March 29, 2011 In 1995 I harvested a dying madrone tree below our house here in the Sierra Nevada foothills. I milled the tree and dried the wood and it lay around for many years until a few weeks ago I decided to make something from this distinctive board. It turns out that this tree [...]

What’s new for St. Paul this year? In January, 2011 I saw a piece of furniture by a local walnut farmer from the Sacramento Valley. He studied art in the 1930’s at what is now called the California College of Art in Oakland. Ferd Schleimann was a painter, craftsman and farmer. His great uncle was [...]

In 2009 I visited the Rockefeller Preserve in Teton National Park and saw and sat in what looked to me like a very distinctive Adirondack chair. These chairs arranged on the covered porch of the visitor’s center turned out to be the original Adirondack, the 1903 Westport Chair designed by Thomas Lee, a large landowner [...]