Something to aim for
No matter how good I get – you, too, for that matter – there will always be someone out there doing it better. And that’s a good thing.
No matter how good I get – you, too, for that matter – there will always be someone out there doing it better. And that’s a good thing.
I consider myself a pretty good woodworker. I’m competent, manage to do what I do with minimal need of Band-Aids, people like what comes out of my shop and, most of all, I’m satisfied with my work. But sometimes a particularly good project inflates my ego beyond any sense of propriety. When that happens, I can always depend on the work of members of the Society of American Period Furniture Makers to bring my exaggerated ego back down to Earth.
The highboy in the photo is the work of New Hampshire furniture maker Daniel Faia, who will receive SAPFM’s 2023 Cartouche Award next month, and he certainly deserves it. It’s beautiful; completely flawless to my eye. And while I can handle cabinetry in a competent and attractive manner, there’s a lot here that’s just beyond my skills.
Those cabriole legs, the carvings top and bottom, the delicate parquetry on the sides of the piece – all of that is simply out of my league. I do minimal carving because it’s not in my skillset. I’ve tried parquetry with less-than-stellar results. And don’t get me started on how many hand-cut dovetails must be in that highboy.
But looking at that piece makes me want to try all those things again. Of course, I will never be as good as the typical SAPFM member. (Heck, if they have rejects, I probably couldn’t ever be that good, either.) Nothing as large and grand as Faia’s work, but there’s no reason I can’t try to incorporate some of those things into my next project.
They still probably won’t be very good, but by doing them I’ll get better at it, even if only a little. And that’s why I like the work of these masters of the craft so much. I’ll never be in their class, but they never fail to make me want to be a better woodworker.
A.J. Hamler is the former editor of Woodshop News and Woodcraft Magazine. He's currently a freelance woodworking writer/editor, which is another way of stating self-employed. When he's not writing or in the shop, he enjoys science fiction, gourmet cooking and Civil War reenacting, but not at the same time.
