The Competence Project: Drifting in a Walnut Shell

That title is a very oblique reference to the original Hans Christian Anderson version of Thumbelina, which involved Thumbelina sleeping in a cradle made of a walnut shell. That story always freaked me out a little bit as a kid, not sure why. I didn't have any natural aversion to Cinderella-type stories, so maybe it was something about her minuscule vulnerability. Maybe even as a child I was searching for inner strength.

None of this has anything to do with this table-in-progress, except that it incorporates driftwood and black walnut. Last fall I was fed up with my copy editing work, frustrated with my parenting, and generally feeling glum and at sea. And pointless. So I emailed Dan Mack (the woodworker and artist I've taken the most classes from) to see if he had any classes or studio days opening up. It turned out he was doing a found objects workshop on the banks of the Hudson River that coming weekend, so on a Sunday my husband and I took the kids and he had them rambling around poking in the water and playing with sand and collecting rocks and sticks while I essentially did the same thing except with some direction. Or not. Dan likes to encourage people to find their own relationship with nature.

I found these:

Four driftwood sticks, which I kept trying to place so they would eventually make a table (I seem to be obsessed with little tables), and he gathered them like a driftwood nosegay and helped me screw them together and level out the bottoms.

It sat in our garage for a very long time because I couldn't find the right kind of top for it. Driftwood is so brittle -- I learned that to my regret in my very first class -- so it couldn't take something too weighty.

A few weeks ago I was at the sawmill and I found these slices of black walnut in the scrap pile:

The owner always encourages me to take scrap if I can use it (part of New York Heartwoods's mission is to reduce waste). I've got three pieces of flat walnut, and one would seem like the perfect top for this table, so I'm sanding them down (eventually -- there's that whole kids and job and life set of wrenches that run into my projects) to see how they'll work.

What to do with the rest? Cutting boards would be great (I'd love to make some of those) except for the big holes in the middle.

It'll be a while before I finish this again, as I'm hauling the kids back to Montana (yay! home!) and don't intend to leave for quite a long time. Hey! We're building a house. Soonish. Well, after we sell our cookie cutter in New York. So that'll be fun.

Until then, small projects. And look! A cat!

Cedar in Plane Sight

When I first sanded down my maple table I said I never wanted to own a planed piece of furniture again. A plane is a tool -- either a machine or a hand tool -- designed to straighten and smooth wood before its final sanding. Because I'm looking for rootedness or groundedness or whatever the heck it is, planing wood seemed too far removed from that to be satisfying.

That was true until last week. When I showed up at the mill we were tasked with ripping down into 4-, 6-, or 8-inch widths cedar planks leftover from an artist's installation up at the Storm King Art Center's sculpture park. (I have learned, by the way, that we do not "cut" wood. We rip it.) The cedar had been taken from her family's farm down in Tennessee and was already milled. She wanted it cut to size and then planed so she could make crates out of it for deliveries.

I've always loved cedar, the way it smells, the way it looks. We have a big bag of cedar shims sitting in our closet, which we'd bought at a hardware store in Tennessee several years ago and were going to get around to making shoe racks or something out of. (My husband and I have conversations sometimes about how lazy we are together. We're bad for each other's health and productivity. But we have so much fun.) Cedar has a reputation for keeping moths at bay, which is why blocks of it are often put in drawers or storage chests. It also supposedly has antibacterial and antimicrobial properties among a million other uses (some of which I maintain healthy skepticism of), and makes great outdoor furniture because it's resistant to decay.

In raw form I think it looks lovely. But planed, with a layer of wood skinned off to expose the inner colors, it's really beautiful. We ran it through the saw and the planer and the planks came out with these deep, bright purple and cream colors.

Unfortunately, I also discovered that I'm highly allergic to cedar. My childhood allergy tests probably say this anyway, but with the dust flying in my face I became aware of it all over again, sneezing my head off even through the high-end filtration face mask. Time to break out the Claritin, since clearly the homeopathic remedy I've been trying (quercetin, with extra Vitamin C) has had no effect. I hate having hay fever. The truth is, in another age I probably wouldn't have survived even if I were competent at survival and sustainability skills. If severe allergies didn't kill me, childbirth certainly would have.

Anyway, I'm a convert to planed wood depending on the context. 

The plane's crazy noisy, though. Even with our awesome earmuffs the screeching was pretty penetrating. If I'm going to invest, I think I'll go for the hand plane. And then I can just do that for hours and forget about getting on the rowing machine. Except not with cedar.

