As woodworkers, many times we try to figure out how to class our projects up. Maybe a decorative inlay. Relief carving. Proudly cut dovetails. The possibilities are endless.

But, many times, our projects turn out a little more bland than we would like. Why? Because, we don’t know exactly how to pull off these more interesting and – yes – even classy design elements. Instead, we turn to more of the tried-and-true tricks in our repertoires because that’s what we know. And, in many cases, our work starts to become easily identified as ours.

What we need – in addition to projects and techniques that add class – is a class to learn about projects and techniques. Classes can be offered at many locations.  Some are online. Others can take place at a community college or trade school.  Woodworking schools are great places to seek out some new knowledge and meet other hobby woodworkers who are into the craft.  And, in many cases, stores that sell woodworking tools are offering classes.  Woodcraft. Rockler. Lee Valley. Highland Hardware.

And, the newest entry into the field is taking place at  Infinity Cutting Tools at their new Oldsmar, Florida location. In a dedicated section of their spacious warehouse, David Venditto will be offering a number of classes on different projects and techniques to inspire wooodworkers to go on to bigger and better things in their shops. Woodworking experts will lead these classes, which will help take your work from nice to woah!

The first class is scheduled for Saturday, February 9, from 8 a.m. until 1 p.m. at Infinity’s offices.  During this class, participants can get the lowdown on how to get the most out of their routers.  Tampa Bay area furniture builder and woodworking teacher Kurt Raschke will touch on the many different operations that a router can do – inlays, joinery, moldings, and many more operations.  Hand held and table mounted routing will also be covered in detail, as well as bit selection and care.  I plan on being there for the class, and trust me, there will be lots of pictures!

While this is a great first offering, it’s not all that will be presented. In fact, this first class is just a taste of the future offerings.  It’s the first part of a series of classes including the basics on table saw set up and use and getting the most out of your planer and jointer. And, as future classes are planned, you will have a major say in what gets instructed.

So, what kinds of classes would you like to see? More hands-on how-to, projects that you will be proud to put in your living room, design that gets the proportions and wood choice down pat? Now is your time to help guide the development of this brand new woodworking school.

Oh, and look for a few posts from me as the courses get going. There may be some interesting techniques I can bring to my woodworking from them.

A funny thing happened on my way to being the Vice President of the St. Petersburg Woodcrafters Guild…

Let’s go back in time – a long time ago – to December of last year. The guild meetings we were attending were pretty cool. We got to talk about really cool stuff. Guild members showed off some cool projects. They were great.

The only problem was that the guild hadn’t yet embraced the magic of social media. There had been talk about getting on board with Facebook in the past, but there was very little push to make it happen. After all, things seemed to be going pretty well, and, gosh, that was pretty darned good.

Sure, there was talk that perhaps it might be good to revisit the idea, but, that was going to be a discussion for another day.

This past fall, during board elections, Dale Neff was chosen as president of the guild. Dale’s vision for 2013 was to reignite the enthusiasm of loyal guild members, attract new people to the guild and welcome members who had given up on the guild to come back to try it once again.

One of the things he did was to give direction to his new vice president – me – to get out there and promote the guild with an updated website and a reach out to the social media communities of Facebook and Twitter. So, out I went and started to get the guild’s presence online.  Now, there was some concern. What would happen to guild members who weren’t tech savvy or preferred to get their newsletters by mail?

No, this wasn’t an either-or proposition. In fact, we could easily accommodate the members who preferred the more traditional approach to things while going boldly into the online community.

Even though it has been just one month, how successful has our effort been?

Well, at our first meeting of the year, less than a week ago, we had six new folks show up to the meeting – because they had seen the meeting notice online. We also had several members who hadn’t been to meeting in the past year or so came out just to see what was going on. They were excited about the site, the social media outreach and they wanted to see what was going on.

And, this past weekend, we also ran a woodworking demonstration at the Folk Festival at Heritage Village. We had a few classic woodworking activities set up, and we threw the doors open at the beginning of the event. And the people came. Holy smokes, there were times during the day when it was darned near impossible to move in the building, with people crowded in to check out the happenings.

