Thoughts from the peeler: The artisan obsession and where does it end?

There is in just about every artisan, a touch of obsessive compulsion. Whether or not it's a disorder depends on how you feel about being both obsessive and compulsive at the same time with sharp implements in hand.

I don't want to make light of a genuine medical disorder. As someone who suffers the black periods of lost joy and time that is depression, far be it from me to make light of someone else's affliction.

Obsession and compulsion exist on a sliding scale, which is set by the same people who have categorized an affection for coffee as a mental disorder.

So let's ignore those folks for a bit.

For all practical purposes, it boils down to whether your obsession/compulsion is positive or destructive influence on your life.

Be ye moderate in all things except moderation.

So it is with caffeine and beer and so too it is with handicrafts.

But where is that moderate line? When do I stop? How far do I take each of these explorations of a craft? When do I tie it off and call it good? Do I keep going until I've got it perfect? Is perfect the enemy of the good?

I discovered recently when I began exploring the uses of the sector, that I was wrong in a very important way when I discussed the many ways for finding the angle at which the staves of a bucket or tankard meet.

My methodology was modern. For one thing, we started with an equation. For another, it depended heavily upon looking at the tankard as an equilateral polygon and we did some really sweet math based on that assumption.

That was an inaccurate assumption.

Even though it worked.

As I examine more coopered buckets and tankards, it because clear to me that the old coopers didn't think that way. The staves of a bucket are rarely all the same size, and no two identically-sized buckets seemed to have the same number of staves.

My math was accurate, but my method was wrong.

The period method is really cool. It's easier. And it involves a sector and some different neat math having to do with isosceles triangles and dividers.

My assumptions were wrong and even my successful result was... I don't know. Was it a failure to achieve the goal by apparently modern means?

A period item was created, but it was based on best guesses made with a modern mind. My methods of arriving at that item were modern even though I used my best period tools to achieve the result.

I know all of this because I didn't finish exploring coopering when I finished writing about it. I kept going. I kept talking to other coopers. I examined barrels and buckets in antique shops. I made a bucket. Then I made a butter churn. Then I repaired some damaged buckets and barrels and tankards back to working order.

I know I was wrong because I didn't stop.

I made an ale pail that would hold ale, but did I succeed or did I fail.

Sorry, that was Seussical. Sometimes I can't resist.

At some point do I stop going back and adding to these projects?

Or is this exploration of artisans a reflection of artisanship itself in that the learning never actually ends? And if that's so, is my quest really impossible after all? Will I ever have more than the most surface knowledge of any of these crafts if I cannot devote more than the duration of a few blog posts to each of them?

How do I know when to stop?

And if I'm honest with myself, can I stop even if I want to?

- Scott

Thoughts from the peeler: What am I?

Nothing happens in a vacuum. Not even this curious obsession of mine. The artisans of the 16th century were part of a larger society and so too am I one cog in a 21st century gear.

I'm not a big fan of most modern labels, but one that I rather like is "Maker". It's incredibly general and yet incredibly specific at the same time. It's a person and a movement. A maker is one who has joined with others in stepping back from the mass-produced and plastic, disposable world that says: "Hands off! If it's broken, throw it away. Don't make things, we're here to do that for you. We can do it incredibly cheaply and out of sight in factories overseas, under conditions we don't like to cop to."

Makers stared at the tamper-resistant screws on the back of a device and wondered what's so special under that lid. Makers felt the inexorable pull of the workbench, or the kitchen, or the garage.

"The Maker Movement." It's not often you can encapsulate such a disparate group of artisans into one category like that and have almost all of them nod and say "Yeah, that's cool, that's me."

It seems too general, on the face of it, but artisan is no less general, and no less co-opted by society at large. When you say 'artisanal' it draws images of tattooed foodies in Seattle or Portland, making weird beers, and odd sausages, and stinky cheeses that only a very few taste buds can tolerate. I feel a kinship with these oddballs and their obsessions, and I never lack something to talk about when I step into their atelier or welcome them to mine.

We're all similarly obsessed. As happy to learn as we are to teach, and eternal apprentices all. Even if I don't understand their particular Thing or they mine, we are kin. Because who cares? We're not doing it for each other, we're doing it for ourselves. We're sharing it with Those Who Understand.

As long as you are willing to do instead of being done for, and to teach as much as you learn, you are in the fraternity of makers.

Walk through any modern Maker Fair and you will see no fewer subcategories than you see in our project list here. There are certainly areas of the Maker Fairs where I would be very very lost. Despite the robots of my fictional worlds, I'm no friend to electricity. Microcontrollers and circuit boards rarely grace my bench except accidentally and often tragically.

If it's a question of taxonomy should we create our own taxonomic paradigm? Are you Homo sapien maker cooper? Or are you homo sapien maker roboticist?  Maybe not. Maybe that would be too confining and imply walls where none exist and stifle cross-pollination.

And down the rabbit hole we go and I find myself back where I started, looking askance at modern labels. So in the greater framework of modern society, am I a maker or an artisan? Do I really need to choose?

Maybe I am happier unlabeled except as the Eternal Apprentice. Student to all, master to no one. Under that title, you will find me in every corner of the internet's Maker Fair from Tested.com to Modern Woodworking. Poking, reading, asking questions, watching, learning.

No matter what is happening in my life, no matter how fraught my circumstance, one thing always remains true: I will compulsively gravitate to the nearest pile of raw materials and begin turning them into something else.

