Good To The Grain

One of Good To The Grain's contemporary designs, an address plaque.

I love seeing people grow. One of my readers, Diane Decocq, has made the jump to starting her own custom woodworking business, Good To The Grain.

As part of expanding her business, she wants to expand her skills. To do this, she's planning to attend the Southwest School Of Woodworking, in Phoenix, AZ.

She's started a Kickstarter project to fund her studies. This will cover materials and tuition. In return for pledged funds, she offers a variety of custom-made items.

Go to her Kickstarter page to learn more or help fund her classes. It includes a video slideshow of some of her work.

If you're unfamiliar with how Kickstarter works, you can get more information at their "about" page. But the short description is that it's a website to allow people to fund creative projects and receive items resulting from that funding. This is known as crowdfunding. By helping in small amounts, a crowd of people are able to pool their resources to help achieve something bigger.

The Southwest School Of Woodworking looks like a great place. Good course selection, good list of instructors, good workspace.

Good luck with your new venture, Diane!

Fall 2016 Session Intro To Hand Tools

Learn how to use these and other hand tools.

The Fall 2016 session of my online video course Intro To Hand Tools starts September 16 at Popular Woodworking University, the online education component of Popular Woodworking Magazine.

The course consists of 12 hours of instruction for $59.99. If you'd like to learn how to do everything with hand tools or just add some hand skills to your power tool woodworking, whether you're a new or experienced woodworker, this is for you.

Why do everything with hand tools when there are perfectly good power tools available? The practical reason is lack of access to power tools or lack of space for them.

A small hand tool workshop is an excellent option for anyone with limited space, as little as 4'x6'. It can even be portable, with a workbench that folds up to be put aside when not in use.

The less practical reason is that it's a lot of fun, very satisfying.

Skills covered include sharpening, rough and fine stock preparation, simple and fine joinery including mortise and tenon and dovetails, and curved work. These are used in furniture making, cabinet making, musical instrument making, boat building, and home building and repair.

The course runs September 16 through November 16. During this period you can join the online discussion and ask questions. You have unlimited access to the videos during and after the course. You can watch them at your leisure on your schedule as many times as you'd like.

For a full episode guide, see this blog post: 59 Videos: Intro To Hand Tools.

This 7-minute video is a free sample lesson on rabbetting excerpted from the longer lesson:

This 11-minute video is a trailer that I have looping in the background when I do demonstrations (it's silent to avoid disturbing other demonstrators):



To go to the course description and registration page, as well as read reviews from past sessions, click here.