Many of those folks said they had heard about the event on the guild’s home page or on social media…

This recent spike in interest in the guild’s activities illustrates one very important reality – by promoting your guild, your blog, your woodworking event online, you can get the word out and get a lot more interest out in the community.

And, by doing that, you can help spread appreciation of woodworking. And, that’s not a bad thing at all!

In case you hadn’t figured it out yet, I run a woodworking blog called Tom’s Workbench.  Been at it for a few years, and put up a few posts…

Yeah. And the Grand Canyon is just a hole in the ground.

You would think that would be plenty to keep me busy, but not so.  You see, last month, I was installed as the St. Petersburg Woodcrafers Guild Vice President. Yes, this is the same position that the honorable John Nance Garner said isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit. But, that’s beside the point.

One of my duties with this position is to serve as the external affairs officer for the guild. Yes, that’s an emergency management term, but stick with me here. What this means is that I am in charge of the guild’s website and social media presence.

One of the first jobs I was tasked with was a redesign of the current guild website. The current guild website needs some help. First, it’s not the easiest of things to update, since it has to be done in HTML editing, and only one person has access to it.  This one person has done a great job, but recent job commitments have limited the amount of time he can spend on the site.

But, hey, that’s OK. The tough job of gathering the material for the site has already been done. This is good. What I wanted was a platform where I could work easily with the content and have most of the functions of the site done automatically. It also needed to be easy to put graphics, videos, links and the like into. I had heard that last year, the guild had considered creating a site on WordPress, the same platform that I run my blog.

So, with a little blogging hocus pocus, I was able to bring in some graphics and the content from the old site and voila – our new site. Please let me know what can be improved!

Another thing I was able to do was start up a Facebook page for the guild. I’m hoping that we’ll be able to do enough cool stuff to make a visit there worthwhile.

What’s next? I dunno… but I can tell you that I’m looking forward to it. Even though it’s a second blog…

Growing up in our modest two-story house in Bloomingdale, New Jersey, there were some places where we weren’t always welcome in the house. After all, my two brothers and I were pretty rambunctious kids, and the formal dining and living room weren’t places that my mom and dad wanted to replace furniture or broken china. These rooms were extra special places where my parents would entertain special guests on important holidays. Easter. Thanksgiving, Christmas Day.

Normally, those important guests and my parents would enjoy a few cocktails seated on the antique furniture, then retire to the dining room to enjoy the sumptuous food. The kids? We ate in the kitchen because, more than likely, we were going to end up with puddles of gravy or bits of food all over the floor.

But, there was this one day of the year when the rules were off. Christmas Eve. That day was so different from the other 364 days of the year. Typically, Christmas Eve would start off with my maternal grandparents coming to the house. They were going to spend the night there to enjoy the spectacle of three holiday-wired boys frantically unwrapping presents at 0-dark-thirty in the morning. But, that was hours off… the real fun was going to happen before then.

We would go to Christmas Eve mass at St. Mary’s church over in the neighboring town of Pompton Lakes. The church staff always decorated the altar beautifully, and we would fidget constantly, anxious to get home to the main event. Oh, we knew what was coming.. and we were looking forward to it like nobody’s business.

Once mass was over, we drove home where the magic truly began. We changed out of our fancy going-to-church duds and got into more comfortable clothes and assembled in the dining room. That’s when we began the traditional feast of the seven fishes.  From what I was told, the tradition comes from the Roman Catholic practice of observing a fast day before a major holiday. But, by fast, I don’t mean not eating… but abstaining from meat. Thus, the seafood-inspired menu.

My mom would start bringing out the food … and what food it was! Shrimp fra Diavolo. Clams casino. And, the star of the show – lobster tails. No, we weren’t a rich family, but on Christmas Eve, we celebrated. I can also remember my grandmother mixing up wine spritzers for me and my brothers – red wine and Sprite. We would eat like there was no tomorrow… And we enjoyed each other’s company gathered around that dining table in the room we weren’t normally allowed to be at. My grandfather would ask us where we thought Santa was. Dad would have to cut the meat out of mom’s lobster tail… she wasn’t one for cracking shells.

