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

Time-Traveler: The man from nowhen...

"I bet you think you were born in the wrong era," she said. I smiled grimly and shrugged. I didn't want to point out to her that Everyone Says That. And it drives me just a little nuts.

As a writer, I spend a lot of time delving into the past and exploring what life was like at various points in history. I've written about WWII, Prohibition, the Great Library of Alexandria, and Shakespeare. So "Do you feel like you were born at the wrong point in history?" isn't an uncommon or even unreasonable question.

Frankly, I'm a little disappointed that since I wrote Howard Carter Saves the World no one has asked whether I felt I might've been born on the wrong planet.

It annoys me at times, but it's a fair question because if anyone was ill at ease in the modern world, it's me. Let's face it, I have a lot of skills that aren't of much use in the 21st century.

By the metric of the rest of the country, my childhood was more on like my dad's than it was like the rest of my peers. We didn't have a video game system or a computer of any kind. Dad didn't believe in video games and didn't like computers. I learned to type on a typewriter (as is right and proper) and only saw digital systems when I went to a friend's house or a mall.

My friends refer to this as a 'sheltered upbringing' but I'm not sure I'd agree.

I spent a lot of time at my grandparents' farm where grandpa taught me woodworking to keep me out from under foot and where I made a lot of my own toys. I built rafts because I read a lot of Huck Finn. They all sank or broke apart, so I swam to shore and built new ones. It was a world of pocket knives, toy guns, frogs, wooden airplanes... I played with GI Joe while we listened to Fibber McGee & Molly on the radio. I watched Star Wars like every other kid of my age, but read voraciously from a library that was stocked mostly with books written over a half century before I was born.

My childhood was a Mark Twain novel ghostwritten by Ray Bradbury, filtered through an Archie comic.

The world that was shown to me on TV seemed distant and somewhat surreal, simultaneously more modern and less than the world around me.

I still prefer hand tools to electric, my typewriter to my laptop, and a printed book to a digital one. I have no real attachment to those wonders of modern technology that people around me can't live without. I don't own a cell phone, though The Engineer has one. It's not inarguable that I really am a man out of my era and I wouldn't blame you if you thought that if given a time machine and license to use it that I'd be off like a shot.

I certainly used to think so. I may have been misplaced several centuries! I said as much to my dad once. Dad, who had very little tolerance for bullshit, looked at me and kind of snorted and said "Take off your glasses."

Touché, Dad. 

I have allergies and poor eyesight and I have an asthma inhaler in my pocket as I type this. Even when I join in a historical reenactment and try to sink into a past age, never far from my mind is the fact that I never would have survived childhood in these past worlds.

Books are my time machine along with projects like this one. This is my preferred method of time travel. If someone offered me a trip through time I might not take them up on it if I cannot close the cover and return to the modern era any time I wish.

And it's not at all about the asthma inhaler. The women around me are valued as highly as the men. My wife is an engineer. My boss is a woman.  I can see someone passing me on the street and talk to them without my judgement of them stopping at the color of their skin. I can say whatever I want here and as long as I don't libel anyone, no one can stop me.

Because honestly... the 'good old days' weren't that good.  The Elizabethan era may have birthed the modern world, but it was still firmly anchored in the medieval. The streets stank of the latrine, death stalked the streets, the laws were Draconian and the punishments cruel, the cast system was becoming porous, but only just.

So until the man in the Blue Box comes to escort me to the opening night of Hamlet and then safely home again... I like this time period just fine, thanks.

Frankly, I like it here. The people are mostly friendly, the medicine is pretty good, and I don't have to worry about people teleporting into my house unannounced yet.

---
This post first appeared in a slightly different form on my writing blog Pages to Type Before I Sleep... in February of last year. People keep asking the question, though, so I find myself continuing to answer it.    ~Scott

Making Light: The meditations of a powerless artisan...

As I noted on Facebook, sunset yesterday for the Puget Sound area was at 4:32 pm. Which meant I was standing over a boiling pot of bones in the freezing rain and dark of night. I told my wife that if it started snowing or sleeting, the US Post Office would be sending me a paycheck. Needless to say, I was thanking my stars I had a warm home to retreat to when I was finished.