If it's a pile of cloth, I will make clothing.

If it's lumber, I will make furniture.
If it's leather, I will make shoes.
If it's metal, I will probably fail in hilarious and epic fashion to make another thimble.
If it's yarn... I will give it to my wife because I really don't like knitting.

And if left alone in a dark room, I will pull words from the aether and I will make stories.
Because a writer is never without raw materials.

- Scott

What I've been up to and other recent projects...

So... I haven't been completely idle this past year; I just haven't been doing anything in any sort of pre-planned and extensively- researched way. Mostly, I've been keeping myself busy when my hands were too idle and my brain too active.

Here are some of the recent projects to roll across my workbench.

Inspired by an article by Chris Schwarz in Popular Woodworking, I built a modified 6-board chest for my wife out of offcuts and scraps of VG fir from the window and door manufacturer where she works. (They were fished out of a dumpster with permission. Always get permission before dumpster-diving.) It was assembled using copper boat nails (for no particular reason) and finish with red milk paint and a coat of varnish. 

She uses it to store her video games and accessories.

Since I wasn't really doing this one for the blog, there weren't many in-progress shots. I did a few oddball things with it, though, mostly for practice, including this boarded bottom which I made using the next item on my list...



Last fall, a Craigslist post netted me this box of dusty and rusty planes. Most of them were Sandusky moulding planes, which made them a real find and worth the effort (in my opinion) to sharpen and lap the irons back to usable condition.

This box...



Begat this shelf of oiled, and ready planes. And I'm only short one iron after all is said and done, which is a bit of a miracle if you've ever bought a box of moulding planes. (I have irons for the two in the back that are sitting empty, they were in progress when I shot the photo.)



I used them to tongue and groove the bottom of that chest.

I have continued to practice at the lathe, turning out piles of oddments like these threadreels, which I based loosely on some of the reels which were found on the shipwreck Mary Rose. They're fun to make and an excellent small project to practice with the tools.

And because not everything I do generates sawdust, I've also been exploring puppetry.

Why puppets? Because I'm part of the Jim Henson generation. Also because when you've had a year like I just finished, you find yourself looking for other mouths to express yourself through, be they monster or monkey or felted frog...

This is the one facet of what I've been working on that has required a significant amount of research, which began the first time I saw Grover on Sesame Street, extending across the decades to this past year when I was sitting at a table where the nearest pile of raw materials were foam and faux fur.

This is what sketching looks like when you're making puppets.

Ever wonder how the puppets from your favorite television shows were built? This isn't the place to really discuss it, but I have documented these pretty thoroughly and might need to set up a static webpage or use them for a guest post on someone else's (more appropriately themed) blog.

Anyway, this is what's under all that fur and felt you see on TV.

The above was a commissioned piece, actually. I'll have to share the videos that his owner ultimately makes with him after he takes delivery.

In the meantime, I'm warming up the workbench (Literally. The shop was 24 degrees Fahrenheit when I was out there yesterday) and getting ready to begin the next project. In the meantime, here;s some puppet video my wife shot while I was testing the build on the big grey fellow. This is Mr Grumpigus, who is having issues.

Peeling and pondering

Sometimes, you have to grab a pile of fruit and a knife and make a pie. But really, you just... just... want to peel something.

More even than wood carving, taking knife to fruit is a supremely meditative act of creative destruction.

Care is needed lest you cut yourself, of course, but even if you mangle the fruit, who cares? It's going into a pie anyway, so make with the blade, kiddo, and let your mind wander.

I've been doing a lot of peeling recently, trying to decide how best to proceed with this project.

2015 has been a tumultuous year. My book was published and I was riding high. Then my mother died suddenly and I was left feeling high and low at the same time.

Knife to peel.
Spiraling.
Lengthening.
Try to get it all in one.
Meditate.
Don't cut yourself.

So here I am at the close of the calendar, trying to decide whether I care much for calendars. It's tempting, oh-so-tempting, to think in these discreet blocks of days, months, years. It tempts you to take up the blade.

Peel away the questionable bits.
Cut around the bruises.
Save the good fruit, dispense with the bad.
It's just a pie, it doesn't have to be pretty.

To think in calendars is seductive. It makes it easier to just pretend you can bin the entire year at will or pick or choose in phases of the moon or turning of the seasons. Hell, this entire project is and always has been dependent on calendars for its framework.

In January, can you really begin again? Boot the old man to the curb and pick up the baby in the tophat?

Time is seductive but false.
You can't time a pie, it's done when it's done.
Density, moisture, relative humidity, too many factors at play.
Keep an eye on it and yank it before it burns.

I am about to pick this project back up again. For those of you who have waited patiently while I run off to be an author and have family tragedies, I thank you for your time. I hope you don't feel I've wasted it.

Going forward, we're going to take a more meditative approach and we're going to ignore the calendar. I was wrong about the artificial frameworks for this. I was wrong to think I could just peel it and pop it in the oven and set a timer and it would be done when it dings.

We're going to carve around the worst bits and bruises and try to use the best of the fruit. And we're going to watch the food and let the pie tell us when it's done and time to move on to another pile, another peeler.

Our knives will be sharp and our pies will sometimes be ugly.

I hope you'll join us.