After the delicious meal, dessert would be served. We would eat such creations as Baked Alaska (browned meringue on top of frozen ice cream? How was that possible?) while the parents and grandparents would drink coffee and remind us that – if Santa was going to come visit our house – we had to be off to bed. But, before we retired for the night, we each got to open one present from a relative.. maybe from our grandparents. We raced off to bed, anxious for the morning to come.

It’s been more than three decades since those memories were made, but I still look back fondly on each of them. Christmas was great, but Christmas Eve still holds a special, magical place in my memory. When December 24 comes around, I forget that I’m in my 40’s, and the child inside me is allowed to join me in that special place around my dining table in my house. Tonight, we’ll have oysters on the half-shell. Steamed clams and mussels. Cod with crabmeat stuffing. Shrimp fra Diavolo. And, with my family gathered around the dinner table, the magic will be back.

May each of you capture the magic of the holiday season and let the child in yourself into that special place in your life.

While I was up in New York, I didn’t get a chance to do much woodworking. There is a world of difference between not doing much woodworking and not doing any woodworking. In fact, I had a pretty darned good woodworking trip – I came back having taken the Ultimate Penultimate Woodshop tour!

That’s right – my good friend and one of my co-hosts of the Modern Woodworkers Association podcast – Dyami Plotke, lives about an hour east of New York City on Lawn Gisland (Long Island, as it is incorrectly printed on maps) and offered me the opportunity to play hookey for a day from the New York City Logistics Center. Nah, I couldn’t do that, but when they did change us from 12 hour days to 8 hour days, that provided me the opportunity to give Dyami and me a chance to meet up after work one day.

He pulled up to where the warehouse was located – a shady industrial looking area of Brooklyn – and offered to drive me immediately to Tools for Working Wood, legendary woodworking store over at the docks and the home of Gramercy tools. So, we braved the uber-congested city streets and shot as quickly as possible to the site of the store. Well, we got there just a little too late. Bummer. But, we did have a TON of fun schlepping up the five flights of stairs in the scary looking building that I fully expected to see in some creepy zombie movie.

After escaping the dock district, Dyami offered me a choice – go do something generic in Manhattan, or head out to his home to check out his workshop and have a meal with him and his family. How long do you think it took me to accept his generous offer to head to his house?

It took some time to navigate the dark, crowded streets (why does the Sun never shine on Lawn Gisland?) out to the highway to his house. And, what a nice place it is! I mean, I had a chance to see the Penultimate Woodshop!

I got to visit his wife’s basement craft room where he podcasts for the Modern Woodworkers Association.

Heck, I even got a tour of the Penultimate Tree House, still under construction.

You can tell I’m a little excitable, can’t you?

In addition to the woodworking tour, we were also able to sit down for some very good Lawn Gisland barbecue (it was the southern shore of the island.. it counts), a bottle of a sweet Malbec and a lot of stories. Most importantly, I was able to get out of the madhouse that is the city, unwind for a little bit and enjoy myself.

All good things must come to an end, and that was the case with my visit to Dyami’s house. But, we had to make one last stop when we got back to the city – at Tim Hortons. A tribute to our Canadian friends Ian MacKay and Adam Van Sickle who we teased mercilessly during our trip to Woodworking in America just a few LONG weeks ago.

Today, I go back to my normal routine, and I will be getting some woodworking done for sure. But, I will always fondly remember my time visiting Dyami’s place. It pays to take that side trip.

I’m still on a big time high after coming back from Woodworking in America, the midwest edition. I mean, when you can get folks together and talk woodworking – ALL weekend – I mean, come on!  It’s about as woodwork geeky as you can get!  So, what was it like? Well, lemme show you!

While it was sad to see the show wrap up, I flew back to Florida excited to think about next year.

And, yes, it was fun, but I think there were a few things that could improve the event next year. With two shows – the first one held a month ago in Pasadena, California – it split the WIA audience into three segments – those who attended Pasadena, those who attended Covington and those who didn’t attend either show because everyone wouldn’t be together.  Rumor has it that next year, they will go back to one show… And, I hope to see y’all there!