Book Page

GreenSense:

A good mix of practicality and inspiration. Teaching by example, Pierce visits the workshops of nine successful craftspeople, allowing them to explain and demonstrate not only their production techniques, but also the underlying philosophy and sources of inspiration.

Excerpts...

Woodturner and author of two books, Judy Ditmer, on how a particularly difficult piece helped both her art and her ability to cope with illness:

Giving up is the end of everything. Acceptance is something different. Acceptance is where you say,'No, this isn't what I thought it was going to be, and this isn't what I wanted it to be, but here is what it is.' And that's the same way that piece was: It wasn't what I thought it was going to be or what I wanted it to be. But I went ahead and worked with it, and it turned out to he incredible. In fact, a lot of the work I did after that was informed by that bowl.

Or Warren May, dulcimer maker for over 25 years, describing the evolution of his use of technology in a variety of production areas, from the beginning...

..I was making my thin wood by planing 1" boards down to 1/8". I didn't know about resawing....then someone gave me an old meat saw, and we began to use that, with a 1" blade, to resaw thin wood...[then a salesman] gave us some Lenox flexback, thin-kerf band saw blades as free samples....That one little change helped to refine many of our processes.

...Then we put finer sandpaper on it, and it worked just fine. Later we found out we could make our own sanding heads to the shapes we needed...

We're also totally recycling our wood, turning all our scrap into low-end items (boxes, treenware, etc.)...