Volunteer Woodworker

(whimsical old-time music) - Welcome to the "Volunteer Woodworker."

I'm your host, Charles Brock.

Come with me as we drive the back roads, bringing you the story of America's finest woodworkers.

(whimsical old-time music) (whimsical old-time music) (whimsical old-time music) We're going to Ashland, Tennessee to meet Anne Briggs.

Anne is a social media phenom, known as Anne of All Trades.

She is a farmer, a teacher, and a woodworker.

In fact, Anne is anything she can will herself to be.

Anne turns her weaknesses into strengths.

Let's meet Anne Briggs.

(whimsical old-time music ends) - [Announcer] "Volunteer Woodworker" is funded in part by.

Since 1970, Whiteside Machine Company has been producing industrial-grade router bits in Claremont, North Carolina.

Whiteside makes carbide bits for edge forming, grooving, and CNC applications.

Learn more at whitesiderouterbits.com.

Real Milk Paint Company makes VOC-free non-toxic milk paint, available in 56 colors.

Milk paint creates a matte wood finish that can be distressed for an antique look.

Good Wood Nashville designs custom furniture and is a supplier of vintage hardwoods.

Keri Price with Keller Williams Realty has been assisting Middle Tennessee home buyers and sellers since 2013.

Mayfield Hardwood Lumber, supplying Appalachian hardwoods worldwide.

Anna's Creative Lens, crafters of resin on wood decorative arts.

- Anne Briggs.

- Hey.

- Anne of All Trades, we're here at the homestead and there's so much going on.

Tell me about it.

- Well, we do a little bit of everything here.

I chose the name Anne of All Trades for a reason, because I didn't want to be pegged into one thing.

We've got dairy cows, dairy goats, beef, we're raising pork, we're raising a garden, we've got a school we're building, my trade school to teach disappearing life skills.

We've got all the things all the time, and- - [Charles] Wow.

- We're just trying to keep our heads above water here.

- (laughs) Well, I've heard you say you kinda tied yourself to the mast here.

- [Anne] Mm-hmm.

- Tell me what you mean by that and- - Yeah.

- How does it work?

- I have taken a very meandering path in life, and I've, you know, faced a lot of struggles that I've tried to kind of reel it in a little bit.

And basically what you're seeing now is the product of 35 years of trying to fix what always kind of felt a little bit broken.

And in that, everything that I'm doing here serves a purpose, that maybe some other people might have dreamed of one day having a farm, or dreamed of one day becoming a woodworker.

But for me it was more just, what could I do that will help me to show up to be the kind of person that I want to be?

And suddenly I found myself on a farm, as a woodworker, doing some blacksmithing on occasion, and then tinkering on old cars and other things in my spare time, whatever that looks like.

(laughs) - Well, that begs the question, what kind of person do you wanna be?

- Oh, wow, this is deeper than I expected to go.

I wanna be, I mean, I wanna be a good person.

I wanna be a upstanding member of my community.

I wanna be the kind of person people can call when they get stuck.

I wanna be the kind of person who shows up for the people that I care about.

I want to work hard and be a good steward of the time and the resources that I've been given.

And when I die, I wanna say, "Yep, I did it all."

- Well, you're well on the path to that because there's so many people that like to live vicariously through watching you turn your compost, and watching you assign the pigs to a task that they can do for you.

And so this really fits in with the growth and development that you had planned for Anne of All Trades.

- I think a decade ago when all this kind of started, I was just bouncing to whatever next thing grabbed my attention.

And back then someone told me, I was never gonna be good at anything.

And at the moment, that really, really hurt, but I think mostly because I realized it was true.

And so in that moment, I decided I was gonna stop bouncing, and I had to figure out a way to make that actually work for who I really was.

And in that I decided for the rest of my life, I am going to pursue becoming a truly excellent woodworker.

And to get to that, I need some external stimuli.

And so I milk a cow every day, not because I love drinking milk, which it turns out, now that I have a milk cow, I do, but really because I need my butt to be in a seat by a certain time of the morning, and I know that an alarm clock didn't do that, a planner didn't do that.

