If you're looking for some additional information about me, my shop, and what I'm trying to do at Moonlight and Snowfall, or even where the name comes from, you're in the right place.
My YouTube channel of the same name is here.
Moonlight and what? - Where does a name like that come from anyways? I'm glad you asked: back in 1991 I was working a medium-sized architecture firm in Boston and we were thinking about the annual holiday party. The word went out that we would have an in-house competition to design the invitation. I thought about what I liked about the holiday season the best; what my fondest memories and favorite things from this time of year were, and this is what I came up with. Snow settled on pine trees, steep snowy mountains, the quiet of snow falling on a bright night (the equivalent of sun showers at night, only with snow) and the moon, full and bright, shining down on everything.
This is the sketch I did for in-house competition, and the final artwork, which needed to be easy to print with the current copy machine tech at the time, so it was designed to look like an old-timey woodcut. Yeah, I was woodworking then too.
This was the thought process I went through when trying to come up with a name for my Etsy store, early winter 2013, I ended up with this name, Moonlight and Snowfall, for my on-line shop over at Etsy.com. Go on over and check out the things I have for sale over there. And if there is something you'd like that you don't see, or if you'd like to tweak something you do see, just let me know and I'm happy to help.
This Blog - This blog is my way of keeping track of things that go on the wood shop, and allows me to give folks a peek inside the way that I work. Woodworking is not my profession--I'm gainfully employed in a small architecture firm outside of Boston--but woodworking is a fun outlet for me, where I can design, prototype and manufacture my own little design elements. Its like a mini microcosm of what I do professionally.
I've done projects as large as a complete rebuilt of the front porch of my 1885 Victorian (time to redo some of that!) and as small as the buttons I've been selling on Etsy. Both types are satisfying for different reasons. Carpentry, finish carpentry, cabinetmaking, and furniture building are all related, larger scale, wood-based endeavors, but the tiny size of buttons has really been a change in the way that I need to approach working with wood. They're so small that power tools just don't work for everything. I honestly just don't want to hold something as small as a button next to a spinning saw blade, so I've rediscovered hand tools.
Hand Tools - Hand tools are great for a variety of reasons. Not cutting your limbs off by accident is just one of them (altho, to be clear, there are plenty of hand tools which you can use to cut your limbs off, so be careful). Some of my favorites are the simple ones, and the simplest are the kind you can make yourself. I've been doing just that recently. I'm also interested in what I can do to improve my work method by using hand tools, and I'm especially interested how really sharp hand tools can create beautifully smooth finishes without sandpaper in many cases, and therefore without a bnch of dust.
The shop or the Shop? - Having a wood shop and an Etsy shop (that's their word for an online store) makes for some confusion when discussing my 'shop'. To be clear, my wood shop is in my basement, and it doesn't have a name. Phil's Shop is, I guess, pretty self-evident, but it didn't have the right impact for an online store. So Moonlight and Snowfall is the name of both my Esty store, and this blog. I hope that's as clear as mud for you!
Etsy Store - Woodworking projects can be big, but shipping a set of shelves across the country doesn't seem like the most efficient way to run a business. I fell into the Etsy store idea after making a set of wooden buttons for a sweater my wife made for my daughter. She was home from school, looking at the nearly completed sweater and discussing what she would like the buttons to look like. She wanted a dark wood, rounded rectangle. I overheard and went downstairs to make them. I finished them in walnut oil. They both loved them, and my wife said I should sell them online. I must have looked dumb because then she explained what Etsy was, and I took a look. I decided that small items would be just the thing, so I posted some buttons on there and I've sold a few sets. I haven't quit my day job, lets leave it at that shall we. I may soon try some other small items, from wooden clasps, to simple toys.
One of the things I decided pretty early on, was that I would keep all of the items I sold at Moonlight and Snowfall, all natural. So I make my own stains and finishes here in the shop. I have an ebonizing stain that naturally reacts with the natural tannins in the wood to darken it; that's made with white vinegar and steel wool. I finish things with walnut oil, a drying oil, or a polish I make with beeswax and walnut oil. I'm also experimenting with fruit stains, made with fresh fruits and vodka, and shellac, which is a natural product.
Shellac is secreted by the female lac bug, Kerria lacca, onto the branches of trees of India and Thailand to make little tunnels. Its scraped off the branches, heated to liquid form and filtered through canvas to skim out the bark and buggy bits, dried into a flat sheet and broken into flakes. I mix up these flakes with alcohol, which acts as a vehicle to paint it on and then evaporates out.
What else? - I've kept another blog for a few years now, mainly about the books I read, but I occasionally will also write about public libraries, my bookmark collection, robots, you know, the basics. Between what is written here, over there (there's a whole page like this over there called backmatter where I discuss what I'm trying to do on that blog, and it includes a short bio so I won't repeat that here) you should get a pretty good idea about who I am and what I do.
If you have an idea about what I should tell you about or if you have an idea that you think would help around the shop, leave a comment somewhere. Do you have a natural wood finishing recipe you want to share, bring it on!
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