobile, using your shop space for other functions as well (he has a place in the corner for shooting photos of his work) and checking the capacity of your electrical wiring before you start hooking up machinery -- so that you don't have the Welsh farmer down the road complaining that you've just killed his lights when you start running your table saw.

A woodworker visiting the conference from the other side of the world was Osamu Shoji, the founder of the private Shinrin Takumi Juku woodworking school in Japan. He demonstrated the use of Japanese hand tools -- clucking at a plane shaving, about as wide as two sheets of construction paper laid on top of each other, that he said was "too thick for me," -- and building a miniature headrest pillow to illustrate Japanese knockdown construction.

The pillow stool that Shoji constructed is a scale model of a larger piece that would have been used to support a samurai warrior's heavy hair.

The pillow stool is also an example of Japanese knockdown construction.

Shoji's session tapped into other elements of the conference as well. He discussed having his woodworking students plant seedlings on the school's grounds to ensure adequate future timber supply, while a joint presentation by Scott Landis and David Fobes focused on sustainability issues related to woodworking and Mira Nakashima Yarnall gave a keynote speech detailing the influence of Japanese design and Indian philosophy on the designs of her father, George Nakashima.

That kind of synergy that marked the conference as a whole: all the pieces related to each other, whether it was a panel discussing woodworking education or a critique of Furniture Society members' studio furniture on display at the university's art museum. And, while there were lively debates on such matters as the influence of regionalism on design, perhaps Alan Peters, an Englishman who received one of the Awards of Distinction, put it best during the session when he was supposed to be sharing profound insights on his work. "There's no one way to make furniture, and I just do it my way," he said.

(If you want to read even more about the Furniture Society 2002 conference, or find out about next year's gathering in Philadelphia, visit www.furnituresociety.org.)