But knowing that my cow will get mastitis if I am an hour late, and knowing that she's out there waiting on me, and knowing that I love her and I don't wanna let her down, I'm out there every morning, and getting my butt in that seat helps me to get my butt in my seat for my job, by the time that I need to do that every day too.

And so I kind of have all of these external stimuli in my life that help me to do the next right thing.

- Well, you are tied to the mast, just like being tied to the biological and organic clock of the homestead.

- Yeah, I mean, I think for, you and I are really similar people.

I think we've had really similar struggles in life, and there's a lot of stuff going around now that's like, oh, you know, all of a sudden people have all of these nameable ailments and things.

And the reality is, I think, a hundred years ago, these were all things that everyone had to do.

There was no real choice in it.

It was like, you know, to survive, we need to do these things.

And a lot of those things involved moving our bodies very intentionally.

We had to actually exercise to get the things that we need out of the ground, out of the animals that we work with or whatever else.

We had to chop firewood so that we had, we stayed warm in the wintertime.

All those things kind of were just a given in life.

And now they aren't, because we have modern conveniences and all these other things.

And I will be the first to admit I love a hot shower.

I love being able to call my friends in Taiwan and China, but I do really, but I have realized that for my own mental health, for my own wellbeing, the life that I live may not be for everyone, but it is the best life for me, because it forces me to be fully engaged and fully present in my life.

- Well, how did that meandering path start?

Where did it start?

- It started about 12 years ago when, you know, my husband and I had just gotten married.

We were broke as a joke.

We were getting most of our food from the food bank.

And I was like, "You know, I think I could plant a garden in our backyard."

And I wanted, I had a garage for the first time.

My parents are missionaries, so we didn't ever have, you know, a stable unit where I could have amassed a woodworking tool collection or anything else.

So just being there in the city with a little backyard and being like, "Well, I could put some tools in this garage if I'm able to buy some.

I could put some seeds in the ground in the backyard."

And then one thing led to another, and a lot of the things that I do now are known as gateway drugs into homesteading.

You get a garden and then you get chickens, and then someone tells you it's a good idea to get goats.

And then pretty soon you've gotta get a cow.

And well, now here we are.

- So everything's a next step.

- Yeah.

- You take the first step, but then after that, it's just developmental.

Now you're an avid reader, researcher.

- Oh yeah, now I am.

I mean, when I was a kid, I'm severely dyslexic, so I didn't learn how to really read and comprehend things until I was 22 years old.

Incidentally, that's when we had just gotten married and had this house, and the house was across the street from the library.

And so I started going to the library.

And as I was wanting to plant that first seed, this is before YouTube, this is before all that stuff.

So I was like, "Oh, I don't know how to do that.

I'll find a book that shows me how."

And I became a voracious reader.

That first year, I read 300 books on homesteading and woodworking, and within two years, I had checked out and read every single book that the Seattle Metro System had on basically any of this stuff, and consumed as much of it as I could, because I was hooked.

- Well, you've lived many places, being the part of a missionary family.

- [Anne] Mm-hmm.

- [Charles] Tell us about that.

- Yeah, I went, we spent a lot of my young life in Ukraine, Czech Republic, Austria.

I spent a lot of my young life in Asia.

I speak fluent Chinese.

That's one of the, you know, what do you not know about me kinda things.

But all of that wandering kind of did leave me with a, "Someday, I wanna have one place that's there forever."

And you know, when you've got 30 acres and cows, you're kinda stuck there.

And I don't think of it as being stuck.

I think of it as, "Wow, I have a home for the first time."

- You have a big laboratory.

(laughs) - Oh, yeah, oh yeah.

- And you get to mix the chemicals every day.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, well, what kind of woodworking projects have you jumped into?

- Oh, I've done pretty much all of 'em at this point.

But I started with, literally, I needed a bed.

We didn't have the money to buy one, and I was like, "Well, surely it's not that hard to build one."

I grew up with, my grandfather was a great example in this.