I managed to make that observation via Facebook minutes before the power went out.

I burn the candle at both ends, I'd light the middle if I could...

The Engineer and I had headlamps, warm blankets, and lots of books to read. It wasn't that big a deal; these things happen when you live on an island. Contemplate, though, a world in which that situation isn't just a vexing part of life in the country, but a daily aspect of your life. An obstacle to every effort you make to get food on the table. For the sake of comparison, sunset in London yesterday (a few points north of here) was 4:07 pm. Thirty minutes earlier (relative to their GPS coordinates, of course).

It certainly illustrates a knotty problem for working class schmoes in a time before Edison and his light bulb made lighting well nigh a civil right rather than a luxury.

I wasn't going to really get into this until we got to the Chandlers' companies, but I see that fickle fate had other plans.

Fine work like pinmaking, embroidery, and sewing was heavily dependent upon the available light. If you imagine a work space lit by lanterns or torches or anything you might see come out of Hollywood, you'd be wrong. Tallow candles and rush lights give off a dim, flickering and smokey light at the best of times.  A rush light is a piece of straw dipped in animal fat and held in a metal clip as it burned.  Fitful light at best. Beeswax candles were beyond the reach of humble pinners. If you picture children and small-fingered adults clambering onto windowsills and jockeying for the best of the available light, you'd be closer to the mark.

Yes, most pinners were children. As Tony Robinson noted in that TV show I mentioned the other day ("Worst Jobs in History: Tudors") this pin making thing is an incredibly fiddly business and small, dextrous fingers are necessary to do it well. I spoke with one of the researchers he used and she made it clear that it was work that was often done by children, but mostly by the poor and desperate, quite often by crippled soldiers.

Rachel Jardine, who worked with Robinson on this episode of his television series (you can see her name in the credits as "special thanks"), contacted me via Facebook and kindly provided some of her research into pin making in the early modern period. I am still poring over most of it, but what I have digested thus far is amazing.

"In the constant protestations of the Pinners in the early seventeenth century that many 'poore and impotent people' gain employment through pinmaking, that lame soldiers, children and cripples find this their only means of employment it is similarly made clear that the majority of pinners are extremely poor.[1] It is therefore unclear what extent the technological developments which occurred during the sixteenth century were adopted for widespread use. It seems likely that most pinmaking continued to operated using the simplest of tools."

"Pinning down production: Pin manufacture, technology and the market c.1500-1610"  by Rachel Jardine

[1] See, for instance, BL Cotton MS Titus BIV f. 304/314, Lansdowne MS 84, no. 21.

I think I've expired the length of blog post that my waning laptop battery will allow, so that's all for tonight. More from Rachel's amazing research and on the process of pinning this weekend.

The bones are de-fleshed, boiled, and scraped. Now they are sitting in an antiseptic solution that will also bleach them white (health & safety). They should be ready to start making pins soon.

- Scott

News: Plus Stuff and Tools and OMG all the STUFF!!!

Beard = Serious Scholar

I've been silent for awhile as I do important things like acquire hard-to-find tools, rare books, and grow a new beard (very important, I am told for these historical research projects). Seriously, I've been travelling all over the country, visiting family, haunting antique stores, and generally ramp up the behind-the-scenes portions of this effort and tie off a bunch of projects both personally and professionally that will be on-hold while I'm doing this.

I seriously think that at some point in the recent past all of the antique tools in America were loaded in trucks and hauled to rural Missouri.

My studio is starting to look like Brueghel's Satire of a Merchant's Greed.  Which might be the nerdiest reference I've made in recent memory... Also, Amazon has started sending me emails that say things like "Special sale for our customers who like hammers..."

Yes.

Oh, and while doing this, I've been applying and interviewing for a full-time job at the college where I am currently working part-time. Which will seriously change the dynamic of this project if I get it.

And I really hope I do get it. Not because a potential background checker might see this post but because it sounds like an awesome job that I'd really enjoy that would allow me to actually use the skills I paid tuition dollars to learn.

(Gasp!)

I bring this up because I haven't before, and we need to start this with everyone knowing that I will be fitting this project in the spaces around my "Real Life". Yes, I will be "getting 500 years behind" in my free time, which is an unfortunately limited commodity. This project is about pursuing my deep and abiding desire to LEARN ALL THE THINGS (as we say on the interwebs) not about putting food on the table, so anything that pays will inevitably take first chair.

