I’m working on replacing my porch furniture, and the side table was the worst of the lot so it got replaced first.

I’ve built a few little tables by now and I’ve got a lot of the process down. I used this one as an excuse to practice making actual mortise and tenon joints instead of the loose tenons I’ve used in the past. The mortises that the center brace sits in were chiseled by hand, the others are routed.

I’m thinking of making a couple outdoor-friendly morris chairs to replace those old iron ones. That’ll be a minute though.

    • Captain AggravatedOP
      211·
      6 months ago

      The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing were one of those sects of mutant Christianity that happen all the time in the United States, they were nicknamed “Shakers” because let’s be real nobody’s going to actually call them The Organization Of The United Brotherhood Of Jesus’ Best Friends Forever And Ever Society…and because their worship services involved jumping up and dancing. To quote a Crash Test Dummies song, “And when they went to their church, they shook and lurched all over the church floor.” This is also how the Quakers got their name. Yes, as in the oat mascot.

      They believed in separating themselves from society, they took some passage in the bible that says something like “of man and woman was He” to mean God was both gendered and thus they had both men and women in positions of leadership in the church, though they did pretty strictly conform to gender norms in the workplace; women worked indoors cooking, doing laundry, practicing crafts etc, men worked the fields and workshops. They were so celibate that men and women weren’t even allowed to use the same staircase, which is largely why this comment is written in the past tense.

      They’re a bit like the Amish in that they associated simplicity with piety, though they weren’t deliberately retro, there were many notable Shaker inventors, along with artists and musicians. The song “Simple Gifts” was composed by a shaker. They also strongly agreed with the statement “Idle hands are the devil’s playthings” and so they were all about hard work and craftsmanship. Which is why today they are strongly associated with a style of simple yet well made furniture.

      Shaker furniture tends to have few if any features intended for decoration, instead deriving beauty from well-chosen proportions and symmetry. They eschewed metal handles and so when a piece has doors or drawers it will have simple turned wooden knobs. Occasionally they would allow such things as tapered legs or chamfered edges, as I have added to this piece, but they would make mission-style furniture seem downright ornate. They did have a tendency to stain or paint their pieces in solid colors, often red or orange but sometimes green. Shaker furniture tends to be the platonic ideal of whatever it is; it’s difficult to describe a shaker chair as anything more than "a very well made, simple wooden chair.’

      Related to shaker furniture, they always installed a wooden rail along the walls of their buildings with evenly spaced pegs, which could be used to hang such items as clocks, small cabinets, clothing, or even lighter items of furniture such as chairs when not in use.