He was Mr. Use What You've Got to Get Where You Need to Go, and one of the things that I had as we were traveling around the world, one things I had in the back of my, or one of the things I had in the back of my head was, "Someday I wanna have a place just like my grandpa's shop."

He had a three-bay garage, and in one bay was the woodworking stuff, and in the middle bay was the metalworking stuff, and the other bay was the car working stuff, or the mechanical stuff.

And I remember as a kid thinking, "Man, we can go in there and we can make anything we want.

We can make any dream come true."

And though my grandfather passed before he was able to share much of that knowledge with me, I carried that with me for the rest of my life, basically being like, "Someday I wanna have the space where I can make all the things that I need to make my life work."

And so I started, my first wood shop was in my laundry room.

- Wow.

- And that's why I actually started, my focus was hand tool woodworking, because I didn't have space for a table saw or anything else for that matter.

In fact, when I was building my first bookshelf, I had to climb over the workbench to get to the other side, because if the bookshelf was there, I didn't have.

(donkey brays) Oh, my donkey's saying hello.

(Charles laughs) He's conducting the little donkey- - There you go, the sounds of the farm.

- Yeah, well, here we are.

- Yeah.

- It's everything, all the time, all at once.

(Charles laughs) But that really led me to like, constantly wanting to challenge myself.

And again, I wanted to spend the rest of my life pursuing one specific path, and in that I was like, "Okay, what's the next hardest project I could try," which ultimately led me to the shop of Greg Pennington, who I think you also did an interview with him.

And he taught me how to build Windsor chairs.

And I was like, "You know what?

This is kind of the culmination of everything a woodworker would do."

And he was such a good teacher, that I was like, "I think I wanna do this."

So now I'm building a woodworking school, well, the School of All Trades.

We won't limit ourselves here.

But yeah, that I think will be the ultimate culmination of everything is, one school where I can teach all the things that so many people like Greg have been so generous to teach me throughout the years.

- So you've created a very shareable laboratory.

- Oh yeah, I think one thing that tends to maybe even get in the way of some woodworkers is that it tends to be a very lonely pursuit.

And I'm an introvert, just like a lot of other woodworkers are.

But there is something very inspiring about announcing some of the things that you're doing or sharing some of the things you're doing.

And so I didn't want woodworking to become a solo pursuit.

Community is very important to me.

And it turns out, having struggled with learning my whole life, I'm a really good teacher.

And so I wanted to then take the things that I'd learned and teach them to other people, and make this place open to other people as well, so that this isn't a solitary pursuit.

It's not a selfish endeavor.

It's something that hopefully other people like me will come here and see how I've made things work for myself, and then leave feeling better equipped to do the things that they wanna do too.

- Well, you've built lots of Windsor chairs- - Yeah.

- In different styles.

You've also built a mandolin, 'cause- - [Anne] Yeah.

- [Charles] It's hanging over there, and I've seen it.

- Yeah.

- I was attracted to it when I came in.

What are some other projects that you've been involved in?

- Well, in 2020 I needed to raise a lot of money that had disappeared from prior work commitments for building the School of All Trades out there.

And so I started doing a whole lot of spoon carving because a lot of people were stuck at home.

A lot of people suddenly became interested in craft, and spoon carving seemed like a very good tool, or a very good vehicle to help people start learning how to do craft.

And the fun thing about spoon carving is you only need to have a handful of tools, and, you'll actually learn everything that I have to unteach all of the power tool woodworkers that come to my classes, with regard to grain direction and wood movement and things like that.

So you've got a really compact way to learn anything you wanna know about woodworking.

But then also, people who aren't necessarily even attracted to the craft of woodworking would also be like interested in spoon carving because it's just a fun thing to think about whittling by the bonfire or making a kitchen implement for those cooks who are really interested in having handcrafted items and things like that.

- Are you gonna show us how to carve a spoon or a kitchen utensil?

- I would love to.

- All right, can't wait.

- Great.

(whimsical old-time music) (whimsical old-time music) (whimsical old-time music ends) (folksy mandolin music) (folksy mandolin music) - Why Anne, you are gonna make a spoon out of what seems to be firewood.

