DougStowe

Mark,
I'd go with boxes. And they aren't quite as time consuming if you make them in small batches. They are a great way to use some of the more interesting scraps that accumulate from larger projects, and a person can always find something around the house that would fit perfectly in a box.

In fact, giving boxes year after year would be a good idea. You can start your loved ones collecting. And yes, they travel well if you are going to fly home or away for the holidays.

Tom, Thank you for sharing my kids' video with a wider audience. Back in the days of educational sloyd, teachers knew that doing creative work with the hands was important for the development of character and intellect and that it also awakened the child's interest in learning.

We went down a long slippery slope of teaching to the test while in Finland where sloyd was first invented it is still a part of the national curriculum. While American kindergarten teachers are focused on getting kids to read, in Finland teachers and students are busy with crafts and woodworking. So while we start reading at 5 and they start reading at 8, by 8th grade (ages 13-14) they've left Americans in the dust, learning more in less time because they are ready for it. It is like the difference between pushing or pulling a rope.

While we have struggled to follow No Child Left Behind legislation, our children have been left behind in 15th place or worse in reading and math according to international PISA studies.

You learn some common sense stuff in the wood shop that all kids need. But since schools don't seem to get it quite yet, parents and grandchildren should take matters in their own hands. Limit your child's time with computer games and lead them to the wood shop. They will get the same hand eye coordination while doing something more tangible that can be shared with others. And their pride will be obvious. You might even get them hooked on an avocation that will last a lifetime.

At Clear Spring School this week we began our annual holiday toy making this week and our kids from pre-school through 12th grades will begin making toys for distribution through our local food bank. This will be our the 5th year of our toy making tradition.

North Bennet St. Industrial School and Gustaf Larsson's Sloyd Teacher Training School were actually separate institutions, both at the same location, 37 North Bennet Street, and both with the same benefactor, Pauline Agassiz-Shaw. Of the two institutions, the North Bennet St. Industrial School was founded first having grown from the North Bennet St. Industrial Home to become a school by around 1883. Agassis Shaw invited Gustaf Larsson to found the Sloyd School to share the North Bennet St. School premises in 1888.

By 1908, the 37 North Bennet Street Location had become too small for both schools, and so Mrs. Shaw built a new school for Gustaf Larsson's Sloyd Teacher Training at 7 Harcourt St. in Boston. You can find that building using Google or Google Earth including a street view. The building is currently occupied by a Property Development Corporation. Google 7 Harcourt St. Boston, MA to find it. Or you can visit my blog for a street view and floor plan. http://wisdomofhands.blogspot.com/2009/10/second-sloyd-training-school-in-boston.html

Miguel, great job with the video. American Woodworker has made my Sloyd articles from Woodwork Magazine available on-line at the following url: http://americanwoodworker.com/search/SearchResults.aspx?q=sloyd

I started making boxes as a way to keep busy between furniture commissions, so I have always done both. The boxes are sort of like a vacation to someplace I've been lots of times before... kind of relaxing in that I know exactly what comes next. Many fewer surprises to contend with. So the balance between working on boxes and doing one of a kind furniture is a natural.

Tommy, you are more than welcome. The divide down the middle adds interest, and few casual observers realize it has such a practical purpose.

About 3/4 of my best ideas come from not having something that I might think I need. (like a bigger planer) Good luck with the surgery. I hope you are not kept from the wood shop for long.

You can keep up with my work through my blogs, wisdomofhands.blogspot.com and boxmaking101.com

Doug

It is amazing how complicated simple things can be to make. The idea of through wedged tenons is simple. But each table has 22 tenons and an equal number of carefully placed mortises, and 44 carefully positioned wedges. So there are lots of parts, many operations. Simple and easy are not the same thing. I'm glad you like them and took the time to comment.

My earliest distinct memory of my dad was working in the driveway outside our home in Memphis. He was dripping sweat and stripped down to a sleeveless undershirt, and I was trying to learn to hammer without smashing my thumbs. Much later, when we were living in Omaha, Nebraska and he was managing a hardware store, he took an old shopsmith in on trade and bought it for my 14th birthday. Nowadays, a dad might give his son an iPhone, but I still have the shopsmith. I use it as a drill press and sometimes as my lathe. When I use it as a lathe, I can still feel my Dad's presence, over my shoulders as I guide tool to wood.

I will always be grateful that my father gave me the encouragement to work with my hands. When my daughter Lucy, (now a third year at Columbia and at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory for a summer internship in geophysics) was three I had a small table in the woodshop where she could take my scraps and glue and build things from her own imagination. We still have a small collection of those interesting objects. When Lucy turned her first wood on the shopsmith, I stood over her shoulders, my hands on hers and sensing my own father over my shoulders, his hands on mine. No doubt a father sitting down with a son or daughter to play video/computer games makes memories, too. But it is hard for me to imagine anything finer to share than working with wood.

Matt, a couple years ago when I was visiting my mother she asked, "Do you want those old shelves you made in junior high?" She had stored them in the basement from when I was in 7th grade. They brought back a flood of memories. They were the last project of the school year and I remember being in a rush to finish. When I was cutting out the shape with a coping saw, I noticed I was getting off the line and felt bad for a minute. Then I looked over at my neighbor who was drifting even more widely from the line. "I'm not doing THAT bad," I remember thinking.

Then I was driving in the nails to hold it together and one split the shelf as you can see in the photos I posted in the gallery. I showed it to the teacher hoping he could fix it or something. "It will be OK," he told me, "You've done a good job." I was crushed that my shelves weren't perfect, but since then I've learned that very little from the hands of man ever is. If it were perfect, we wouldn't have the same impulse to keep trying again and again and we would miss out on so much fun.

Sockets, accurately reflecting the shape of the stones are carved into the wood,, then the stones are glued in place with system 3 epoxy. I wrote about this technique in Fine Woodworking, number 187 in an article called Fresh Take on Table Tops.