It’s a mystery. At least, I like to think of it that way.

Last week I spent my mornings dovetailing the pieces for the large sliding till in my tool chest. It’d been slow-going, partly because I overslept one day, and partly because I’d been experimenting with process. Friday morning, I reached the point of dry-fitting the side pieces.

A fitting end to all that sawing.

It was a bittersweet moment, because it was the first time I couldn’t look down and see all of my tools. That’s really the only downside of the tool chest: I don’t have everything in plain sight. No, it’s not a deal-killer, and it certainly beats coming into the workshop to find the array of tools that have fallen off shelves to the concrete floor, or planes that have formed sudden blooms of rust.

So after giving myself about 30 seconds to acknowledge this transition to layered storage, I embraced it. I started thinking about how many tools the chest could hold once I finished the tills, and the sense of discovery I could channel each time I lift the lid on this chest.

I started thinking of it not simply as a tool chest, but as a treasure chest. I try to see it through my son’s eyes, maybe wandering into the workshop on a quiet afternoon, opening the chest, sliding the tills back and forth, seeing how many of the tools I can name, admiring their form, imagining their function.

Fill ‘er up, son.

It’s not so hard to imagine. As a kid, I remember being fascinated by my grandfather’s garage, his den where he practiced woodcarving and sharpening, even the organizer he kept on his chest of drawers, filled with the things he took out of his pockets at the end of the day. I was convinced that he could make or fix just about anything. After he died, I brought home some of his tools, hoping to instill that same spirit in my own kids.

I want to walk into the workshop each morning with that sense of wonder and excitement – beginner’s mind, if you will. It feels like I’m on the right track.

One Good Yarn Deserves Another

Taking cues from Peter Follansbee and Pete Galbert, I thought I’d share what my wife is up to.

I haven’t written much about Bonny here (as an eloquent writer and a keen-eyed editor, she is quite capable of telling her own story), but over the past year, she has taken up crochet and knitting with a passion and integrity that I admire as a fellow craftsperson. I’m in awe of the skill and creative vision she’s developed in such a short time.

Knitted and felted purse

I also find her work remarkable as a symbol of the transformation we’ve made together with our two kids, from a family of consumers to a family of makers.

Crocheted scarf in wool and acrylic

Just over eighteen months ago, Bonny was running herself ragged as a retail manager, working late and thankless nights and rarely seeing her family. We spent her income freely, but had little of meaning to show for it. The spring of 2012 changed our lives profoundly, though. We lost my stepfather to heart disease in early March. Then in late April, just seven weeks later, we lost her father to cancer. By mid-May, we had reordered our lives so that she could leave her job and have a family life again.

Knitted baby hood in acrylic

Bonny’s story embodies what I’ve been aiming for with this blog: creative work as a path to meaning, purpose, and joy. Needless to say, I am a huge fan.

You can find Bonny’s ready-made work for sale on Etsy. She is also quite happy to take custom orders through her Facebook page (although her dance card might be full until after the holidays). You can find her on Twitter as well.

Green felted purse

Knitted cowl in wool and acrylic

Knitted baby hood in acrylic

Crocheted scarf in linen

Crocheted scarf in wool and acrylic

Knitted cowl in wool and acrylic

Roll Your Own

Working on a large project (like the dining room table I’m currently building) is a great way to shake out new methods of work and new shop arrangements. While my current arrangement is the best I’ve come up with yet, I still have a list of changes I want to make once my current project is complete.

Big on my list are a traditional tool chest, a sharpening bench, and some better organization for my clamps. To go with the tool chest, I want some cotton tool rolls for efficient storage.

Most of that list can wait, but I had to do something about my brad point bits. The block of wood I stored them in was tippy, and they were always in the way.

So Tuesday night, I decided to make a proof-of-concept tool roll for my brad point bits, borrowing my daughter’s sewing machine to do it. (Hey, she borrows my table saw, so it’s only fair, right?) I had some old khaki pants I needed to upcycle, so it seemed like a low-risk proposition.

This turned out to be a great side project, solving a shop problem and providing the sort of immediate gratification to keep me energized for my longer project.

Best yet, it worked out well as a proof-of-concept project. I have plenty of fabric on hand for more tool rolls. With something as utilitarian as this, I can’t see a reason to buy what I could make in a couple of hours.

