About

Sticks and Glue

Joseph carving details in the UW-Stevens Point cupola. Photo by Tom Charlesworth

I began providing custom woodworking and restoration services to individuals, churches, antique dealers, corporate offices and universities in the early 1990s. Throughout the successful as well as challenging times I have managed to maintain both an enthusiasm for learning about my craft and passing it on through teaching.

I will be adding posts of work that I have done; this includes both newly made projects and furniture restoration jobs. My goal in all of this is to help folks explore the subjects and help them learn a bit, or simply satisfy their curiosity about the subject. If you have any questions, I’ll do my best to answer them for you. If you have ideas that you would like me to cover in a blog post I’d be interested in hearing about that.

There are a lot of ways to approach a project and each individual or shop will likely have their opinion of how work should be done, and that’s as it should be. My mentor told me to visit any shop that I was invited to because there was always at least one good thing to learn from the experience. So, look around here and elsewhere, find what work style resonates best with your inclinations and I wish you the best with all of your efforts!

A Word About Photos

If there is such a thing as a genetic predisposition towards photography I do not have it. I have learned very slowly and relied for years upon the kindness of others to take pictures for me; it was only with the smart phone that I began to get tolerable photos. Many of the photos I have taken of restoration work in progress were not taken anticipating their use in an explanatory blog; they were simply for my reference. As I move forward I will be taking photos with sharing them in mind.