Thank YOU world!

I once lived more permanently in the USA and started teaching woodworking and furniture making on a local level in small town outside of San Antonio, Texas. It started with just a handful of people and was sponsored by the Texas Arts and Crafts Foundation. That small intro birthed a desire in me to pass on anything and everything I ever knew and understood about my craft. In the US 4,500 people attended the subsequent courses I developed curriculum for and now of course we are teaching on wider global basis. I didn’t just teach about hand tool traditions but everything I knew. Apart from the odd critic here and there, and usually they are quite odd, your support has been at the very least overwhelming. So much so I can no longer answer every email that comes my way. What I do and say is from how I feel we can involve others that were up until recent years excluded from the woodworking work zone for a variety of reasons and not the least of which was the industrial impact of mass-making machinery manufacturers downsizing machines for home use. Whereas there was a real value in this, that intrusion did do much damage to real woodworking and more than anything I care to imagine. Today of course advocates now use these methods for the most simple of tasks such as cutting dovetails or making tenons. tasks that take minutes by skilled hands and tasks that anyone and everyone can indeed learn.
Today, thankfully, I see more and more of you venturing into realms of real woodworking you once only dreamed might be possible and using methods that embrace the need of true skill. The pictures you send me are amazing and often I look at blogs done by others and see my stuff somewhere in the background or holding the workpiece. I see spoons being made with the new and now ultra-famous Hirsch 38mm #7 sweep gouge they most likely bought from Highland Woodworking and of course the similarly famed aproned workbench with the vise protruding past the apron. I remember a few short months ago the critics in the beginning saying that’s no way to make a bench and now today hundreds of you have indeed made your first “Paul Sellers workbench” which of course is not mine at all really. Now hundreds of thousands of people have watched the series for free on YT. I don’t take this lightly.
This morning I sat and allowed the Air Traffic Map of the world run for an hour. The pins kept dropping and showing me each of the pages people were reading. I haven’t really done this before but over a couple of hours a pin dropped every few seconds with almost always less than a minute as the max between them. Woodworkingmasterclasses always heightens after we post the most recent training video but then it keeps going minute by minute. I should have taken a screen shot now that i think about it, but anyway, it is very gratifying to know what we are doing is impacting the whole world and not just a isolated few this all began with when i first saw the need for apprenticing and passing it forward.
I say all of this to say a mighty big THANK YOU! Without you I would not do what I do. I also thank everyone behind the scenes who you only catch a glimpse of from time to time. These are my friends who work on the research we dod to test the efficacy of things and to balance out my imbalanced perspectives a little. When I am not sure of what I find I pass it to someone else to look at and examine. They test it and check and say I am wrong or I am right. We look again and find the answer or check elsewhere. Some of you jump in and make a statement or offer other perspectives and we listen. That’s what makes our work organic.
Finland and Israel, you are important. The single drop pin in the centre of Russia and the other one in the middle of China too, you are important. Newcastle and Perth in Australia, you are important and the pin that just dropped in Melbourne, I stop and think about who you are as I work on my blog and get ready for a lesson. Right now the west coats of the US is mostly asleep but the Eastern seaboard is hyperactive as it starts its day. Right now its 7am there. Someone in Edmonton Canada is reading my blog. I wonder about your woodworking and what you do. The whole of Germany seems to be covered with pins right and in fact most of central Europe too. Britain is as always pretty much obliterated as will be the USA in about five hours time. Hello Rio De Janeiro in Brazil. I see a pin or two down there. have a wonder-filled woodworking day.