Woodworkers display, discuss their work at EP mall

As they have for several years, members of the Minnesota Woodworkers Guild displayed their projects in the Northern Woods Exhibition at Eden Prairie Center mall last weekend. The annual event serves as a showcase for the public to examine the projects and a competition for the members who’ve entered their pieces.

One of those members is Stu Fox, who retired as the Eden Prairie parks and natural resources manager in 2015. After his 38-year career with the city, “I needed a hobby,” he said. Fox took a class at the Woodcraft store in Bloomington and, “I thought that’d be a great thing to do to keep me occupied,” he said.

Fox had two pieces on exhibit in the Northern Woods show, a coffee table he titled “Honey, I’ve Been Thinking” and a “Cherry Butterfly Table.” The latter received a Judges Award – but that doesn’t mean it was perfect. The “butterfly” in the title refers to the design of the tabletop, which uses two pieces of cherry wood veneer that are book-matched (arranged to mirror each other in the style of a book’s open pages) to represent butterfly wings, with an insert of walnut veneer to represent the butterfly’s body. 

In leading a group of woodworkers through the show and explaining the thoughts behind the judging process, 2024 Northern Woods judge Willie Willette said to Fox regarding the insert, “You went too far. I would have stopped before the inlay. It’s not needed for the beauty of the piece.”

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Ed Neu, president of the Minnesota Woodworkers Guild, said that after the show opens and sets up on a Thursday, the judges spend the day on Friday looking at the pieces and making their judgments. Most of the awards, which come with both trophies and cash prizes, are then presented to the woodworkers in a ceremony at the mall’s food court after the show closes on Friday evening. The public visiting the mall on the weekend sees which pieces are the award winners and casts their ballots for the final remaining award, the People’s Choice, which is presented at the show’s close on Sunday evening.

Fox’s drawer box as much work as the table

Fox was unfazed by the judge’s critique of his table, noting he had taken the project on as a challenge after seeing its inspiration on the website of woodworker Philip Morley, from whom Fox had taken a class at Marc Adams School of Woodworking as part of his retirement hobby. “I fell in love” with his furniture, Fox said, including techniques for making shop-sawn veneer.

That means Fox created the veneer, the thin layers of cherry wood that make up the tabletop, in his garage shop. Other pieces of the table are solid cherry wood. The table also features a pull-out drawer which, Fox noted, “is not a rectangle.” It’s also not an open-topped drawer, but instead an entire wooden box in itself. “There’s as much work in that box as there was making the carcass,” or the body of the piece, Fox said. The reason the box isn’t a rectangle? It’s because the front face of the table, its apron, is curved, so he needed to taper the box accordingly.

An homage to ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’

David Lane, whose piece “Robert Pirsig’s Toolbox” took Best in Show, faced different challenges. The piece is a wooden recreation of the blue Craftsman toolbox owned by Pirsig, author of the book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” 

Upon reading the book, a fictionalized and philosophical autobiography of the author and his son’s motorcycle ride from Minnesota to California, in 1990, Lane said, he was heavily influenced by its message regarding quality and respect for tools and process. “He talks about, if you’re climbing up the side of a mountain, you see more on the climb than you see at the summit,” Lane said.

Pirsig, whose book royalties helped build the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center, died in 2017. This year is the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication. “I thought it would be nice to do an homage,” Lane said. 

Lane used photos of the toolbox posted on an auction site after Pirsig’s death and Pirsig’s list in the book of the tools he carried with him to recreate the box and its contents in wood. Lane borrowed actual tools from a neighbor who fixes old motorcycles and used them as reference for recreating the actual measurements and details. The project, he said, was “engineering as much as woodworking.”

From sketch to coffee table

Although some pieces displayed at the Northern Woods show were available for purchase, Lane’s Pirsig toolbox is not for sale. Stu Fox’s other piece, “Honey, I’ve Been Thinking,” is also a personal project. It grew out of a request from his wife for a new coffee table.

Fox also took in stride the judges’ critique of his use of MDF (medium-density fiberboard) in the coffee table. “It’s just going in the living room,” he noted. The cherry veneer for his table is applied over a core of solid lumber, whereas the coffee table has mahogany veneer applied over the MDF, plus a solid mahogany sliding door and base. Fox created the table based on his wife’s vision, starting with a sketch and following with a small-scale model and then a full-size cardboard mockup placed in the living room to check for size. 

Most of the pieces Fox builds, he said, are for friends and relatives. He’s been enjoying the opportunity woodworking gives him to learn and try new things, whether through local educational opportunities such as those offered by the Minnesota Woodworkers Guild or traveling to woodworking schools. Referencing his retirement hobby of woodworking and his wife’s of quilting, he said, “It keeps us both engaged in things we enjoy doing.”