CFDA Newsletter

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

There is a call for entries for the Deceptive Design Show.
Please go to http://deceptive-design.com for more details.

We are hosting our first-ever juried furniture exhibition with the Chicago Chapter of the Industrial Design Society of America, to be held Oct 08 to May09 at the Chicago Cultural Center! Interested in partnering with a IDSA member to create a winning entry? Want to discuss sponsorship opportunities for the show? Meet and greet IDSA and CFDA members at the launch party, and check out the newly launched site for more information. Jefferson Tap, 325 N. Jefferson St, Chicago. FREE

ANNOUNCEMENT - from JUDITH DIASSELLISS (webmaster)

If there are ANY EVENTS at all that anyone would like to have posted, please send me an e-mail at any time and I can update the calendar for you!

my e-mail is jd@graphicnomads.com

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Program Schedules:

May 13- Gothic Architecture, A Love of Geometry and Proportions. Hal Link will share his enthusiasm for gothic architecture and show how it has influenced his furniture design. Hal is a relatively new member. From what I've seen of his work he is coming from a unique place. Come get acquainted with both Hal and his muse

Not yet scheduled- The Craft Schools. Let's hear about what goes on at the craft schools that have established themselves around the country from people who've been there. We're talking about Andersen Ranch (Barry Newstat?), Penland (Tim Cozzens), Marc Adams (Still need someone) and the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship (Tor Faegre). Can anyone think of a school we should add to this list?

Future Months:
The following programs are in the pipeline but are still under development.
Look for specifics in the future newsletters.
- The Design of Built in Cabinet
- Presenting Your Designs to Customers

September 6 - Reproduction Furniture. John Gush will show examples of English and South African furniture that he has very exactingly reproduced. His shop is modestly equipped, so John relies on skill and ingenuity to deliver the spectacular craftsmanship evident in his pieces. John's work has been featured on the back cover of Fine Woodworking Magazine. Don't miss this one!

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CFDA Meeting Report:

CFDA Minutes - April 8, 2008

There was a 6:00 Rising From Ashes meeting, which went long and so the regular CFDA meeting upstairs didn't begin until 7:25PM.

14 members were in attendance

Chris started off by announcing that the CFDA/IDSA joint show kickoff party would be held on Wednesday, April 30th at 6:30 PM at the Jefferson Tap (325 N. Jefferson). This will be an opportunity for each group to meet and greet with each other and to start any team building inroads.

On April 24th there will be a show at Design Within Reach, at the 1574 N. Kingsbury location, from 6:30 to 9:30.

And the Deceptive Furniture show call for entries is up on the website. The deadline is coming up at the end of May, so time is short. And the show is still in need of sponsorship.

John introduced some of the topics for the Rising From Ashes show that were covered in the committee pre-meeting from earlier in the night. The Chicago Botanical Gardens were still being pursued (although by the time this newsletter hits the website we'll have found out that the show wasn't on-topic enough for them and that they eventually declined involvement).

The Notebaerte Children's Museum is still on the table, and an application was submitted to the Illinois State Museum system. If accepted to the State Museum this show has the possibility of traveling to four separate venues throughout the state. And this would cast out the time span for the show quite considerably, likely well into 2010 or 2011, depending on site availability.

And the RFA show needs your photos and artists statements ASAP. Please get this into Dolly, soonest.

Lloyd reported that the CFDA currently has approximately $5,000 in the bank. The recent influx of new members and application fees from the RFA show caused the increase from last month's report.

The business meeting concluded at 7:45

Program:

When building large-format tables we're often presented with a raft of challenges. Those can include structure, proportion, transportation and installation (!) as well as design choices to take advantage of the best utilization of materials. Several designers presented photos of some of their large tables and discussed the challenges and strategies needed to execute them.

Lloyd started with a 40" by 104" table made from African mahogany. He noted that to his eye tables are all about edges. So he tends towards treating the edges of the tables in such a way that they become features in and of themselves. But he also discussed that these large-format items get extremely heavy. To combat this he's been using end grain balsa cores that he's purchased online from traditional boat building sources. When mated with 1/8" MDF faces the table tops are strong and rigid, yet light enough for two people to handle easily.

His second table was a 48 inch wide by 120 inch behemoth that sported a laurel burl top which was dyed to look similar to stone. He finished the frame and legs separately to keep a crisp set of details. And, of course, there were weight and maneuverability issues.

His five-foot diameter multi-leaf table required a rethink of traditional slide and connector hardware. After sampling many different alternatives on the market he ultimately settled on knockdown-style hardware from Haeflele. Here the positions of the hardware in a multi-leaf situation are absolutely critical. You can't count on the leaves always being installed in the same order. So to account for this the hardware locations need to be precise enough to ensure dependable interchangeability

John introduced us to a six and a half foot table made from urban-sourced walnut. And because it wasn't traditional FAS stock that's found in a lumberyard, the construction strategy needed to account for the inevitable grain irregularities. So he introduced an inlay stitching effect which allowed him to work around the defects and use shorter pieces. This table also was built to include integral pawls that recess into mortises and which lock expansion leaves onto the outer ends to increase the table length. The engineering and execution of the pawl system was truly ingenious and isn't something you see every day.

John remarked that working with large tops is not easy. It requires care and attention to rhythm, edge quality, color, figure and maneuverability.

Bill First presented a cherry kitchen table that sported 1-5/8" solid cherry top and a trestle base with wedged through-tenons. His second piece, a shaker trestle table with breadboard ends on a one inch top required that he use Photoshop to help him scale up drawings. He needed to keep very close attention to a set of shape and size ratios. He printed out his results and spray-mounted them to a 1/2" MDF template to ensure repeatable results that met the size and shape requirements.

