Tomorrow, I am off to visit the guys and gals that put on Woodworking in America, and I am totally excited. Not just because it’s a great place to visit with friends (and dance on the tables of German-themed drinking establishments), or that there are awesome classes taught by talented woodworkers or that the marketplace is full of drool-inducing tools.

No, it’s because something about being in that environment ignites a spark in me.

Last year, as I was getting ready to head up to Covington, Kentucky, I was totally stoked. I had worked with the rest of the gang at the Modern Woodworkers Association planning a meet up. I had been in touch with the folks at Wood Talk Online about setting up a big get together. I was drafted into helping Roy Underhill run his audio-visual presentation (i.e. hauling a huge log around a conference room while he chopped at it with an axe).

But, I was totally blindsided by what was about to happen. You know, when you get a new woodworking book or magazine, you might bookmark a page about a particular project you might want to build. There is a totally different feeling, however, of looking at an example of something you want to build in person. That’s the feeling that overcame me when I saw Mike Siemsen’s Nicholson woodworking  bench in person. That’s the feeling that also overcame me when I saw Chris Schwarz’s Dutch tool chest in person.

Being in the room with these pieces, touching them, looking at them from different angles… it fired the right synapses and really brought it home for me.

So much so, in fact, that within a few weeks of getting back to the shop, I had started on my iteration of the Dutch tool chest, and, by the first week of December, I had my new Nicholson bench in place, ready to work. It was a veritable building boom!

I’m not making any promises this year that I will tackle the world, but the progress I have already made on the table in my shop this past weekend was definitely encouraged by the fact that I was going to be back in that environment.

It was Stephen Covey who wrote in the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People that one of the important steps was to ‘sharpen the saw.’  In many ways this is exactly what the annual pilgrimage to be among my peers is for me…a chance to take a new look at my craft and recapture the excitement…