It’s “Get Woodworking Week”! Begun by Tom Iovino from Tom’s Workbench, it’s a week to think about ways to introduce the craft to others.

For this year, I’d like to offer a couple of things to keep in mind…

Mistakes are okay!

I think the fear of failure makes some folks a bit timid about getting started. Don’t let mistakes throw you. Mistakes are learning experiences. Often they are not catastrophic. Embrace them, learn from them, then get “back on the horse” and get going again. Take this example from the recent Woodworkers Fighting Cancer easel build.

Yep. I cut on the wrong side of the line. I had my dado stack in the table saw set to 5/8″ thickness. I had a choice: either discard the piece and start over, or keep my current setup that I had at the table saw, cut the rest of the legs the same way, and thus choose a “design modification” so that the panels of the easel would be 5/8″ shorter. I chose the latter, resulting in a “design modification”.

Invite Your Kids Into The Shop.

Keeping safety in mind, I would encourage folks to invite their kids into the shop. My son is 8 years old. With a little ways to go before being ready for the table saw, jointer, or other power tools, he was a great help in the easel project with glueup and assembly. I didn’t push him, I simply invited him into the shop to see if he wanted to help Dad out with some glueing up of the easel. He readily said yes. With some special needs, he can either be prone to less focus, or have laser like focus.

I explained that we needed to spread glue up evenly in each of the half lap joints and if he needed some help, just let me know. He did remarkably well, and when he did run into a situation of too much glue running over the edge, I told him it was just fine, we can wipe up the excess, which we did.

In the end, he really enjoyed helping me out, and of course, had some extra fun as well.