I’ve lost count of how many chair legs I’ve turned. Dozens, at least. And yet every time I set the gouge to a fresh piece of wood, it feels like the first time.

People ask if it gets boring, doing the same cut over and over. It doesn’t. There’s a Harris Tweed weaver named Marion Campbell that the photographer Dewitt Jones likes to talk about. When someone asked her what she thought about while she worked, she said, 

“When I weave, I weave.” That’s the whole answer, and it’s mine too. Turning a leg is like anything worth doing well: you and the lathe, the knife and the wood, all working together. None of us operating alone. When it’s going right, I can’t tell you where my part ends and the wood’s part begins.

I remember when I was starting out, how hard I concentrated on every cut. I was so far in my head, thinking through every step, that the thinking got in the way of the work. What I needed then was to let go of all that head knowledge and just make the chair. That’s where the ease comes from. That’s what makes this work good.

I still study the craft. I watch the videos, I read the books, I never stop learning something new about wood or tools or technique. But there’s a difference between learning how to make a chair and making one. At some point you have to put the books down and let your hands take over.

I used to joke that I make chairs because they don’t have corners. Most woodworkers spend their whole careers chasing a perfect square edge, and here I am making curves on purpose. But that’s not really why I do it. I make chairs because nothing else I’ve found asks for my whole self the way this does.

When I’m turning a leg, shaving a spoke, or carving a seat, there’s nothing else that matters. Just the wood, the tool, and the next cut. That’s the whole job, right there.

I didn’t learn any of this on my own. A lot of what I know, and a lot of what keeps me inspired, comes from watching and learning from people further down this road than I am. I want to name a few of them here.

Curtis Buchanan, chairmaker, mentor, and friend, in Jonesborough, Tennessee. He’s been building Windsor chairs since 1983, the same way they were built two hundred years ago, and he’s generous enough to teach it freely to anyone willing to watch and learn. Curtis taught me this craft directly. He’s my teacher, and my friend, and Elia and I share that same root.

Elia Bizzarri, chairmaker in Hillsborough, North Carolina. He also apprenticed under Curtis and has gone on to become one of the finest turners working today. His attention to the details of the craft has taught me a lot, and it means something to know we both learned from the same hands.

Josh Klein, pre-industrial wood artisan and editor of Mortise & Tenon magazine. His work looking closely at old, hand-built furniture, and thinking hard about what hand tools and machines each do to the person using them, has shaped how I think about this whole craft.

I’m grateful to all three of them, and to everyone else out there still doing this work by hand.