Yet Again ... Vermont Open Studio Weekend

It's happened every year for the last 18 years ... Hundreds of Vermont artists welcome their friends, neighbors and strangers into their studios for two days of show and tell. It's about education and community ... It's about cleaning your studio a little more than the usual ... It's an opportunity to maybe put some prototypes and experimental pieces out and see what happens and what people might say about them ... It's like going to a craft fair without the travel ... In short, though I sometimes resist and carp when it's time to actually get it together, but now, at 9:00 Friday night, I'm ready, and I'm sure by the end of Sunday, I will have had another enjoyable and stimulating weekend .... And, Monday's a holiday ..... Click the pictures to enlarge them .... The building above looks like it might be a big outhouse, but it's really my sawdust shed .... The post immediately below is from last year ... We have a new custom hat artist, Denise Tilley showing her hats here at our shop .... more on all this later ...
Bird's Eye View from the front stepWill's working on banjo #2 and carving some maple leaves on some table legs, and we're going to make a slab top table out of the English elm that's leaning up there...
Sam finished up a nice lily that has been lurking outside the metal shop unfinished since last fall
Visitors willing to walk 600 feet to the house can see the 26' x 9' table with the first five pieces of granite in it ...
In the shop, we have the 20'r, but we had to disassemble it for the weekend ..
One of those good deal, experimental pieces, I mentioned earlier
Penny organized her paintings and will hang them in the morning ...
Chris Bowlen stopped by to show us the bench Sam made the metal work for ... very cool ...
A group of us, along with some high school art students made a sculpture at the Northshire Bookstore to raise awareness of 'artists in the community' ....
Looks like it's going to be a perfect weekend weatherwise ...

Gardening ... An Appreciation

It is really wonderful being married to a gardener ... This morning was one of those mornings when you wish maybe you were a painter ... A little fog, a little mist ... total blue sky ... I just walked around Kit's gardens, sort of amazed ... I actually can't believe I live here .... I will let these photos speak for themselves .... Click the photos to enlarge them ....

'State of Craft 2010' ... Goodwood Lane

I had sort of a revelation this morning. It was related to the show that opens Saturday at the Bennington Museum ... State of Craft 2010 ... 50 Years of Craft in Vermont. I realized I have been nosing around the crafts scene here for almost 40 of those years .... Kit and I lived in The Wall Family Gallery building in Manchester, starting in September 1971. The Wall Family Gallery was basically a pottery studio, run by husband and wife, Beriah Wall and Janice Farley... our age, more or less .... We still see them when they come to town ....Kit traded batches of chocolate chip cookies for pottery .... You get the idea ....

Starting in 1972, I worked for Beriah's brother who had a landscaping business and he introduced me to carpentry ... Time went on; we built a house, in our 'spare' time, pretty much every nail and slate, in 1974; after that I worked for a (much) more professional carpenter; we started a furniture business in 1980. Talk about clueless.
The 1974 house ... The shop at the old house where we worked until 1999 ...

Now, 30 years later, what have we got and where are we???? Almost 40 years in the same geographic area, lots of regular friends, unbelievably interesting clients/friends, a great shop, a great place to live, fantastic gardens by Kit, two great and talented kids working with us, beautiful gardens, a little time for golf and tennis ... What more could a person ask for? I'd say the 'State of Craft' on Goodwood Lane is pretty good right now and I can't imagine where I would be if I had stuck with that sales job I took after college in 1970. I realized this morning I have to occasionally stop and appreciate how lucky I've been to have been involved with the 'State of Craft' ... It's been a good 'state' for me ....
The boys working on the duck bed
This morning 7:00am

Mysterious Greene & Greene Like Houses

I belong to a Yahoo newsgroup on Greene & Greene design, architecture and furniture. I have always enjoyed the style of the Greene brothers, and, while not a strict copier, I have often been influenced by their design vocabulary. when working with clients with a fondness for Arts & Crafts style furniture. So, in 2003, while preparing to make a couple of rooms of furniture for one of my local clients, I took a trip to Pasadena to tour the Gamble House, the Huntington Museum, meet with John Hamm about lighting and visit a friend in Huntington Beach ... Good trip.