In the meantime, have a happy Christmas or a happy whatever celebration brings you together with your kith and kin this winter's turn. Draw near to those you love and remember those who are missing. Share food and companionship and warmth and remember that they are the only real light that matters in the winter's darkness.

And volunteer in the kitchen when there's stuff to peel.
It'll be good for you.

- Scott

What I did on my summer vacation, or "How this project got stepped on by a giant robot"

For the past little while, I've been distracted from this project by an overwhelming surge of The Other Things that make up my life. For this I apologize because I've been less than communicative. Sometimes I get so far into my own head that I'm out of cell range. My wife and I went on our first vacation in years and I saw parts of my own state that I've never had the privilege of exploring before.

Sometimes you just have to get in the car and go for a three-day drive.

No leather was worked, no wood was carved, no sheep were sheared. I did clean out my shop before it started raining and we built another oven and baked some bread, but that was revisiting a guild that already had its checkmark.

For all intents and purposes, the Renaissance Artisan was 'out' for most of the summer.

Which isn't the same as saying that I've been idle...

As you probably know that before anything else that I do, I am a writer. I make sense of the world by telling stories about it. Whether it's history or fantasy, it's all words to me. When I'm lucky, I get to share those stories with others. Writing is my vocation and my first love. This means that at any given moment, I have more than one project on the docket and often when a deal is being considered, it is confidential until all the papers are signed.

Which is a long way to go toward saying that this week, I signed a contract with a small UK-based publisher called Crooked Cat Publishing to bring my humorous science fiction novel Howard Carter Saves the World to bookstores. The official announcement was made by my publisher yesterday via social media.

I've been bouncing off the walls ever since.

Howard Carter is a novel that I just sat down and told the first story that occurred to me, taking it wherever my fancy led, no matter how bizarre. Aliens who learned about earth by watching Sesame Street? Done. Secretive government agencies? Mysterious universities? Mad scientists? Got it all. Giant robots? Oh, the giant robots...  I wrote it all in public (rather like I've been doing here) posting chapter-by-woefully-unedited-chapter on a blog, writing live and in front of a studio audience. No laugh tracks allowed!

If you want to read a bit of it, here's a free short story that gives you a general sense of the storytelling and characters from the novel. 

Which is a long way of going about telling you that I'm sorry I dropped this to run off and do that, but I will be back in the workshop in a week or so. I have a half-finished costrel and a shoemaking project in the wings. I've also been making connections to get a proper handle on the life of the Worshipful Company of Woolmen, plus the weavers, spinners, mercers, and tailors that lie at the end of that supply chain. 

In the meantime, I have some up-front work to do on getting Howard Carter ready for print and I'll be ducking in and out as my editor and publisher need me. If you would like to join me on that part of the journey as well as this one, I'm inviting you to come with me on the next step of the journey as we prepare Howard for his debut at Amazon and other online booksellers.

Side note: Would it be cheating to use this as part of a study of the Worshipful Companies of Stationers and Clerks?  Just a thought...

However it goes, my goal in that project and this one is to put out a story that is good enough for you to read and enjoy, one that you love enough to not only read but to recommend to your friends. I've worked in publishing at enough different levels to know one thing for certain: positive word of mouth is how success happens.

There will be much, much more later.

- Scott

Status Report

So, the reason we've been delayed this time is because our camera is screwed up. It doesn't recognize the SD card and none of the many suggestions from the online "What to do when your Canon DSLR loses its mind" fora have helped.

I would just carry on anyway, but I screwed up my hand last week in my typical too-humorously-clumsy-to-be-real fashion.

While out trolling for rusty tools in Port Orchard on a rainy day, The Engineer and I were walking back to the truck when I reached into my pocket to fish out my keys. My pinkie finger went through the key ring and I pulled the keys out and flipped them up into my palm in a jaunty manner to unlock the truck with the remote fob. After the truck chirruped in greeting, I let the keys dangle from my pinkie while I got into the cab.

My wet boot sole then slipped on edge of the door sill and as I fell forward, the keys caught on the edge of the seat and my poor little finger was pointing the wrong direction.

Which isn't a good look for anybody. It makes your gloves fit funny.

If my youthful experiences as a drummer taught me anything it's that my left hand isn't really game for anything too intricate, so I'm on hold for the nonce.

In the meantime, I've made a felt prototype of the shoe and discovered some fit issues that I'm glad weren't discovered after we went to full leather. I'll document those and the changes I'll be making to the shoe pattern once the camera has recovered. Also, my experiments in 16th century joinery are similarly impacted by not being able to hold a hammer or pretty much anything else heavier than a serving spoon in my right hand at the moment.

It's amazing how such a seemingly inconsequential finger plays into everything you do with that hand.

On the bright side, I have this DVD of Peter Follansbee teaching 17th Century carving techniques and you don't need your pinkie to hold a remote control. So there. Once I can again wrap my hand around a carving chisel or a sewing awl, I'll have a lot of pent-up and lovingly hand-crafted artisanal frustration.

So we have that to look forward to, I guess.

C'est la vie.

~ Scott

Now What? The evolution of the project...

Today is December 1st. The state of the project? It is to laugh...

I've been very sick since the end of September. I have this stupid... thing that happens to me periodically. Around here, we call it Sporadic Lego Head Holiday Syndrome. We call it that because it's apparently un-diagnosable by modern science. Perhaps the dumbest assumption I made at the beginning of this year was that I'd be able to stay healthy for the entire year so that I could complete the rather daunting task list I'd written for myself.