- That's basically exactly what it is.

This is a cherry tree that just blew down in the last tornado here.

We've got some walnut that we're in the midst of carving as well, and you know, just like, kind of just like our ancestors did, we wanna use whatever we've got to get where we wanna go in life.

And these will be kitchen spoons that we can have in a bucket to give to our neighbors, to welcome new people to the neighborhood, to thank someone for helping me catch my cow, or whatever else.

And I mean, (Charles laughs) I think everyone remembers their grandma's kitchen spoon for one reason or another.

- Yeah, I think the back of my hand kind of remembers it.

- Oh yeah.

- Yeah, "Charles, don't go there," so- - But this is, I mean, this is one of my favorite things to like, this is very portable.

I can take this kind of anywhere on the farm, (mallet taps) and, you know, turn as I'm watching the sunset or as I'm waiting for my cow to have a baby or whatever else.

I can actually do something useful, with both my time and my anxious energy that I seem to have quite a lot of.

- There you go, and looks like it has a lot of versatility, and, it has some safety features built in.

- Oh yeah, so any time, I mean, we're both musicians.

Any time you're using an ax this close to your hands, you want to know that you are really safe.

And I really like this thing for a lot of reasons.

I used to work on a stump that I had to bend over and use, and that, you know, hurt my back.

This allows me to stand and be really close and be right above my work.

But also, you know, there's a lot of things that are, I'm working on the opposite side of the stump.

This is gonna catch the ax if it slips.

- [Charles] Mm-hmm.

- And then once we get into carving this little bit in here, we can then come around from this side, and swap our axes to the correct ax for that job.

And we'll be able to come in and have two balance points.

So we'll be able to, you know, not have to just be swinging our ax freely and hope that we don't flick- - Wow.

- Flick the ax in the wood all in different places.

And I can even just show you that right now.

- [Charles] All right.

- [Anne] So this is, sometimes you have to scooch it around, to be able to get to the next stop, the next spot.

But, so here as I'm carving the back of the spoon, I'll come in here, (ax hammers) and you can see I've got two points of contact.

And then also there's always something to catch the ax as the chips are flying.

(ax hammers) Faster.

(ax hammers quickly) And so from here, we're gonna do this Martha Stewart-style.

But from here, we'll go to the next stage, which is, we have basically a roughed-out spoon like that.

- Right, so the cooking show.

- Exactly.

- Yeah, there we go.

- Yeah, we start drawing out the shape and we get, we get the interior shape kind of defined.

Then we come here and we've got, we start carving out the middle bits.

- How do you shape the bowl of the spoon?

- [Anne] That is an excellent question.

- Yeah, I should see if I could make a spoon out of this.

And when my grandkids come over, - Oh, listen.

- I could practice on 'em.

Yeah.

- You should.

You absolutely should.

(Charles laughs) So depending on how confident you are with an ax, you can actually also use what's called an adze, to start your spoon.

You can use this tool to come in and you carve out the center a little bit.

(adze taps) And that's, again, if you're pretty confident, but you have to be pretty careful, because one thing that you learn really quickly in spoon carving is what's gonna happen to the grain, that we have the opportunity to come at things from a lot of different angles.

And again, if you can use a lot more carefulness (adze taps) as you're doing this part, you can get away with getting rid of a lot of that there.

After we've got this chunked out to about this stage, most people will come in and, you know, just kind of refine their design a little bit, which is what I'm gonna do.

I want this to look a little bit like an egg.

We'll get that.

And then we're gonna start using a tool called a hook knife.

A hook knife is exactly what it sounds like.

It's a knife that's shaped like a hook.

And we have lots of different ways that we can use this knife, but I will tell you the one way every single person cuts themselves with this knife is because if you use it the way you would intuitively use it, you go right up here and you go right into the flesh of your thumb.

So there is a little bit of anti logic that goes into using this tool in a safe manner.

But you might actually notice that I'm moving the piece of wood along with the knife.

And so I've got my thumb safely tucked back behind here, and I'm actually gonna start removing the material from the inside of the spoon in kind of a circular pattern.

