Don's Words of Wisdom

A couple of years ago I received the greatest gift ever. I had seven of my grandkids in my shop all making stained glass projects, mostly as Christmas gifts. As an artisan you often watch others and learn techniques and styles, their sense of color and flow of a project may be different than anything that you have done. Well, watching the seven children, who ranged in age from 7 to 14 years old, and listening to their sense of style, the flow of their project, and reasoning of why one color goes better than another taught me a whole new way to look at projects. I thought: “Hey I’m supposed to be teaching them how to do it, not learn from the little tykes.” But guess what? It was a well-used two way street. What brought this all to mind; the other day while designing a cutting board I stepped out of the box and changed the flow of the board and made something different than what I was originally going to make. After I was done I thought, “Where did that come from?” and then I remembered, “The kids.” I often say I never taught a class where I didn’t also learn something myself, but as a woodworker for almost seven decades to get a whole education from seven little kids was amazing and rewarding.