On my way to the airport, I ran into a friend and told him about my upcoming trip. He told me his sister-in-law, or someone related to him, lived in a G&G house and gave me her number .. I called her when I got to town and she agreed to let me visit her and her house ... Cool neighborhood ... I don't know if her house is a documented G&G but it sure had some similarities ... The whole neighborhood had a consistent Arts and Crafts feel. As I recall, she had some original plans and I glanced at them, but don't remember the details ... Click the photos to enlarge them and leave a comment if you know anything about the houses or the neighborhood ... Thanks ....
My memory is a little sketchy and I didn't take notes, but I think this is the front door of the 'sister-in-law'? Since she met me when I pulled up, I didn't take a lot of photos of the outside of the house ... I think hers was the 2nd or third on the left.
Her front door from the inside ...
She took me to meet her neighbor down the street at #309 ... He was also friendly and gave me a tour of his house ... I don't have a photo, but he had a definite G&G like stairway and I also recall some stained glass transom lights ...
The neighbor's front porch ...

Below I have posted photos of (I think) Charles's studio around the corner from the Gamble House .... I would love to know a little about that and what it looked like inside ... Thanks ...

Progress On The Giant Tables

That's Trevor down there on the end of the table .... about 30' away ... Click the picture to enlarge it and see him smiling away down there. He's allowed to smile as this table has been pretty much his baby. He is our CNC man, and I don't think we could build these tables without one. I mean, how would I even make a template for the 1020" (85 foot) radius edge of the table? Beats me .... Below is the assembled top of the 26' x 9' table we have been working on. I have described it in a couple of previous posts here and here ... check them out for the full story ... Let me know what you think
Here we are (again) working on the table. That's Steve Holman (on the table) below of Holman Studios and his assistant Kevin helping us get it together ...
We're still on the temporary base here, and Steve is working on the real base in his shop just down the road ... We're planning to assemble the whole thing, granite and all, at least once here in my garage before we ship it all to New Jersey, along with its smaller (8'x 20') cousin that we started work on yesterday.
Yesterday, we assembled the temporary base for the 20' table in the adjoining bay of my garage and Trevor started cutting the mdf parts for that project ... If I built these all the time, we would definitely need a MUCH bigger shop.
This one is only five four foot wide pieces, but it still takes up half the shop ...
Yesterday, Herb Johnson of Johnson Marble and Granite, of Proctor, Vermont came to get the first five granite templates. That's his shop above. Herb has done much stone work for me in the past including the marble vanity top in this post, and all of the marble tops on this page here.
He'll do the 10 end pieces with the miters and their neighbors and see how they fit with the rest of the templates and then finish up with the six center pieces. He claims I've done the hard part by making the templates .... Glad to hear that ....

'State of Craft' Show ... The Bennington Museum

'State of Craft' ... Exploring the Studio Craft Movement in Vermont: 1960-2010. Runs from May 22nd to October 31st at The Bennington Museum, Bennington, Vermont . Curated by Jamie Franklin and Anne Majusiak, it displays the work of 85 craftspersons, (is that how we call us?) 125 objects, oral histories, studio interviews .... I don't generally look for shows to be in, but this one found me and I'm glad it did .... Click the pictures to enlarge them ....
"Bridges", our piece, is a collaboration between Dan (b. 1947) , Sam (b. 1982) and Will (b. 1984) Inspired partly by my grandfather, Irvin Seeders, a bridge riveter for Bethlehem Steel for 52 years (b. 1902), BS from 1916 to 1968. For the show, I thought it would be good if his generation, my generation and the next generation were represented. You know, a 100 years of craft or something .... just a thought ...Our piece started as a couple of different ideas, based on other designs we had created, but took on a life of its own. For a while it was going to be gold leaf and bubinga, then high finish walnut and blued steel, but in the end, it came to be made of recycled oak (heritage and tradition) and painted steel, with the rivet connection to my grandfather the coup de grace. Sam did the steel work and the green paint; Will did the burning and finishing, and I did a little roughing out of the wood and assembly and helped with the conceptual stuff. On the whole, a lot of fun. The show opens next Saturday and I am really looking forward to it ... Should be a good party ...
Early on .. after we decided on the recycled oak, but before the rivets ... The burnings seemed unrelated ...
The initial paint job, which was later toned down by sanding through to the red primer and glazing ...
The rivets ... I forget exactly whose brainstorm that was, but it was a good one ...
Will, burning the oak prior to staining and glazing ....
After the burning and stain, before the sanding and glazing ...
It's a bridge ...
A rusty one in Shelburne, MA
A soaring and inspirational one in New York, the GW, which I'm pretty sure my grandfather worked on ...
Some of the other pieces in the show .... this is the underside of the 'quarter bench' below
There was no label and I don't know the artist, but he's from Brattleboro.
Other objects ready to go ..