CFDA Newsletter

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

Meeting Program - Saturday, June 9 at 10:00 a.m. at Urban Forest Products in Libertyville. This is a morning meeting, with coffee and doughnuts and tour hosted by Bruce Horigan. You will see his sawmill and drying kilns and an impressive collection of lumber. After the meeting any one wanting to see the warehouse is welcome to do that too. Our warehouse (really just a storage site in Mundelein) is about 15 minutes farther northwest.

Directions to both follow.

The address of the sawmill is 535 Aptakisic Road Lincolnshire IL 60015. I'm attaching the directions that I give to most folks who come up to see us. They are fairly straight forward. You can map quest easily with this address.

To Sawmill:
94 or 41 to Deerfield Rd. West

Deerfield Rd west to Milwaukee Ave (Rt. 21)

Milwaukee Ave North (Right) to Aptakisic Rd. (0.9 miles) there is a Shell gas station on the north west corner and Aptakisic only goes West or left

Aptakisic Rd West (Left) go thru 2 lights,

(Barclay Rd is 2nd light & UAW building is on the north west corner) The sawmill is the first driveway past Barclay Rd.(right beside the UAW building) on the right. (North)

There is a small Sunrise Tree sign at the entrance to the yard. The saw mill is in the north-west corner.

To Warehouse:
Continue West on Aptakisic to the end @ Rt. 83.

83 North (right) past Half Day Rd./22 to Gilmer Rd.

Gilmer Rd. North/West (left turn) 3.2 miles

1st driveway on the right side after the intersection of Indian Creek Rd.

White farm house and garage.

If you cross RR tracks you have gone 3 driveways too far.

Call us with questions, we look forward to seeing you.
Erika Horigan
847-729-1023

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NOTE: There will be no meeting on the second Tues.

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Program Schedules:

July 10 - Lisa Elkins: My Work.
Lisa is another nearly new member. She currently teaches at UIC as a day job, and as we all saw at the Form Follows Form show, she is an accomplished designer. Let's see more.

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CFDA Meeting Report:

CFDA Minutes - May 8th, 2007

The meeting was called to order at 7:00 p.m. There were eight members in attendance.

Treasurer's Report - Lloyd Natoff reported all bills have been paid.

Newsletter Editor's Report -

Newsletter production -- Now that the Newsletter content, style and production process has become stabilized and professionally supported by Judith Diassellis, our website developer, Rob Frazier suggested that it would be helpful to the CFDA, and to the editor, if there were one or two members who could work with him to write up parts of the Newsletter and gain some familiarity with the process. This would facilitate the development of new features, spread the tasks of writing up the various sections and simplify the transfer of editorial responsibilities whenever that might be timely.

The editors suggestion regarding backup, as noted above, was approved. Chris Brandel and the editor would appreciate any volunteers.

The discussion also emphasized continued interest in the exploration of a section on Books of Interest, perhaps just a listing from time to time, or a brief review. The editor has received some book suggestions already and would welcome more.

Shows -

The IDSA (Interior Decorators Society of America) Show Committee met with its IDSA counterparts and is recommending that exhibitors endeavor to collaborate with members of the other society in some manner as yet unspecified. Further refinement of the deception theme is needed. And a venue has not yet been identified.

The President asked the following members to serve as a

Show Committee: Sean Scott, Chris David, Helen Maria Nugent, and Chris Brandel, with others to be added.

The Ash Borer Show planning has been slow this past month.

The Morton Arboretum has space for about 20-25 exhibitors. It is planned for Aug-Sept '08. Other venues of nterest include the Chicago Botanical Gardens, and the Village of Wilmette.

The Show Com members for this show are Dolly Spragins and Bruce Horigan, and if available, Helen M. Nugent.

Chris Brandel announced that he and Dolly Spragins will construct a list of tasks needing workers for these shows.

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Member Profile:
John Kreigshauser

What got me involved in furniture making and design? As a child I was always making things: tree houses, boats that barely floated, models of ships and planes. Then, one day a truck came to deliver several built-in cabinets that my father, an architect, had designed for our house. Even in their unfinished state, these cabinets struck me as beautiful, so precise and so perfect and so unlike the crude things I was making! I marveled at these cabinets. Of course in our daily life we are all surrounded by perfectly made products, so they are nothing remarkable, but perfect products, to my child brain, came from far away factories where they were somehow made by machines. These cabinets, on the other hand, were made by the guys who unloaded the truck. I was awed. How did they transform wood into such perfect things?

From earliest childhood my parents would give me tee squares and triangles for Christmas, but I wanted none of that. Instead, I determined to major in economics, which I did. However, by the time I graduated I realized that economics was just not for me. So I wandered about the country, hitchhiking and riding the rails and ended up in a saw mill camp on the California coast. Living with friends in an unfurnished cabin, I determined to make some furniture for the place. I got hold of some used tools and I've never looked back.

Quickly my interest grew beyond what I could do as a hobby, so I gave up teaching junior high and found work at commercial millwork and kitchen cabinet shops, until Jerry Green, a designer/maker in St. Louis offered me an apprenticeship.

Coming to furniture design by this route has given me an unusual perspective on the field. While others squabble about the relationship of art, craft and design, I additionally have a genuine respect for and serious roots in the trade of commercial cabinetmaking. I could never whole-heartedly embrace furniture as art because, in my mind, only very exceptional art pieces have enough aesthetic value to compensate for their loss of function. Craft is a troublesome area for me because when a piece is valued for its craft that typically means that the piece is about rarified levels of perfection which, again, means that the piece loses functionality. Alternatively, craft often means making gift items or collectables. Even though these find a ready market, somehow making collectables doesn't satisfy me. I would like the furniture to perform real service for real people. Design might seem to be the obvious alternative for me, but in actual practice, design is more about marketing than about making.

So at the end of the day I find myself between definitions, trying to find a path between conflicting approaches to designing, making and marketing furniture. One of the reasons I have been willing to invest so much time and energy to the CFDA is in order to create opportunities to see into other people's approaches to the field. I'm looking for someone whose work can inform me about what I'm doing!