What I'm Working On -- Mitch Roberson

Member Name: Mitch Roberson

City/Town, State: Nashville, TN

Website or blog: https://furnitude.blogspot.com

Title of Woodworking Project: Tage Frid-inspired Three-legged Stool

Project Category: Seating

Description: I've always loved Tage Frid's three-legged stool and decided to make a pair of them. I had a couple of funky pieces of maple with knot holes in them that I thought could be an interesting take on Frid's design. The stool is like a mini-course on woodworking because it includes angled dovetails, a mortise-and-tenon joint, lots of shaping, wedged through tenons and complex angles. 

Please see this blog post that contains links to the articles I wrote about the stool on the Craftsy woodworking blog.

What I'm Working On

I'd like to introduce a new series of posts called "What I'm Working On" to highlight the work of our guild members. We invite you to send in a brief description of something you're making or have completed recently. Please fill out this form and send some photos to informationcumberlandfg@gmail.com.

Thank you!
Mitch Roberson

Vanderbilt Arboretum Tour for Smartphones

The Vanderbilt University campus is home to over 6,000 trees representing 190 species. Thanks to the biology department, there is now a way to tour the arboretum with help from a smartphone: http://vanderbilt.edu/trees/tours/ .  Each of the 60+ trees on the tour has its own webpage complete with photos, information about the species and the history of the specific tree. Some of the tree labels even have QR codes so you can scan them on your phone and be directed to the webpage. Whether you are a fan of Juglans nigra (black walnut) or Maclura pomifera (osage orange), it's great to see the trees in their natural setting.  

Fall Meeting Reminder

REMINDER

The Cumberland Furniture Guild Fall Meeting

The fall meeting will include a CNC demonstration by David Sapp as well as a demonstration of vintage hand tools by Bill Maddox

November 22, 2014

2:00 - 5:00 p.m.

The meeting will be held at Woodcraft, 209 S. Royal Oaks Blvd Ste. 164, Franklin, TN 37064

First Saturday Arts & Music @ Wedgewood/Houston

The Cumberland Furniture Guild is delighted to once again partner with Fort Houston to offer an opportunity for Guild members to show and sell work. This show will be Saturday, October 4, 2014. Every member is encouraged to show and sell his or her work as part of the monthly First Saturday Arts & Music @ Wedgewood/Houston. There is no fee involved. Just come set up your area and spend the evening meeting people, selling your goods and enjoying the atmosphere. The shows will run from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m.with set up starting at 9 a.m. that morning. We will be inviting the American Institute of Architects and Interior Design Associates to come see the work of our members. It will be an excellent opportunity to promote your business. Please take advantage of this great opportunity and let's show the community what talented members can be found in the Guild. If you are interested in participating or have any questions, contact Rita Kaplan at kaplanr@comcast.net.

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I showed some work at the last Ft. Houston event and was amazed at the number of people that came through. It is definitely an event worth attending, especially if you want to sell some things. Mitch

Guild Meeting Recap -- Jeff Miller on Design

On Friday night in a packed room at Fort Houston, the Cumberland Furniture Guild hosted furniture maker Jeff Miller to speak about design and the creative process. Jeff’s approach to design is more about problem solving than inspiration or even talent. He discussed how he makes time to play in the shop, encouraging new ideas to emerge. He also discussed standard methods such as using ratios to help make decisions, looking to nature for interesting shapes and setting structure and practicality aside to give room for surprises and novel connections. To see some examples of Jeff’s designs, have a look at his website here.

The Perfect Chair – The Jeff Miller Way!

Jeff Miller seems to be everywhere you go in woodworking these days. You see him on the cover of Fine Woodworking and Popular Woodworking magazines and in numerous articles and books. You can also see him August 8 & 9 in Middle Tennessee at The Cumberland Furniture Guild meeting and a Saturday workshop on chair design. His work is just by Jeff’s nature “perfection!”

I was visiting with Jeff recently in his Chicago studio and he gave me a tour of how one of his “perfect” chairs was developed over a twenty-year period. Iteration after iteration was tried to achieve the vision Jeff started with. Jeff shows it takes patience, persistence and talent to achieve his beautiful work. Jeff will share with us his process and help us design more comfortable, beautiful and durable chairs.

The following video tells about a recent workshop Jeff taught on the subject of chair design. I hope you'll join us at our Guild meeting on August 8 from 7 pm - 9 pm at Fort Houston (500 Houston Street, Nashville, TN 37203).

Chuck Brock

Welcome to the Cumberland Furniture Guild Blog!

As another way to reach out to Guild members and prospective members, we are launching the Cumberland Furniture Blog to compliment our website and Facebook efforts. We will be posting announcements of meetings, events and opportunities for our members to promote, showcase and sell their work. It will also include interesting links, videos, blogs and articles on relevant woodworking topics.

The blog will be a reflection of our guild, so we hope you will contribute. As a way of sharing our woodworking experiences, I invite you to submit (via this form) a description of a project you are working on or have recently completed. These posts will make up a series we’re calling “What I’m Working On” and will be tagged so they will be easy to find and share. It’s always fascinating to see the range of projects our members are tackling in their shops. We will also highlight members’ blogs, so please let us know if you write one.

The blog is a work in progress and will definitely change over time. We wanted to get going now as a way to help promote our upcoming workshop with Jeff Miller. We invite you to share the blog on your social media. And we invite your feedback and contributions. There is a box to the upper right with links to the Guild website, our Facebook page and our new Twitter account.

Thank you,

Mitch Roberson