Getting Ripped

I've been volunteering at a local hardwoods sawmill. New York Heartwoods, to be specific, which is run by, of all random things to find in nowhere upstate New York, another woman from Montana, and specializes in salvaging downed and diseased local hardwoods and milling and kiln-drying them for woodworkers, artisans, retail stores . . . you get the idea. Aside from the fact that I feel completely incompetent (hence the Competence Project), spending a few hours there makes my week. I wish I could rewind all my school years and career years and go back and learn how to do something useful like this. I mean, I correct grammar for a living. Much as I enjoy grammar, it's not, in real-life terms, all that useful.

The very first day I was there was back in January, and we rode the tractor over to a neighbor's collapsed barn to salvage 8-foot beams for a local woodworker. If you click here you can see a photo of us doing just that. I am the person in the blue coat pulling something out of that really precarious pile of barn wood.

That something was a barn beam. The thing about old barn beams is that they often have a lot of nails in them. Very old, very rusty, very long, and very, very sharp. I was bracing the beam while it was being chainsawed down, and it slipped on my leg. See those nails? It was one of those.

My very first day branching out (so to speak) in an effort at competence? I ended up driving to the doctor's office for a tetanus shot. These are my only pair of jeans. My husband repaired them that evening because I loathe sewing and only do it under duress. He didn't know that what he pulled out of the sewing box was silk embroidery thread over seventy years old that had belonged to my great-grandmother. What a convoluted world.

Did you know that tetanus shots make your teeth hurt like hell? Nobody told me that. I thought I needed a root canal. And underneath this ragged seam is a dull line that very much resembles my C-section scars. Except less painful because I didn't rip any staples out of this. Hands down, I'd rather get scarred by ancient nails poking out of barn beams than go through pregnancy again.

That Birch Is Buggy

My friend who co-runs a local organic farm said I could take some of this birch. That's misleading. I happened to be at the farm with the kids on Saturday and saw the huge pile of cut birch logs on my 2nd-3rd-4th attempt to take my 3-year-old to the Port-a-Potty. She screamed every damn time. My friend invited me to take her behind the decrepit trailer to pee on the grass, which is where she herself goes. "Just -- if you hear a noise, don't worry. That's just a cat in the trailer." The followed a long explanation as to why the cat lived in the trailer and why he was noisy. I think his name was Jack but can't swear to it. Suffice it to say he was actually noisy and the toddler twitched around to see what was going on and got pee on my Keene sandals. Like that even phases me anymore.

Anyway. All this birch. Gorgeous. It wouldn't fit into my station wagon so I had to come back later, which meant my husband had to give me a brief lesson in using his Sawzall. (I ended up bending the blade. Sorry about that.) Look! Helpful children!

Got it back home and into the garage. Was doing some copy editing work and got an email response from Dan Mack about an open studios day I wanted to attend. I'd mentioned that I've been forming, slowly and over several months, ideas for a live-edge, slab-top dining table. "My friend said I could take a whole bunch of birch and I was thinking of using it for the legs. Would that work? It seems sound, but I don't know about how well it holds weight."

His response: "Oh, birch is terrible. Bugs usually. Like bananas in a plastic bag."

Not exactly the feel I was going for. Ah well, it was adventurous day out and now I've got this in the garage and don't know what the hell to do with it. I should take it to the sawmill and kiln-dry it but that seems like a lot of effort. I don't know if I can get my laborers to reload it into the car.

Un-Competence Project, with Carpenters

I stole this log. That's what my son says. Someone had cut down a tree by the side of the road and left the chunks in the ditch. I drove past it once, then twice, then turned around and stopped. I could barely lift it. If I were a decent photographer, you could see how big it is. I'm awfully impressed with myself getting it home. Except my son kept saying, "Mummy? Are you going to get in trouble? Mummy? Should you be taking that? Isn't that someone's wood?"

My mother-in-law happened to be visiting that week and spent some time trying to figure out what it was. She scoured the Internet for bark descriptions and tentatively settled on sweet gum. An architect friend of ours guessed cherry, but the bark is completely different from the cherry I scavenged elsewhere.

The other day I was inspecting some of my black walnut scraps nearby and happened to notice motion in the log. Big black ants. Carpenter ants. My modern home-loving husband is thrilled with this revelation. You should have seen his expression. I rolled it out of the garage and to the woods, but am going to have to do some inspections tonight. And I'm bummed. What pretty tables it might have made, ants and all. Do they have carpenter ants in Rivendell? I never used to wonder but now I do. The owner of the sawmill I volunteer at said I could throw it in the kiln, but I don't know how I could get it back into my car. Self-sufficiency requires so much effort. And driving time.

The Competence Project, Bowl Me Over

Ha, ha. Isn't that a funny title? If I were still on Facebook, I'd have just been blocked by several friends. Oh, wait, you haven't read the post yet. Even less funny.