And his third example was a small-ish cherry table with multiple leaves. He used metal slidees as his guide mechanism and after the two 20" leaves were inserted the small table can grow to become 88 inches in length.

Chris presented images of some truly large tables from other parts of the world. A fish drying table that sits in southern Malawi covers what many would consider the size of a modest backyard. This confirmed that scale truly can be driven from the need that the table will serve.

An artsy table at well over eight feet tall incorporated high-back chairs as the actual legs. Whimsical, but it pointed out that the definition of a 'large table' can be stretched quite a ways before breaking.

Similar images of a G-shaped conference room table, a long commercial diner's counter and an ancient Roman reclining table brought us a question. Is the seating defined by the table, or is the table defined by the seating? This sparked a good bit of discussion and it segued into structural and electrical/data/ multimedia requirements for modern large-format tables in corporate installations.

The idea of a large table, it seems, is plastic. It's not ridgidly fixed in shape, form or duties. It can be bent, stretched and shaped to just about any geometry we require. The only real hard constraints seem to revolve around handling and transportation. Past that anything seems to be possible.

The meeting concluded at 9:00 PM.

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Member Profile:
Matt Seiler

My journey into woodworking began fairly young. In preparation for making my first Cub Scouts pinewood derby car in 1974, my father gave me a slim hardbound book named Basic Woodworking Processes, by Herman Hjorth. He had kept it since his grade school woodshop classes from the '50's. I still have it and can see that it has a 1935 publication date. It clearly wasn't new when he used it in school. I now recognize that this book is an obvious descendant from the Sloyd movement and it served as the cornerstone for my early approach to woodworking.

Together, that book and those wooden cars got me infected with the woodworking bug.

For the next six or eight years I spent a lot of time making dollhouse furniture for my sister and her friends. They all seemed to have the same elaborate and upscale dollhouses by Lundby, and the furniture was really well made (and not cheap!). So I was tapped to fill in the odd gap here and there in their collections.

Modern woodworkers would recognize these as maquettes. But instead of using the model as a study prior to building a full-scale version, here the miniature was the end product.

Much to my parents' chagrin, I blasted through a lot of wood in those early years, with as many failures as successes. But I learned the working properties and limitations of building in small scale, as well as the use of solid, basic hand tools.

This was also the time period when an obscure little film called Star Wars burned into my adolescent mind. Suddenly I was building my own models, based on the movie, made from every small scrap of wood, metal and plastic that I could lay hands on. So in all, it's very fair to say that my early training was as a model maker.

Through all of this small-scale madness I learned to love the fabrication cycle. It was the event of the build, with its engineering and aesthetic challenges, that gave me a charge, and it still does. Here's where I got to tap into my father's Art Institute and automotive design training. During this time period he taught me how to 'see', and how to quickly develop isometric sketches to run through design possibilities. And, inevitably, this lead to a limited series of art classes to further train my hands to document what was in my imagination.

Wood then took a back seat through high school and college, where music took the forefront. Planes and rasps gave way to electric guitars and amplifiers as I performed on stage both in school and in clubs. I didn't pick up woodworking again until I bought a house in the early '90's. While doing some (not so small!) remodeling jobs I slowly built up a collection of tools and created a place to work. In hindsight, the early furniture pieces from this period were more than a tad crude, but as the tooling and my skills got better the end product improved quite a bit.

Then in 2001 I was caught in the maelstrom of the TechWreck and found myself with a lot of time on my hands after a sudden and unexpected company closure. I'd spent the 90's maintaining and programming large private telephone systems and inbound call centers. I realized after the closing announcement that it had actually become past time to transition to something a tad less frantic and a whole lot less stressful. So during the early part of this decade I split my days between freelance consulting for my old customers in the telecommunications world and gleefully making sawdust in my garage.

The work that I was able to find during this time period was a blend of custom furniture as well as some handyman-type services around the south and southwest suburbs. By the end of 2005 the telecom work had evaporated entirely (by design) and the woodworking had taken its place. And, thankfully, I stopped doing onsite remodeling work and focused entirely on fabricating in my garage shop.

Lately I've been fortunate to find a bit of a niche in making companion pieces to existing furniture. Then in 2001 I was caught in the maelstrom of the TechWreck and found myself with a lot of time on my hands after a sudden and unexpected company closure. I'd spent the 90's maintaining and programming large private telephone systems and inbound call centers. I realized after the closing announcement that it had actually become past time to transition to something a tad less frantic and a whole lot less stressful. So during the early part of this decade I split my days between freelance consulting for my old customers in the telecommunications world and gleefully making sawdust in my garage.

Lately I've been fortunate to find a bit of a niche in making companion pieces to existing furniture. Either the clients couldn't locate related items any longer, or the original manufacturers simply didn't offer companion pieces. This work is a tall challenge, as you need to be able to duplicate things like moldings, design motifs, proportions, wood tones as well as finish schedules from existing pieces. I've blown through dozens of board feet of samples just in pursuit of getting the color to match the existing pieces. It's tedious for sure, but it's amazingly satisfying when you nail it. And the look on the client's face makes all the fussy experimentation worthwhile.

And over the last couple of years I've taken on a role with Wood Magazine, serving as an online moderator for their forums. That's recently lead to being tapped for technical help for in-print articles and I've done some product reviews, and an in-print project design, all of which will grace the newsstands later in 2008.

It's been an interesting ride. And it looks like I need to keep my arms and legs inside the car at all times: this rollercoaster isn't done yet.