All that is somewhat beside the point.

The brief interstice moments the past couple of months, I've spent working on our kitchen. Because family comes first and I keep my promises to others before I keep the ones I made to myself. So I have a functioning kitchen and a non-functioning artisan project...

I'm proud of the work I've managed to finish on the kitchen, but the "One Year Mission..." part of this blog has not fared nearly as well.

Have I failed? 

It would be difficult to argue otherwise. I certainly can't knock out two dozen trades in the one month I have between now and January 1st. So it would be pretty stupid for me to say I haven't failed at my original mission.

If you feel the urge to say I told you so, please feel free to swallow that urge. Seriously. Don't be that person.

The truth is, this project was beginning to morph into something more long-term long before my head swelled to cartoonish proportions. If I'm honest with you and with myself I began to second-guess the format I chose for this back in August when I experienced the true difference between learning an aspect of a trade and truly practicing it.

Of course, it's impossible to practice 111 trades from 54 guilds at once.  There are valid reasons why tradesmen specialized and it wasn't only because the guilds required them to. The requirements for specialization forced them to focus on a single trade and operate at the top of their game.

So now what?

Yes, I am a craftsman, but I am first and foremost, a storyteller. So I will finish the story.

This story has grown in the telling, as stories are wont to do. With every blister, splinter, burnt loaf, and failed thimble, it has become about more than the making of the stuff and less about the making of the artisan. For the past year, I expended too much effort on the tasks and not enough on the tradesmen.

A story like this deserves all the space it needs to tell it properly. It deserves more than scene setting, it deserves character development. I don't rightly know how that will look, but that's what I plan to do. So my continuing mission is a purer, more thorough version of the original one, but without the artificial time constraint.

I said at the outset that I had a problem with how history is taught, with the People Magazine approach that is a pointless litany of glittering celebrities carrying on, mostly behaving badly. It's no wonder that students view history as a list of dates to be memorized and the names of kings and generals to regurgitate. I found myself doing the same thing on a different level, ticking off a list of items to make and move on to the next.

Material culture is only interesting in how those materials reflect the culture. The tools are only interesting in the way that they reflect their user and their maker. I lost sight of that as I focused on the sprint.

Spending three weeks in the smoke and flour dust of our ersatz renaissance bakery showed me how thin my understanding of these trades was. How superficial the project had become, mostly because I had set an artificial deadline that made it look more exciting from the outside and forced it to become less in-depth on the inside.

By failing, I've set myself free from my own constraints. There's probably a deeper metaphor there for those who have an urge to mine for such things.

In the meantime, I've a story to tell. I invite you to stick around and help me tell it. If you don't, I certainly understand.

~ Scott

Shoemakers and Tailors: Because naked people have little or no influence on society...

Mark Twain said "Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society."  Which brings us to the next parcel of research in our quest.

Before this project even began, I was already thinking about what I would wear and how I would make it and whether for the sake of authenticity I needed to wear a costume while I was about my monthly tasks. One year ago today, I was writing the words: "Going into this, I honestly did not give much thought to clothes. I am mostly known as a costumer, of course I was going to be doing most if not all of this garbed in the period manner. As much as possible and a bit more, please."

At the time, I fully intended to be dressed like the fellow in the engraving at right. This renaissance tradesman has always struck me as the iconic figure of the man of the period, standing ready to make a living by the calluses of his hands. I bought fabric and sat down to make the costume I would wear for each and every aspect of this year's project. I would put it on whenever I was going to be doing anything for this project.

If you've been following along, you'll already know that this turned out not to be true.

Seriously, though, Espresso Monkey tees are totally correct for the period. 

In the end, I decided that unless the clothing either changed the outcome in some manner, or unless the venue called for it, I was going to focus on the nuances of the trade and focus on creating and using the correct tools, wearing the correct and current safety equipment, and not get slowed down each night when I got home by changing into doublet and hose.

Don't forget that I am, as I often point out, not a reenactor. I'm not here to step into the life of a 16th century tradesman, I am here to study the lives of all 16th century tradesmen. Which isn't to say that I didn't make the costume...

Of course all period artisans spent their time leaning against trees with their tools scattered at their feet...

As previously noted, I didn't really try to become a tradesman in any real sense until my recent stint as the baker in the living history encampment of the local renaissance faire. If you've stuck around that long and were paying attention to those photos from the faire, I was wearing the costume created to match the bloke in the engraving.

Before I started this project about half the people who knew my work knew me primarily as a costumer. (The other half of my world thought of me only as an author; this is the first time I've made any effort to combine the two disparate halves of my life.)  Because I've been a costumer for going on twenty years, the Worshipful Company of Merchant Taylors (Tailors) seems a bit of a dawdle. Much as could be said for the Joiners and Carpenters.

This blog is not the place for dawdling.

Because costuming is something I'm already known for, "learning to sew" would ring just as false as pretending I'm learning joinery. (Google tells me that fully half of you got here by following the link on Garb for Guys, my costuming blog which has featured a good deal of my carpentry as well.) Even were that not the case, it doesn't matter because I'm not here to lie to you regardless.

Really, in the current bundle of projects, shoemaking is the only area where I know nothing going in, so at least there should be plenty of "Scottie is an idiot" moments for your amusement.

How will this work?

