A New Craft
July, 2021. I was deep in the doldrums of the pandemic, lonely, bored, needed a better hobby. Since my teens it was video games or programming. Video games sap my energy. And my other hobby being the same as my job was finally too much.
I got interested in woodworking after seeing woodworking pictures from dvasallo and lcamtuf. From there I did some googling and came to a few initial resources.
I bought Building the Portable Moravian Workbench with Will Myers. Plan from the start: build a workbench that I can knock down and store within my apartment…
I started watching Rex Kreuger and Wood by Wright. Rex led me to buy books. James’ discord was where I got 1:1 encouragement and ordered my first hand plane. I got things from harbor freight. I bought wood (a ton of black walnut) on Facebook Marketplace.
Summer, 2022. I read, watched videos, but I wasn’t doing anything. Texan girl friends were staying at our place in Santa Monica. They stayed in our bedroom with my wife and I stayed in our spare room / my office / my nascent workshop. Just being in the room with all my books got me excited again.
Weeks later my family had a reunion in Florida. I found 20 planes for $200 on Facebook Marketplace. I picked them up the day before I made a huge batch of gumbo with live blue crab. I had everything I needed.
Shortly after that my wife was in Texas and I spent every evening and the weekend building two Japanese sawhorses. I was hooked.
This Christmas I am publishing an advent calendar on Foolish Wood. Each day I’ll present a project I completed in the past two years. I will talk about what I did well, what I could have done better, and take some fun detours along the way. Join me.
I can't really get along with playing video games these days either, at least not to the extent I used to. During summers in between school semesters I'd log 8, 12, maybe more hours a day playing games. I struggle to sit down and play for longer than a hour these days.