Drawers are for Furniture

Maybe I should have titled this post “Why I haven’t built a traditional tool chest yet.”

I’ve read The Anarchist’s Tool Chest three times now. I’ve read it with an open mind and I’ve read it with a critical eye. It’s a compelling book, written with passion and conviction. It convinced me to pare down my own tool kit, to sell off duplicates and single-purpose tools whose functions can be performed with other, more versatile tools. It’s been a liberating process, one that has helped me rewire my thinking from that of a consumer to that of a maker. I still find myself looking around for tools to sell.

After three reads, though, I had one reservation that kept me from building a traditional tool chest. Well, make that two reservations.

The first had to do with floor space. I don’t have a lot of it in my one car garage. The space I would dedicate to a traditional tool chest is home to my sharpening station and a rolling cart that holds probably half of my hand tools. The rest are stored in a cabinet on the wall above my workbench.

I would gladly give up the cart in favor of a chest that would protect those tools from dust and swings in humidity. The thing is, though, I kept my great-grandfather’s Kennedy machinist’s chest on top of that cart. And that’s where my other reservation came in.

You see, I love drawers. I love the mystery of them. I remember as a kid I’d go to my grandfather’s house and look in every drawer in every tool chest, just marveling. (Okay, I still sneak a peak every once in a while. Fascinating.)

It’s funny, though: the thing I love about drawers–the mystery–turns out to be the thing that slows me down as a woodworker. I don’t tend to reach for the right drawer the first time. My brain just doesn’t work that way (or that well, if you ask my wife). For example, it took me twelve years to memorize what each of three light switches do at the back door of my house. The neighbors probably thought I was sending Morse code using my back porch lights.

Maybe I love something that’s not good for me, but I found it hard to give up my machinist’s chest. It’s a bit of self-sabotage to have so many drawers in the way of my daily practice. I used it mostly to store sharpening equipment: stones, files, file card, saw sets. There are also dental picks, Yankee screwdrivers and push drills, a Stanley Hurwood awl that looks like it was beat up by a rival gang of awls, mill files with teeth that are rolled over, Chinese steel shaped to resemble rasps, an old square file I might convert to a birdcage awl one day….

Okay, I had some pretty random crap in there that I could easily let go of.

I’ll be honest. This is not the post I started out writing. I started out thinking how useful my machinist’s chest was, how central it was to my woodworking practice, how I kept it organized, and how everything I kept in there had a purpose. And that was true, when it came to the two bottom drawers. When I looked at it with fresh eyes, the rest of the chest turned out to be hiding a hoard of crap (and also some gems that just didn’t have a good home).

I moved most of the sharpening gear to the metal cabinet where I sharpen, and moved the machinist’s chest on top of a mechanic’s chest for now. What remains in it is a collection of files, a few taps, a die, a screw extractor. I could probably store those files in tool rolls to further reduce my need for drawers in the wood shop.

I think I’ve conquered my drawer demons. I concede the clutter argument, but the bigger issue to me is workflow. I want to spend as much time in the flow as possible. To me, that means honing my skills with fewer tools, and keeping them as accessible as possible.

Floor space, on the other hand, is still a challenge. A traditional joiner’s chest would displace my dedicated sharpening station. What’s worse, the metal cabinet I use for my sharpening station is too small for the purpose. (I like the elegance of Tom Fidgin’s dedicated sharpening bench, but it would take up as much space as the tool chest.)

Taking a look around my shop, there is one way to fit in both the tool chest and the sharpening bench: I need to stop hoarding wood (at least in my workshop). Of all the conclusions I’ve reached through this process, this might be the toughest. But if I’m going to create an environment where I can sustain creative flow, I need the room more than I need instant access to wood. Luckily, I have a project coming up that will use a significant amount of the oak I have on hand, oak I harvested nearly five years ago from a friend’s back yard.

I’m sure I’ll build the tool chest before too long. If I have enough oak left, I could make a purpose-built bench for sharpening, one that would support my saw vise (plus the hand-crank grinder I’ve been coveting).

But first, I have some furniture to build.

Happiness is a Tool in My Hand

As I helped my kids carve their jack-o-lanterns this evening, I noticed my mood elevating significantly. There’s no substitute for standing there with a tool in my hand, making something.