The Joiners, the Merchant Taylors, and the Cordwainers will be concurrent projects.  Remember when I said I had a plan to stack projects in a logical fashion? This is how it begins.

At the moment, I'm thinking a ground-up and skin-out demonstration of costume taken from around 1570 or so; the mid-point of Elizabeth's reign is a nice place to work. I've already been making enquiries in knowledgeable places for information on Elizabethan underwear (which is not a Google search term you want to use lightly; just trust me on this one). Meanwhile, I'll make some shoe lasts and knock out a pair of shoes (he said lightly as if the idea didn't scare him) and follow that with the drafting and execution of a pattern for men's and women's clothing from period sources and made from as close to period materials as I can reasonably acquire.

There's a surprising amount of woodworking involved in all of these projects, most especially hat-blocking and last making. Meanwhile, I shall also be finishing my joiner's toolbox and making a reproduction of an item of Elizabethan furniture yet-to-be-determined. Probably some sort of chair.

Joinery, sewing, and shoemaking is all work that must be done entirely by hand and it will probably continue and finish by late November if not early December. Updates will be posted as they warrant. These projects will be concurrent with and inform many of the other projects that will be taking place between now and the end of the year.

It's the ninth month of what I'd intended to be a 12-month project, so this is how things are starting to shape up going into the home stretch.

~ Scott

Kill It With Fire, Part Five: Cleaning the kitchens. . . summary and wrapup

"Cooking is a craft, I like to think, and a good cook is a craftsman -- not an artist. There's nothing wrong with that: the great cathedrals of Europe were built by craftsmen -- though not designed by them. Practicing your craft in expert fashion is noble, honorable and satisfying."

- Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

This blog began with that quote.

No one begins something like this on a whim. And if I'm honest, the quote that started this insanity was just one of many pebbles that contributed to the avalanche. It might have been the first pebble, but I can hardly blame Mssr. Bourdain for all that followed...

I am tired. More tired than I have been in a long, long time. My new regimen of archery practice didn't help, and for my Elizabethan alter-ego, the invention of Advil is 390-odd years in the future.

Thankfully, I live in that future so I'm not reduced to gnawing on the trunk of the nearest willow tree.

I was an art major, which is a roundabout way of saying that I spent a lot of time working in restaurant kitchens. There wasn't much in Bourdain's book that really surprised me. Of all the oddball jobs I took through the 'starving artist years' that are so fondly spoken of by people who've never lived through them, the restaurant jobs were my favorites.

Was it noble, honorable, and satisfying, as he promised? I dunno. I wasn't a chef, the highest I ever got was prep cook. I certainly didn't make it to culinary school; I spent too much time as a dish dog, really. Nevertheless, the exposure to finer foods and the people who prepared them than I could afford on what they were paying me taught me to appreciate, to taste, food differently.

But this isn't a foodie blog any more than it's intended to be Scottie Goes to Ren Faire. I never really meant for the baking demonstrations at the Washington Midsummer's Renaissance Faire to change so drastically how I thought about this project.

I'm still slightly ashamed to admit that it didn't occur to me earlier to set up and attempt one of these trades at anything close to full production level.  How could I ever hope to understand the lives of my craftsmen forebears if I never stepped fully into their shoes?

We'll get to shoes soon, this is about... I almost said it's about bread. It's actually not at all about bread.  Anthony was right about that. It's about craft.

The WMRF demonstrations were always intended to be a sort of safety valve on this project. The faire was scheduled just past the midpoint in the project and I knew that by that time I'd have a fair idea whether or not I thought I'd make it by the end of December. (Though to be honest, I still don't know and you'll see why I've stacked projects as I have in the coming months.)

Like archery, baking was not something I ever thought to enjoy. In my home, I do all the cooking, but The Engineer did all the baking. Baking was too fussy for me, too much like science and not enough like art... or so I thought. It never occured to me that it would be baking that finally put me over to the noble, honorable, and satisfying side of the kitchens.

Those are The Engineer's hands in that photo above. It was also the first time in quite awhile that she and I cooked anything together. Until the recent remodel began, our kitchen was inhospitable to more than one person at a time.

There's finally room for craftsmanship. 

Photo & Digital Manipulation by Dan Hill - © 2013 Used with permission

By God, Tony was right about that. When Dan Hill posted that photo manip above, one of the first comments posted below it (by someone I have never met, mind you) was two words: "Naturally happy."

Bourdain spent the rest of Kitchen Confidential talking about how dog tired he got working the line, how strung out he was on various substances, how much the food business was a scam and how much was genuine, and how arduous the restaurant biz is is, but even now you can see in his shows how much he loved it.

I'm starting to feel that way about bread and baking.

Baking turned out to be more art than science, not as slavishly dedicated to the arcane formulae of moth-eaten texts as I once believed. When my hands were in the dough and our friend Becky had the ovens blazing and Kristin was scooping flour into the bowls while Becky's husband Douglas was working the rope line, charming the tourists with his English accent and well-rehearsed dialogue about the history of English baking... here was an element of jazz. 

And always the crowds lined up at the edge of our area, asking questions and carrying away my card or the address of this blog scribbled on a bit of paper. At one point, we scrawled a diagram and the URL for this project on a chalkboard and folks were taking photos of it with their phones.

I hope you found your way here without any trouble. I hope that you learned something that day at the faire when you stumbled across our mad adventure in the land of yeast and flour. God knows that we certainly did.

That Corgi was an excellent student...

