I’m reminded today of one of the Marine Corps principles of leadership I was taught so many years ago, which says “know yourself and seek self improvement.” One of the things I know about myself, that I need to keep in check constantly, is my obsessive compulsiveness. One would only need to look at my Lie-Nielsen tool collection to see what happens when I don’t. I’ve put this picture up on twitter a couple of times. It does not include any of their other tools I have just planes!

Anyway I mention OCD because I see myself going down that path with my design work. I think about it constantly, even when I should be doing other things. Not that it is bad. Paper is fairly cheap…at least for now it seems. I’ve been working on my table designs from the earlier posts and will be posting them as I go along. Here are a couple of them.

As you can see my sketching skills are not that great, but they are improving. Of the seven designs that made it to the second round, I think these two are my favorite ones I know for sure I want to see built. Along with knowing yourself you should always seek to improve yourself. In that spirit, this afternoon my wife and I are heading up to Port Townsend for the weekend so I can take the “By Hand and By Eye” class at the Port Townsend School of Woodworking. It is the class that ties in with the book by Jim Tolpin and George Walker that should be coming out soon from Lost Art Press. I think it will be one of those classes that will propel me further in my development of these basic skills I have neglected for so long. Plus I just love PT. It’s only about 45 minutes from my house, but my wife and I always stay up there for little weekend getaways. Hopefully I’ll have some time to take photos and I will let you know how it goes.