Sharpening for Free

And a book by Saunders

Sorry, you will still have to buy stones, grinders, sandpaper…but, the video is free! I just uploaded session 1-4 of my Foundation series to my youtube channel, you can watch it here. I show my methods for sharpening all sorts of carving tools, from drawknife to travisher. I hope you enjoy it.

Now for something new, a book recommendation. I’m obsessed with “A Swim In A Pond In The Rain” by George Saunders. Please don’t confuse me with some sort of literati. I may be pretentious, but I’m not well educated. I do think about craft all the time and this book is the best book on craft, creativity and being human that I’ve ever read. It has no woodworking content, it’s 7 short stories by “The Russians”, Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekhov and Turgenev. Did I lose you yet? The treat here is that Saunders is your guide to the tales. If you have ever felt empowered and enlightened taking a woodworking class or watching someone demystify a technique, you will have a similar experience here. Saunders is brilliant and his guidance opens up these short stories and reveals the mastery that makes them so powerful.

In the first one, he walks you through page by page as you read and the rest he discusses them after you read them. His insights into how the tales are built are informative, hilarious and insightful. There is nothing dry about this, it’s a romp. He shows how asking questions can be a path to creation and understanding. It’s one thing to read a story and understand the action, it’s another to see behind the scenes to see how it’s built to impact the reader. I can’t put it down and can barely make it a few pages without having to stop to think about what I’ll read and learned. The book listed at the bottom of the page “Lincoln In The Bardo” is stunning as well, another book that I haven’t just “read”, but will be reading for a long time.