The Oven's End...

The oven at the Washington Midsummer's Renaissance Faire site was never meant to last. Not only did we build it from the cheapest materials, we taxed them to their uttermost extremes. By the end of the last day of the fair, the cracks were no longer superficial. The ceiling and the framing around the door were beginning to deteriorate and I decided to bake a few final pies and call it a day.

We let the oven cool and went our separate ways to enjoy the fun and frivolity that we'd missed the other weekends of the faire due to tending our breads.  When the final cannon sounded the end of the faire, we gathered one last time around our hearth...

The Engineer had the honor of the first whack.

Then Becky and Douglas, who were so eager to leave they were already changed into civilian clothes...

Then it was left to me. It felt a little wrong, like putting down a family pet. It had stood us in good stead, generated far in excess of its capacity and kept going strong. But the heat and desolation of the days standing in front of it got the better of me and I let the hammer swing.

And soon it was all over.  It arrived at the faire site in buckets and would leave by the shovel full, loaded in the bed of my truck...

The final tally for our little wood-fired bakery: 220 loaves, eight pies, nine scones, two loaves of soda bread, and 1 apple tart, utilizing 1/2 bushel of apples, 80+ lbs of flour, and several gallons of ale. 

Thanks to my partners in floury crime: Kristin Perkins, Kelsey Fahy, and Becky & Douglas Norton. Thank you to Pat, Tracy, and Amy of the Washington Renaissance Arts & Entertainment Society (WRAES) and all the cast and crew of the Washington Midsummer Renaissance Faire.  I hope you enjoyed the bread we dispersed to your tables each day from our bakery.  Thank you to all the photographers that documented the events and kindly sent me their photographs and videos.

There is, as always a sense of melancholy as we end one thing, and a sense of hope as we embark on the next.

Stay tuned to this channel. I doubt this is the last time we will see the fruit of an oven such as this. I still have the one in my back yard, after all...

~ Scott

Learning Curves and the State of the Project: I know now why apprentices are a Thing...

Part One: History and Hubris 

“History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of kings’ bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. That is the way of human folly.” – Henri Fabre

That sounds familiar.

That quote, attributed to Henri Fabre[1], sits at the top of page one, chapter one in the book Six Thousand Years of Bread: Its Holy and Unholy History by H.E. Jacob. The book is a vast and noble attempt to fix Mssr Fabre’s problem, and it goes a long way toward doing so. It is the latest of many books I’ve found and wished I had and/or read before we embarked on this journey. At risk of stacking quotes, an old adage that’s often attributed to Abraham Lincoln says that the purpose of reading is to remind us that our original ideas aren’t all that original.

Touché, Mssrs. Lincoln, Fabre, & co. A hit, a palpable hit...

What 6,000 Years of Bread really does well, though, is map out a very reasonable twenty-years spent by the author trying to understand the origins of bread. And it reminds me that what I’m doing here has become less and less about the world, trade, and tools of the renaissance craftsmen and more and more about their tools.

In other words, I’ve gone about this entire thing in entirely the wrong way. 

For instance, when I ventured into the world of the Worshipful Company of Turners, I spent quite a while trying to figure out what kind of lathe to build, how it operates, and how to build one. Then I built one. From scratch.

Now, while I knew this would be part of the process, I wildly under-estimated how long it would take to build all of these tools. (Or perhaps underestimated the size of my own creative ego, you be the judge.)

The next project includes baking and cooking.

Now, I don’t know about you, but my house didn’t come equipped with an Elizabethan spec kitchen any more than it came with a wood shop, which means there’s a cob oven and hob rising from nothing in my back yard. And I’m doing everything myself except baking the bricks.

And I really ought to be baking the bricks except that I haven’t found someone with a large enough kiln yet who will let me near it. 

Which all sort of argues that my project has veered more toward a re-imagining of the renaissance as something that was invented from nothing. Or perhaps springing from some post-apocalyptic hellscape where each piece of technology has to be re-created from stuff I find lying around. 

 Mad Max, circa 1560.

Part Two: Tools and Their Users

Sometimes I feel like I’m not so much learning how an Elizabethan artisan lived his life as reenacting the 1600 odd years that preceded his life as we moved from whittling to bow lathes to springpoles and treadles and onward. Sometimes it’s a bit like studying the lives of Indy drivers and starting by learning how to make tires from scratch...

Because I’m almost literally reinventing the wheel with every one of these projects, it eats into the time I can spend actually learning about the craftsmen and the things they made. Which is fine, studying the tools is a fine thing and I’m learning a mind-blowing amount of information about fabricating my own tools. But I think that the key thing I’m learning is that this should have been two projects: a yearlong preparation stage where I build the tools and then a second year when I learn to use them to create standard period artifacts and study the people who used them.

Which isn't the worst idea I've ever had, actually.

There's an inherent drawback to inheriting your tools. You were either not alive or too young to care when they were purchased. (Actually, in my case, my grandpa was either not alive or too young to care when some of them were purchased.) So you don't have a really close relationship with that punch to the wallet that accompanies some tool purchases.

Seriously, I bought my first new hammer ever just this year.

When I first embarked on this project, I thought that with easy access to the internet, I could get my hands on anything I really needed to get a project done. Going out into the community to see if I could source things locally was a bit of a lark because I could always just order it online. And that's certainly true, as it turns out... but there's a hitch.

Take this adze for instance.