Image Inserted to Meet the guidelines set forth in the International Treaty 

for Internet Meme Propagation, 921.4, section C, subsection L9

The upshot being that I might actually be ready for this.

(Panics and runs to re-check that everything is in order for the umpteen millionth time.)

Making

Why am I doing this?  I ponder that a lot. And there are a lot of reasons why I decided to do this and why I'm doing it exactly the way I have chosen to.  Primarily, I think, it's because I make things.

Stories, gardens, paintings, toys, furniture, clothing, messes, mistakes... it's all part of the same creative impulse that's driven me throughout my life. It comes from the frustration with what's there not living up to what could be there.

This project is about celebrating the people Who Made All the Things.

When I was a kid, I made many of my own toys.  All of my favorite toy guns came from the crates of miscellaneous junk beneath my grandfather's work bench, not Toys-R-Us.  This isn't because we were particularly poor, and it wasn't because I grew up in 1936 (though it felt like it sometimes). It was because the toys I envisioned in my head were just that much cooler than the ones you could buy at the toy store.

Thankfully, my parents and grandparents encouraged this sort of thing.  At least until I went as far as getting into pounding heated nails into tiny swords for my GI Joes.  Dad drew the line at me becoming an  eight-year-old blacksmith.

Spoilsport.

Even those toys I did buy or that was given would eventually go under the screwdriver.  All of my favorite GI Joe and Star Wars characters and vehicles were custom amalgamations to suit my own fancy, characters in my own extended story lines.

As an adult, I transferred this into sculpture and artwork, but really these are all extensions of the same brain frequency, the translation of a mental picture into a three-dimensional object.  I've made props for renaissance faires and small theatrical productions and science fiction conventions.

This isn't to toot my own horn.

For one thing, I never got the hang of playing a brass instrument and if I did toot a horn, you wouldn't want to listen to it. My sister got the lion's share of musical talent in this family.  This isn't horn-tooting, it's about the philosophy of what I'm up to, what I'm about.

This is a project about makers.  It's about doers.  It's about pulling the spotlight away from the princes and generals and artists who dominate the history books and shining it on the people in their shadows. I've always found that the trouble with teaching or even talking about history is that it keeps boiling down to bold-face names and red letter dates, which are ultimately meaningless: "William the Conqueror defeated King Harold II at the Battle of Hastings in 1066."

I came out of school with my head packed to the hair follicles with dates and names like this. But I couldn't have told you what they ate. Or who prepared it. Or how. I could not have told you, beyond the broadest outlines, how their houses were built, or what their daily lives were like.

And it's just getting worse because history is getting bigger and we're spending less time learning it. Encouraging evermore the approach that exemplified the teaching of history as I went through school: Invasion! Battle! New king. Red ink, memorize the boldface names, pass the test and move on. How did they bake bread? Who cares! No time! Look at the shiny armor, memorize the battles, we have more facts to memorize tomorrow.

I came to terms with the fact long ago that if I was to get a deeper understanding of how humankind got from there to here, it was up to me to figure it out on my own. Thankfully, we have the reenactors and their groups to help us out. Vast societies have sprung up in recent decades to keep alive the martial arts of Europe, breathe life into the illustrations of the fighting manuals of Germany, Italy, France, and Spain.

I don't want to denigrate their efforts. There's some amazing things coming out of their salons, vast tracts of forgotten knowledge reawakened by their scholarship. But strength at arms are not my strengths. One reason I've never joined a reenactment society is because I can't find one that focuses solely upon the homelife of the world that was, a society that doesn't spin breathlessly around the rehearsal for a half-forgotten war.

I know the names and dates of the kings and princes and generals that we are told got us to this point in history. Too much of my brain is taken up with the records of destruction. Time for me to turn over those vaults to the records of creating. Because while the kings and generals were off crusading, there were people keeping the rushlights lit back home.

I've studied the fine art of killing people for king and country and personal honor; now I want to  study the things that kept everyone alive between duels and wars. The people who made the renaissance.

Making things. It's what fires me up.