Authentic Arts & Crafts Furniture Projects by the editiors of Popular Woodworking

Our house is a very, very, very fine house, with two cats in the yard… thirteen hundred square feet, four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a garage, and a hot tub in the backyard. I love it.

The bedrooms are all very small, and luckily it’s just the two of us (for the time being). That gives us one master bedroom, one guest room, and “his” and “her” rooms for our own stuff. We both have a lot of stuff. My room, of course, has bookcases along the walls, a comfy reading chair, and a work table for my various craft projects. E’s room has two computers, two printers, three electric guitars, an amplifier, and one chair.

Sometimes we huddle in E’s room in front of the computer looking things up on the internet or playing video games. Doing anything truly productive gets very uncomfortable for me because there is only one chair. I’ll start standing up, then start leaning on E. After a while I’ll squat on my haunches or try sitting on E’s lap until he starts groaning in pain.

I finally came up with a great idea. “Why don’t we get another chair for this room?” But buying furniture is very difficult for me psychologically—I am always afraid that I’ve bought the wrong thing, spent too much, and I desperately fear increasing the clutter in our house, unless the clutter is both aesthetically pleasing and of high quality. My next great idea solved most of these problems. “Hey—why don’t you make a chair for this room?”

This idea is not exactly as crazy as it sounds. Last year, E and I bought an old library card catalog from Ebay to convert into a side table. E built a low table for the card catalog to sit on, so that the surface was just the right height for setting drinks and the telephone on. Since then, we’ve been spending a lot of time (and money) at Sears, building his tool collection for his garage “shop.”

Then I did myself one better. “Ooh! You could make a rocking chair!”

E was game. He said if I could find plans for a rocking chair, he could at least try. So I went online and found a book called Authentic Arts & Crafts Furniture Projects by the editors of Popular Woodworking. I love the clean lines of the Arts & Crafts style, and the way the shapes are solid and masculine without being harsh. I thought the Limbert rocker in the book would look great in E’s room.

In fact, the book is full of beautiful projects, including a Morris chair, a Stickley side table, and beautiful, beautiful Greene & Greene entry bench. I can’t afford to buy any of these antique items, so I’ll just have my husband make replicas. Except… E has to learn how to use all the tools he’s bought. Then, his first project from the book will be the mirror frame made from only four pieces of wood. From there, he’ll progress to more advanced projects. The rocker, being one of the most difficult projects in the book, may be a long time coming. That's all right. I have something to look forward to.

Authentic Arts & Crafts Furniture Projects by the editiors of Popular Woodworking

Tags: books arts+crafts+furniture carpentry popular+woodworking