If you've never seen one of those before, that's okay; it's not exactly a common tool in modern America. An ancient tool, the adze is sort of a sideways axe, used to dig out hollows (as with a dugout canoe) or smooth a surface (as shown above).

The adze in the image above was an adze-shaped ball of rust when I found it in the bottom of a bin at a flea market. The seller thought it was a gardening tool, and priced it at the princely sum of $5.99. In the past couple of months, I've procured three adzes in precisely the same manner, and in the same state of disrepair. As followers of the Facebook feed know, I recently spent the weekend bringing them back to life.

That one tool took six hours to bring back to life. I worked the sun into and out of the sky and still wasn't finished with the smaller of the three, a cooper's adze.

It was time well spent and it makes my heart glad. This tool is truly a joy to use, as are the other two.

My forbears left me a big box of serious tools because they took their tools seriously. And even if that wasn't true, standing opposed to the disposable aesthetic is part of maker culture.

Part of what makes me... me.

I also refuse to spend the money on anything that won't survive regular use. (Except computer equipment, which is a rant for a different time.) There's no economic sense in spending a $100 for a tool that will last five years (maybe) when you can buy a thirty or hundred-year tool for $200.

This is complicated by the fact that at the outset of this endeavor, I had to agree not to bankrupt us in my quest. The Engineer is smarter than I am and always has been. She's followed me into many a woodworking store and while I was oohing and ahhhing over the figured cherry, she was flipping price tags. She knew this would not be cheap and extracted a promise from me before I caught on.

See? Smarter.

Everything I could ever possibly need is indeed available to me via the internet, but there's a catch. Real tools cost real money.

Three: The Internet & the Deep Blue Sea

As we've discussed before, when Henry VIII's flagship Mary Rose went down on July 19, 1545, she sealed for the ages a time capsule of life in Henrician England. The artifacts preserved included the tools of the ship's carpenters. Eight chests of period tools, preserved by the waters of the Solent and a strange quirk of unkind fate.

Despite there being eight chests of tools, this is not by any stretch an elaborate or even complete example of a wood worker's trade. The tools aboard Mary Rose were specific to the task of keeping her upright and fighting. Nevertheless this gives us that rarest of gifts for a project like this one: an intact example of a 16th century tradesman's tools.

Which made me wonder what it would cost if I just went out and bought the modern interpretations of those classic hand tools. Hewing as closely as possible to their historical counterparts, of course, and bearing in mind the quality standards already outlines, I pretended I had a Hollywood budget under my belt, composed a selected list of key tools from Mary Rose, and went window shopping.

Broad Axe (Woodcraft).... $300.00

Broad Hatchet (Amazon).... $125.00

Carpenter's Adze (Lee Valley).... $250.00

Hand Adze (Lee Valley)... $50.00

Wimble (A wooden brace or hand drill)... Metal varieties are a dime a dozen. No one seems to sell wooden ones anymore and anyone that wants one, makes one. Antiques are priced from $50 up.

Spoon bits (no spiral bits in the 16th Century - Lee Valley).... $80.00 for a set of five

Bow Saw (Gramercy Tools).... $150.00

Wooden Smoothing Plane (Closest I could find to the Mary Rose example - Lee Valley).... $239

Wooden Rabbet Plane (Or what looks like one in the few pics I can find online - Lee Valley).... $39.50

Marking/Mortise Gauge (Rockler)..... $49.50

Dividers (Lee Valley).... $23.00

Ruler (Primitive).... It's a stick with marks burnt into it. Can't imagine buying one from someone.

Draw Knife (Daegrad).... £ 27.99 (Call it $43.00 at today's exchange rate)

Handsaw (Northwind Toolworks).... $275.00

I stopped when the total hit $1600.00 and remember that he would also have had various nippers, pliers, clamps, and miscellaneous whatnot which were made primarily of ferrous metals and therefore lost to time and tides.

I'm not saying that my tool chest is worth anywhere near that much (because it isn't), or that these are worth that much (though they are) you can see why I rely heavily on the antique stores and flea markets. And why I jumped at a carpenter's adze for under $6.00, even if it was a lump of ferrous oxide.

Also, bear in mind that this list would just cover tools for the carpenter's portion of the project. Leaving aside the overlap with the coopers, joiners, and turners which would still add to the total. There's also cooks and bakers and embroiderers and knitters and spinners and weavers and woolmen...

Thankfully, I am only metaphorically doing this on a stage, so there's no reason for me to go out and buy the perfectly period versions of these tools unless it genuinely affects the outcome in some way. Even Peter Follansbee, the joiner at Plimoth Plantation advises aspiring joiners to get close and get on with it.



So that's what I'm doing, but it's still slow-going.

Which is why a large and growing portion of this project has been about tools. Hunting, creating, rehabilitating, tools. And if at the end of the year all I've learned or earned is about the tools and toolmaking, I suppose I'll just have to spend another year learning about their users.And I'm going to call that a win.

With that settled, rest assured I will be posting more often in the coming weeks.

See you soon!

- Scott

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[1] Though the quote is attributed to Henri Fabre (inventor of the sea plane) in the book where I found it, I suspect that it’s actually attributable to Jen-Henri Fabre, entomologist and social commentator who also said “The common people have no history: persecuted by the present, they cannot think of preserving the memory of the past.” Which I find similarly germane to my mission.

And then my brain tried to kill me... The state of the project.

