Jan. 3, 2024
I can’t recall the first time I met Kale. She worked at the bakery on Pike Street where we would buy pastries for our woodworking students. She was the dark-haired one. The other employee was the light-haired one. Both were efficient and pleasant. Perfect.
One day, however, Kale asked a question as I was cashing out.
“Aren’t you the guy at Lost Art Press who makes chairs?” she asked. “I’m, like, really interested in chairs….”
Those are magic words to me, and so I introduced myself and told her I’d drop off a book and my card if she wanted to follow up. I did (and bought an almond croissant).
When I do this, nothing comes of it about 100 percent of the time. That’s OK. You don’t catch a fish every time you drop your hook (unless it’s at an apartment complex where their weird pond is crawling with crappie and you have a bag of corn and…I digress).
Kale asked to come in for a visit. We talked about chairs. What she liked and what she was after. She was calm, but also focused and intense. I was, of course, stuttering and unable to make eye contact because I’m an all-around goofball.
Somehow we agreed to build a chair together. It would be at a slow pace because she had a full-time job (and so did I). I didn’t think anything would come of it (because it never has before).
But on the day we agreed to go to the lumberyard, Kale showed up. Ready. And listening.
We bought some black cherry for her chair. And by the next week we broke it all down into components for her chair (I chose ash for mine). While introducing Kale to the woodworking machines, I was struck by how relaxed she was with the operations. She listened to the instructions and did what I asked.
Wow. That never happens.
I showed her how to turn tenons on her legs and stretchers. I walked away after I was confident she knew the ropes. I went to my bench knowing I’d have a couple hours to myself to work.
Ten minutes later, Kale walked in with the tenons done. Perfectly.
This pattern continued. Kale handled each task with almost too much ease: mortising the seat, drilling the stretchers, saddling the seat.
It made me think. She said her dad had done some woodworking. She had taken some pottery classes. Had done some art school. But nothing that said: Yes, that’s why Kale is a savant.
At some point we concluded it was two things: serendipity and ignorance. The serendipity I’ll deal with another day. Let’s talk about ignorance.
I teach people almost every day who have read thousands of words about mortising but have never cut a mortise.
What if we reversed that sentence?
What if the student had cut thousands of mortises but had never read a single word about the process?
When I teach people who haven’t ingested all the woodworking dogma before getting to work, I find they have an easier time.
When my daughter Katherine was about 9, I taught her to sharpen and cut dovetails in one afternoon. She did both operations with ease. No stress. And her results were nothing to be ashamed off. Her block plane was sharp and her dovetails were tight.
So Kale listened to instructions and followed them. But there was more than that. After a few sessions, Kale said the Second Set of Magic Words.
“I have become completely consumed by chairs,” she said. “I’ll be looking at my phone and realize I have been staring at chairs the whole time.”
This is what we call Chair Disease.
At that moment I thought that maybe, if we’re lucky, this relationship might become an important one. I am a realist when it comes to these things. There are lots of easier way to make a living than making furniture. People move, fall in love, want to live their lives. And chairs fall to the wayside.
All this is natural and expected (for normal folk).
So after Kale admitted she had Chair Disease, I asked her: “Want to be my assistant during a class?”
She said yes.
And the hook has been set.
Editor’s note: This is the first post of many about the training of Kale Vogt. Posts will go up every Thursday morning. Some posts will be written by Kale and some by me. The goal is to give you insight into the sometimes-difficult process of becoming a professional woodworker. And the sometimes-difficult process of hiring a trainee and investing your life in them. For the next couple months, all the posts will be free for everyone. After that, we will have a paywall. About one-third of the posts will be free, with the others reserved for paying subscribers.
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Some of my toughest students to teach have been the ones who think they know everything and don't want to listen and learn. Other tough students have been the ones with zero knowledge and didn't want to listen or learn...
I'm very interested to follow along.
I've always been interested to compare a person's learning curve with prior knowledge. Some with no prior knowledge learn very fast. And the opposite is true. But of course, some experienced people also pick new things up right away. I'm not sure if there is a formula (or calculus) to knowledge/experience/learning. But it's interesting to ponder.
It's great to see Kale aware of chairs now that they're into them. I recall when I started carving that i noticed acanthus leaves are literally everywhere. Everywhere. And back when Chris first wrote about three-legged chairs, I noticed one in an old episode of Columbo while at a friend's house. I pointed, excitedly, and my friends thought I was daft.