Wish you could fill your home with charm? Try making these fabulous projects: a rooster crooning a barnyard welcome, a loving piglet covered in pink hearts, a black cat bedecked in jack-o'-lanterns, a beautiful blueberry step stool, and dozens more of the most delightful country-style designs ever! Every pattern is here, including helpful color drawings illustrating each decorative layer, from base to shadow and highlights, to final details.

This major illustrated study investigates farmhouse and cabin furniture from all over the island of Ireland. It discusses the origins and evolution of useful objects, what materials were used and why, and how furniture made for small spaces, often with renewable elements, was innate and expected. Encompassing three centuries, it illuminates a way of life that has almost vanished. It contributes as much to our knowledge of Ireland's cultural history as to its history of furniture. Lavishly illustrated with a mass of the author's own photographs, mostly in colour and many previously unpublished, it draws on several decades of fieldwork, underpinned by academic research. It looks at influences such as traditional architecture, shortage of timber, why and how furniture was painted, and the characteristics of designs made by a range of furniture makers. The incorporation of natural materials such as bog oak, turf, driftwood, straw, recycled tyres or packing cases is viewed in terms of use, and durability. Chapters individually examine stools, chairs and then settles in all their ingenious and multi-purpose forms. How dressers were authentically arranged, with displays varying minutely according to time and place, reveal how some had indoor coops to encourage hens to lay through winter. Some people ate communally or slept in outshot beds, in the coldest north-west, this is illustrated through art as well as surviving objects. Hanging cradles and falling tables are discussed. A chapter is devoted to the hearth and the shrine, another focuses on small furnishings, such as horn spoons, wooden drinking vessels, basketry, tin-ware, aluminium, coarse earthenware and spongeware pottery.

"..."The Stick Chair Book" is divided into three sections. The first section, "Thinking About Chairs," introduces you to the world of common stick chairs, plus the tools and wood to build them. The second section - "Chairmaking Techniques" - covers every process involved in making a chair, from cutting stout legs, to making curved arms with straight wood, to carving the seat. Plus, you'll get a taste for the wide variety of shapes you can use. The chapter on seats shows you how to lay out 14 different seat shapes. The chapter on legs has 16 common forms that can be made with only a couple handplanes. Add those to the 11 different arm shapes, six arm-joinery options, 14 shapes for hands, seven stretcher shapes and 11 combs, and you could make stick chairs your entire life without ever making the same one twice. The final section offers detailed plans for five stick chairs, from a basic Irish armchair to a dramatic Scottish comb-back. These five chair designs are a great jumping-off point for making stick chairs of your own design. Additional chapters in the book cover chair comfort, finishing and sharpening the tools. From the author: "When I first wrote 'The Stick Chair Book' in 2021, I was also fighting cancer. So I hammered out the text with urgency and the desire to record every fragment of information I knew about chairmaking. "To be fair, that's usually how I go about writing all my books. But then I typically take a couple months off, put the manuscript aside, then revisit it with fresh eyes and a sharpened pen. My final revisions remove about 10-20 percent of the original material. The stuff I cut is usually chapters that don't match the tone of the rest of the text. Or I snip sections that aren't as relevant as when I first wrote them. I also smooth out the writing and add bits of information I'd forgotten during the first brain-to-fingers dump. "And that's exactly what I've done for this revised edition. As a result, the text is 10.1 percent shorter than the first edition. It's more to the point. And it's where the manuscript would have ended up under normal conditions..."--Publisher's website.

A whole clan of colorful characters comes to life in this collection of rustic carving patterns. The carving lessons demonstrate how to use the quick and easy clean-cut method to impart warmth and personality to each of the ten Ozark folk style caricatures—from Ma and Pa to Ol' Blue the coon hound. Very few tools are required and technical notes advise artisans on how best to experiment with tool sharpening. Stains and paints are also addressed, including an easy formula for wood stain that can be mixed in a blender. There are even a few down-home tales along the way, bringing a little bit of country into the woodshop.

Provides step-by-step instructions on wood finishing techniques covering such topics as tools and materials, staining, glazing, and avoiding common mistakes.

First published in 2002, Living Wood is both a practical manual and an inspirational guide, updating much of the information included in Mike's best-selling book Green Woodwork. Living Wood covers: • Becoming a green woodworke--Mike's story, from playing in the woodlands to owning a share in a woodland in Herefordshire • Buying, managing, and harvesting a woodland; • Developing woodland facilities, including tracks, steps, huts, a barn, a kitchen, and a compost toilet • Setting up a woodland workshop--plans for a shelter and updated designs for a shaving horse, a pole lathe, and other green wood-working tools and devices • Making ladder-back chairs, including cleaving, steam-bending, and techniques for ultra-tight joints without glue • Seating chairs with bark and with cord • A comprehensive list of suppliers, woodland organizations, and books Now in its fourth edition, Living Wood includes a selection of photographs of Mike’s latest workshop at Brookhouse Wood.