I had sort of a revelation this morning. It was related to the show that opens Saturday at the Bennington Museum ... State of Craft 2010 ... 50 Years of Craft in Vermont. I realized I have been nosing around the crafts scene here for almost 40 of those years .... Kit and I lived in The Wall Family Gallery building in Manchester, starting in September 1971. The Wall Family Gallery was basically a pottery studio, run by husband and wife, Beriah Wall and Janice Farley... our age, more or less .... We still see them when they come to town ....Kit traded batches of chocolate chip cookies for pottery .... You get the idea ....Starting in 1972, I worked for Beriahs brother who had a landscaping business and he introduced me to carpentry ... Time went on; we built a house, in our spare time, pretty much every nail and slate, in 1974; after that I worked for a (much) more professional carpenter; we started a furniture business in 1980. Talk about clueless.
The 1974 house ...
The shop at the old house where we worked until 1999 ...Now, 30 years later, what have we got and where are we???? Almost 40 years in the same geographic area, lots of regular friends, unbelievably interesting clients/friends, a great shop, a great place to live, fantastic gardens by Kit, two great and talented kids working with us, beautiful gardens, a little time for golf and tennis ... What more could a person ask for? Id say the State of Craft on Goodwood Lane is pretty good right now and I cant imagine where I would be if I had stuck with that sales job I took after college in 1970. I realized this morning I have to occasionally stop and appreciate how lucky Ive been to have been involved with the State of Craft ... Its been a good state for me ....
The boys working on the duck bed
This morning 7:00am
every once in a while i get a little behind in my blogging and need a mega post to catch up ... i feel one coming on now .... pull up a chair .... bunch of pictures coming up .... were finishing up the walnut table above this week .... click the photos to enlarge them ...
we finished and delivered the mdf couches and chairs a couple weeks ago ... they looked and sat great!
the house is almost, but not quite, finished so we left the cushions covered up ...
the chairs, before they left
the gold leaf frame ... from the same post .... totally hard if not impossible with my skills to photograph anything in gold leaf ...
another mdf niche market ... we made 24 of these in 3 different sizes to be painted and sold by vermont pet beds
update on the ash table next ...
it will have the last two coats of finish tomorrow and friday ... there was a delay while we were waiting for confirmation that it would be natural looks great with the steel ...
the 46" round is gone ....
and will is coming along on banjo #4
its an interesting combination of part fretless at the top end of the fretboard where the iontonation is easier and fretted at the pot ens where precision is more important ...
and, this time, because of the choice hes doing the fret board with no binding, he bought a .023 router bit .... yeah that is less than 1/32nd of an inch, and is exactly the size of the t on the fret wire ... so, he was able to cut the stopped slots on the cnc and the edges of the fretboard will be very cool ... more on that when the fretting is finished ... hes got his own banjo website up now ...
and, we started a new bed project .. it will have a pair of slabs hung on the wall for a headboard,the platform attached to that 6" up from the floor, and a box with a drawer on either side at the top of the mattress ... king size .. cool concept ...
this is a photoshopped slab arrangement .. well start smoothing and joing them tomorrow ...
more on that later ... and, theres other stuff too, but for now, this is enough for me ...
