Why can't I just do it right the first time?

As I've mentioned before in this blog, my mother sewed pretty well all my clothes until I was through school. She did very meticulous work and I can remember her saying with some exasperation, "Why is it that I always have to pick out seams?" I, and perhaps she, actually thought that there would be a project where she wouldn't have to pick out any seams.

Ways it didn't work

Now that I've been at it long enough to call myself a woodworker I see the whole business of having to redo things a bit differently.  I'm currently at work on a box project for a friend.  The boxes themselves are not complicated yet, I'm on my ninth or tenth attempt to get it right. These boxes do have to be a certain size and shape to hold table napkins. The design is basic: four equal sides with a groove cut to house the bottom of the box. No lid, no hinges. It's amazing to me how many creative ways I can get it wrong. I must have made three or four attempts where the sides turned out to be too short because of one mistake or another.  Then there were the mitres that didn't quite come together. The version I worked on last night really looked like it might be successful until I cut the grooves for the bottom in the wrong location despite measuring twice and cutting once.

One I didn't intend to make

Because of all of this I am learning. I usually don't make the same mistake in exactly the same way: I find new and exciting ways to make it. I've also learned that I have a choice at each juncture: I can throw up my hands and quit, get annoyed and throw wood, get annoyed and quit for the day, or laugh and try it again remembering Thomas Edison and the light bulb. I suppose you might say I'm learning patience. I'm learning that nobody is going to fix it for me although I can ask for help to unravel a problem if I'm stuck.  Nobody is going to make me redo it. I can walk away any time I want or I can choose to, "Chalk it up to experience,"(one of my mother's favourite sayings) and try it again. Most of all, I've learned that I probably won't do it right the first time and that, in fact, most people don't do it right the first time.

I've been fortunate enough, through the the kindness of friends and internet, to hang out in various woodworkers' shops to watch them work. These folks are far beyond my skill level and they still make mistakes. Often their mistakes don't require them to start from the very beginning  but they do require a certain amount of head scratching to figure out what do do next. As skill increases the standard of what is acceptable increases. Maybe there are some people who can complete a project without having to redo anything but I don't think I'm going to aspire to that. If it happens I'll get out the fireworks and have a huge celebration and if it doesn't, I'll shake my head at my infinitely creative ability to get it wrong, give myself a break and then return to the shop to try again. Woodworking is what I love to do. It is fascinating enough to keep at it even as the burn bin fills up and the line of boxes I didn't intend to make lengthens. I'll head back into the shop later today and maybe this will be the day I finish the napkin box.

Unexpected Treasures

It's no secret that I have too many books. I don't know how that happens.  I make piles of books to give away to second-hand book sales and still my shelves are full.  I make it a rule not to buy a book unless I can't get it as an audiobook (first choice) or an e-book (second choice) but there are some books that aren't available in either format.  Then there are the magazines.  I read some of them and then give them away to unsuspecting teacher friends for art projects or I put them in the recycling. That doesn't apply to the woodworking mags though. I keep them and they are taking up more and more shelf space. I have gone to an online subscription for one of them and I find I don't look at it very often and I like being able to trot out to the shop with several magazines on a given topic under my arm.

I recently discovered that the public library will accept books, up to 20 at a time. Good chance, I thought, to go through my books, put some in a bag and drop them off at the library the next time I'm by.  I started on a box in the basement that I haven't opened for quite a while thinking that I could easily just put the contents in the bag. If I had dumped them into the bag without looking that would have worked; however I didn't.  I took each one out and looked at it. Some I put back in the box; some went into the bag, and others I brought upstairs to have a look at before I put them in the bag.

Six made the trip upstairs, books by Thornton W. Burgess that I remember loving as a kid.  One has my father's name in it and the inscription, "Christmas 1920."  My dad would have been 7 years old. I think Mum read all of the books to me and I probably had all of them at one time.  Somehow these six have survived the cut. I chose the one with Dad's name in it. The cover has come off and there are stains on some of the pages.  My ten or eleven-year-old hand added my name to the front of the book and recopied the title. As I read The Adventures of Prickly Porky I found myself smiling and then laughing out loud at the antics of the anthropomorphic animals. I was prepared to turn up my nose: talking animals sometimes have a bad rap in children's literature. I was delighted all over again.  Yes, the stories are a bit preachy in spots but the characters are engaging and, although they talk (sometimes in accents), they behave very much as animals do.  Even though the porcupine and the dog both have names and personalities, the porcupine curls up and whacks the dog across the snout with his tail when the dog comes close enough to sniff him. The dog runs off in pain and the porcupine uncurls himself and goes about his business. That's what dogs and porcupines do. None of the major characters is killed off by their natural enemies but I have no doubts in reading the stories that they could be. That's what predatory and prey species do.

I wanted to find out more about the guy who wrote these books so I went off on a google hunt and turned up some information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thornton_Burgess He was prolific and there is a school and a couple of conservation organizations named after him. He wrote an autobiography which I'd like to read but it's not available as an e-book and the two copies I managed to track down are going for $85.00 US.  I don't want to read it that badly. There is one volume of his collected works available as an e-book but not in Canada. By that point I realized that I was kidding myself if I thought I was going to put those books in a bag for the library. I'm going to read the other five and then put them back into the box in the basement where I can discover them all over again in a few years. In the meantime I'll attack the bookshelves in my study to see if I can't get twenty books to put in the van for the next time I'm near a library.