I'm a sucker for all those gorgeous wooden bowls you see at farmers markets, the kind that look like they were carved straight out of the stump of a tree and yet smoothed by silkworms. (Does that simile work? Probably not.) So I asked how a rustic woodworker would make those things. "You need a lathe" was the answer, and evidently not an option for rustic woodworkers. I haven't vowed allegiance to any particular kind of woodworking; this just happens to be the teacher I have access to, and he's awfully good. Why we can use drill presses and table saws and sanders, though, and not a lathe, I haven't worked out. Nor could I see how the option he gave me -- an axle grinder -- made the piece somehow more authentically rustic. I mean, an axle grinder. Here I am working it. You know what I'm thinking? "This is freaking insane. Please don't let me lose my grip on this and slice off someone else's fingers." Also, my mouth was full of wood flakes. They went well with the (organic[raw]) almonds and (organic[unsweetened]) dried cranberries I'd brought for lunch.



When I finished, I found that my hands were abraded to the point of bleeding, all over, from the flecks of wood flying everywhere. What I had started with was a cedar knot that was just lying around the workshop. Dan sliced the bottom off with the table saw (he didn't trust me with the table saw yet, quite rightly; he shouldn't have trusted me with an axle grinder, either), helped me clamp it tight to the table, and I dug out the middle with the grinder.



Like the pine-top table, it took me a long time to work out a shape to finish this in. There's so much flexibility with raw wood. It's limiting in a way, no rules to follow. But fun. I could see myself living as any number of Tolkien characters with the stuff I'm making. (The proliferation of raw wood products, barely finished and oozing forest, is starting to concern my husband, who prefers antique, highly varnished furniture off-limits to cats and, um, children.)



More of my crappy photography. These were taken with an iPhone. I don't like iPhone photos. The colors always seems wrong. (Actually, I just don't like the way the iPhone takes pictures of me.)

I finished this with the same stuff I use on my skin -- a homemade lotion of beeswax and almond oil. (Learning to make lotion was, of course, another competence endeavor, and depressingly easy. I can't believe how many years I've paid significant chunks of cash for a product that, if made at home, costs little, uses only a few [or even only two] all-natural ingredients, and takes about twenty minutes. I can make it while dinner's cooking and I'm watching The Big Bang Theory.) Actually, I finished it with that first and then re-cooked the lotion and added coconut oil to make it more human-skin absorbable. (What atrocious syntax.)

The Competence Project, Living with Ugly

The table on the right here was actually given to me as practice by the workshop teacher, Dan Mack, who by the way does magical things with rustic wood furniture in addition to teaching and writing books on the subject. I think I chose the legs -- it's been a while -- but he chose the top, this odd trapezoid of pine (table on the right). The legs are a) on the left, something I can't remember but think might be oak; b) on the right, driftwood; c) at the back, peeled maple.



Anyway, it took me over a year to finish this thing because I couldn't figure out what shape to make the top. I didn't like the trapezoid option, but I'd already drilled the holes for the mortise and tenon joints and they didn't leave much room to get inventive with the shape. In the end I went for something pretty basic and mostly just sanded down the corners to round them out.



It matches our floors almost perfectly. Isn't that hideous? But I like the bottom, even though I can't look at it most of the time. It reminds me of a glacier valley, or the colors of rocks under a rushing river in the Rockies. And the shape looks nice from the side. Turning the legs around was a big improvement over that wide-legged stance. That reminded me too much of so many men on the subway taking up all the space.



All in all, I'm not thrilled with this table. It doesn't have the weight I'm looking for, for one thing, which I'm sure is a psychological problem. (Part of this whole competence project, I've realized, is a craving to feel more rooted or grounded or something; I should just wait a few decades and they'll have a pill for that. Or an app.) But it's not bad. Maybe it needs staining to bring its disparate parts together.



Or maybe I should pretend it's a high-fashion model. The legs have that kind of ultra-skinny catwalk look. Except with the knock-kneed cutesiness of a Care Bear.

The Competence Project, Middle Ground

A little over a year ago I started work on these two tables. I talked myself into thinking the one on the right was like a man standing wide-legged and dominant, but with a delicate top; and the other was a woman with a leg kicked out and a grounded, authoritative weight for the top. Gender role reversal. Except actually I was just at a workshop trying to figure out how to make a stool and these were the result of screwing around.



I really fell in love with the trunk slab, which is a chunk of maple that the teacher had found cast off in scrap at a local sawmill. If I weren't such a crappy photographer you could see the deep saw marks on its top.



It took about five months for me to finish the maple table. Because I have a job and kids and really important stuff like my novel and memoir and loads of essays to finish and peaches and tomatoes to can and even more important stuff like making sure I never miss out when a new season of Doctor Who is released. Also my husband had to buy me an orbital sander for my birthday, which allowed me to see what that slab of maple actually looked like.



I am totally in love with this table but leave further commentary to your own imagination. It makes life worth living. I've shown my love for it by already marking it with my 5 a.m. coffee cup. Oops.