A Maker's Mindset: 30 Lessons from the Lathe
If you've read Woodturning: Form and Formula (that talks about proportion, design, and the visual language of turned forms) and have enjoyed the more philosophical social media posts I’ve written recently, you'll know I like to think about the craft in ways that go beyond the technical. My new book one goes somewhere different. Deeper, I think. More personal, certainly.
A Maker's Mindset is about what woodturning has taught me over the past twelve years. Not just about turning, though there's plenty of that in here, but about patience, focus, making mistakes, and what it actually means to care about doing something well for its own sake. It's the book I didn't know I was going to write when I started paying attention to why the craft kept pulling me back to the lathe, day after day, year after year.
It's not a technical manual. You won't find project plans or tool specifications. What you will find is thirty lessons, organised into five parts, moving from what the hands know, through what the mind sees and the heart feels, into what the work means and what remains after we've put the tools down. Each lesson draws on my own experience at the lathe and in the workshop, backed by research into psychology, neuroscience, design, and craft philosophy. There are eighty-one academic references in there, which surprised me! Turns out that when you start asking why things work the way they do, the rabbit hole goes quite deep.
I came to woodturning in 2014, in my late thirties, after two decades as a photographer and designer. I thought I understood making. The lathe quickly corrected that assumption. Everything I've learnt since then, every student I've taught, every piece that went wrong in ways that ended up teaching me more than the ones that went right, all of it has found its way into these pages.
My thoughts are chaotic. My mind works in spirals rather than straight lines, and the writing reflects that. Stories interrupt theory. Metaphors build on each other. If you prefer things neat and linear, it may occasionally test your patience. But I've found that craft knowledge rarely travels in straight lines anyway. It spirals, returns, deepens with each pass. Perhaps that's fitting for a book about working on a lathe.
This book is published in the year of my fiftieth birthday, so perhaps it's a half-century brain-dump, expressing what I've learnt about life through the craft of woodturning. You decide. But I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you find something in these thirty lessons that helps you think about your own journey at the lathe, or wherever your making takes you.
Pages: 221 (softback only)
ISBN: 978-1-0683581-2-8
Ordering Your Copy:
Kindle: Preorder now for auotmatic delivery from 1st March on Amazon.
Paperback: Available from Amazon from 3rd March.
Signed Copies: Preorder now for dispatch worldwide (Royal Mail Tracked) from 3rd March. See below.