The other day on Facebook, I promised to update soon. I promised that I wasn't dead. And because fate has a warped sense of humor, then my brain tried to kill me.

Like it often does.

So... lots to catch up on. Coffee, for instance. Haven't had any coffee since Wednesday and I have a lot of catching up to do. Also there's a kitchen sitting around in pieces that needs to be reassembled so we can, you know, cook food and stuff. Tiling and cabinets and countertops and miscellaneous whatnot await me, but coffee first. 

Because priorities, I have them.

Which brings us back to this project, and most especially this blog, which I have been neglecting, I fear.

I seriously underestimated the toll that accepting a full-time job would have on this project. Especially with all the home renovations that have to be done. The level of organization necessary exceeded my ready supply of tools.  I'm not really good at organization on this scale at home. I do fine at work, juggling huge projects that span entire years, but when I get home... something clicks off in my brain.

Just one of the many ways my brain periodically demonstrates how it hates me.

There's a horn out in the shop that's halfway to becoming a beaker, a half-made bow-lathe that needs some attention, and all the makings of a woodfired oven stacked under a tarp waiting for a dry spell so I can call out the troops to come help build it.

Anyway, I talked to the engineer, and we're trying something new.

Because real, bought and paid for, life trumps blogging projects, the bulk of my time is spoken for. There's just no way around that. Some of what I have to do for the kitchen (tile for instance) will align with parts of this project, but most of it is too modern to fit neatly into Renaissance Artisan business.

One or two days a week, however, will be devoted entirely to this project. Building, experimenting, photographing, and documenting (cough-blogging-cough) will take precedence on those days. We're still working out which days and how, but that's the plan or this is never going to work out.

Like the Facebook thingy said: "one man, 54 Livery Companies, 111 trades, 52 weeks." And we're at the end of week 18. At this rate, it's never going to work and before you propose it, I am not yet willing to entertain the idea of cutting projects. Part of the "fun" of doing this is figuring out how to do it without neglecting the day-to-day of modern life.

Anyway, that's the state of the project.

More later. I have coffee to drink and all the aforementioned projects aren't going to get closer to done by typing.

~Scott

The Dog Ate My Homework...

So, the part of this I've been slacking on is the 'blogging regularly about things' part. It's a beautiful spring in the Pacific Northwest, and I've been trying to clear a backlog of projects all at once. That backlog includes our kitchen... which won't become germane to this project until I get the floors done so I can start building cabinets.

Which should be next week.

I also wrote this piece as a guest on the blog of urban fantasy & folklore author Maggie Secara, which is directly related to what we're doing here: To Knit or Not to Knit.

In the meantime, there's a pile of bricks and clay in the back garden that will become an oven soon. I've refurbished half of my hand planes (which is enough to get some cabinets going) and the chisels are ready for some handles that I'll be turning on that new lathe I'll be building.

The next phase will be divided between the domestic staff and the people who build the houses and shops the domestic staff lived and worked in:

• The Bakers, Cooks, and purveyors of various foodstuffs
• The Carpenters, Turners & Joiners

Stay tuned.

~Scott

State of the project update...

Bonus Extras!

People who follow along on the project's Facebook page get timely updates, additional progress photos, research trips, discussions, links, and even construction tips such as this one: Put an old rolling pin inside your leather jack to keep from impaling your hand as you sew.

It's a bit like getting to see the DVD extras before the movie comes out!

Projects Currently Under Way

• Hornwork cup & spoon
• Leather bottel
• Needlemaking
• Coopered tankard (still trying to make the !@#$ thing water-tight)
• Knitted Monmouth cap
• A cob bread oven
• Brick "hob" (a wood-fired cooktop)

Research in progress

• Shoemaking
• Advanced toolmaking
• Cutlery
• Elizabethan/Jacobean joinery
• Harvesting wild yeast for bread and beer
• Cooking & Baking
• The Brewing of Ale and Beer

A Craftsman's Curriculum

You may look at the list of research projects above and rightly wonder how I'm organizing this project. As we've progressed, I confess that I have become somewhat obsessed with tracing the way that the companies and guilds lean one upon the other for their very existence, and from that study I have evolved a curriculum of sorts.

The central idea is that each project should, ideally, feed the next project in terms of tools made and acquired or skills learned or improved. In the current kitty of completed projects, we have thimbling, pinning and thanks to my cat figuring out how to operate Amazon's one-click ordering, needle making*. Also about to go on the shelf are coopering, wiredrawing, and girdling.

The stave tankard gave me additional shaping tools and practice with a shaving horse. That will play into the wood forms for the next phase of the bottellers, bowyers, and lastmakers. Of course, the leatherwork will naturally lend itself to shoemaking as well. Pinmaking brought me experience with bone, and thimblemaking (failure though it was) introduced me to brasswork.

Peppered in there are projects that I have going in the background such as knitting and spinning, which I will string together (so to speak) when the time comes, but presently lend themselves to the sort of rainy and blustery conditions that are winter in the great northwest.

Once old Sol starts to stay in the sky for more than a few hours at a stretch, the tilers and bricklayers will emerge blinking into the sun, and build us an oven and cooktop that will do justice to the efforts of the cook and baker.

And so on and on through the end of the year.

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*True story. It used to be that thumbs were our major advantage in the race to stay at the top of the heap and then some brilliant idiot went and invented touchscreen technology.