So I almost like to draw that out.

I think about the spoon in four sections.

So we've got one, two, three, four.

And each one of those sections, as you start carving downwards, you're going to, the grain of the wood is gonna change direction.

So we're gonna actually wanna move our knife like this.

And like when we're carving in that quadrant, we're gonna move our knife that way.

When we're in this quadrant, we're gonna move our knife that way, and then that way, and then that way.

And I'll just show you what that looks like really quick.

So here, we've got this and we've got our thumb safely anchored back behind the cutting edge there.

We'll come in and we'll take little chunks like this, and then, and then we'll come down here and we'll use leverage to our advantage here as well.

We'll go, I'm hinging on my own fingers there, and, one thing, when you're holding a knife, you always wanna have it on some sort of hinge point.

So this hand is never freely swinging the blade, any one place.

So when it's here, it's hinging on the piece of wood.

When it's here, it's hinging here.

And that keeps this thing from ever wandering away and doing anything unexpected.

But basically we whittle that out of the center bit there, and we can come back and we'll take the center.

This piece of wood got a little dry in between our carving times here.

I actually am just recovering from an injury, a knife injury, but hilariously not from carving, because we know how to carve safely.

It was a kitchen knife injury.

And well, you know, sometimes those happen.

But there's also another tool that I actually really like to use at this point.

And it's called, now this one is a real pain to sharpen.

So I never let anyone borrow that one.

But I like this one because I teach a lot of classes.

So I have to show people how to do a lot of these things, both left and right-handed.

And I kept having a problem with grabbing the left-handed knife and trying to use it with my right hand, and then realizing the cutting edge was on the other side.

So this saves me a lot of that stuff.

It also allows me the opportunity to use my other hand, even in situations where I normally wouldn't, move on to the hook or the crook knife.

- By hook or by crook.

- That's right, and then same exact, there's that potato peeler- - Oh yeah.

- Cut again.

- Yeah.

- And we'll, we can use this the exact same way.

This is actually the exact same knife as this.

It's just been turned on a hook.

And so we can come in here now, and do that exact same action there, as we ride that bevel on the inside.

And riding that bevel is exactly what we need to do to be able to have a nice smooth surface on the inside too.

'Cause I think a lot of people, when they're first getting started with spoon carving, the inside of their spoon looks like someone took a hatchet to it.

- Well that is really something to aspire to.

- Yeah, it's so fun.

- Beautiful work.

- It's worth it.

All right, Charles, I'm gonna send you home with a little bit of homework.

- All right.

- You take that piece of firewood, and you turn it into something awesome.

- This into a beautiful spoon like this.

I can't wait to try.

- I'm so excited.

- And you taught me all the steps, beautiful.

Thank you, Anne.

- Yeah, we'll see you again.

- I'm gonna be heading down the road to find a story of another great woodworker.

See you next time, on the "Volunteer Woodworker."

(car door closes) (whimsical old-time music) (whimsical old-time music) (whimsical old-time music) - [Announcer] "Volunteer Woodworker" is funded in part by.

Since 1970, Whiteside Machine Company has been producing industrial-grade router bits in Claremont, North Carolina.

Whiteside makes carbide bits for edge forming, grooving, and CNC applications.

Learn more at whitesiderouterbits.com.

Real Milk Paint Company makes VOC-free non-toxic milk paint, available in 56 colors.

Milk paint creates a matte wood finish that can be distressed for an antique look.

Good Wood Nashville designs custom furniture and is a supplier of vintage hardwoods.

Keri Price with Keller Williams Realty has been assisting Middle Tennessee home buyers and sellers since 2013.

Mayfield Hardwood Lumber, supplying Appalachian hardwoods worldwide.

Anna's Creative Lens, crafters of resin on wood decorative arts.

Visit CharlesBrockChairmaker.com for all you need to know about woodworking.

If you'd like to learn even more, free classes in a variety of subjects are available for streaming from CharlesBrockChairmaker.com.

(light folksy music) (light contemporary music)