One of my recent projects was a departure from my usual commissions. I typically create architectural features or other functional art. I guess this one could fall in the “functional art” category…I made a commercial sign for a local trucking company. I wouldn’t imagine that there are many trucking companies interested in a custom-made sign. But there’s at least one that is, and fortunately for me, it is headquartered right here in Natchez, Mississippi. So I was pleasantly surprised, and gently corrected for assuming that aesthetics and craftsmanship would not be priorities for a business with such a practical purpose. And I’m so glad that I was wrong. The sign looks great, and the company is really happy with it.
The background of the sign is reclaimed cypress. I joined several pieces of lumber together to create a very large, flat surface. I then trimmed it down to an oval shape, six feet by twelve feet, and coated the sign with an all-natural tung oil and linseed oil blend for a high gloss finish. I prefer using this over polyurethane because it holds up much better to the elements. The letters were fashioned from ¼” thick copper. The pieces that comprise the border are made of steel. The letters and border pieces were hand-hammered before I fixed them to the cypress background. I made rivets by hand to coordinate with the style of the sign, and used these to attach the steel pieces to the wood. I used a patina to weather the steel… “old and worn” usually trumps “new and shiny” with me. The letters stand off of the background by a few inches, and I incorporated LED lighting behind them to create a back-lit effect, making the sign visible at night. 
The company actually commissioned two signs…one for the front of their building, and a much smaller one for the side entrance. This company is really proud of their business. It is family owned and operated, treats its employees remarkably well, and prides itself on its ethical standards and quality service. It needed a beautiful, substantial, solid sign to represent itself to the world. I think we achieved that. And they won’t need a new sign for a long, long time.
Cypress and Copper Commercial Sign
Copper Rose Ring Box
Well, there’s a story to be told here…this is the copper rose box I made for my wife’s engagement ring. I gave it (with the ring) to her on a fine and snowy Thanksgiving morning when we were visiting her family in Connecticut. We were on our way out to run an errand, and I told her I wanted to show her a flower that was growing through the snow back behind the old red barn. It was a magnificent morning…brilliant sunlight and blue, blue sky…the barn in perfect contrast to the fresh snow and the rugged old stone wall supporting it. So we picked our way through the snow and over the path that led down behind the barn, to a spot so familiar to my wife, but a whole new world to me. I reached into the crack in the wall where I had earlier hid my treasure, and pulled out this box. It was engraved with a message wishing Catherine a happy Thanksgiving and a wish for many, many more together. It took her a moment to realize that this small sculpture was a box with something inside. She removed the lid and found the ring that we had chosen together a month earlier. Now it was set with the prettiest diamond I could find, and she knew that I wasn’t just wishing her a happy Thanksgiving. Here’s where things diverted from the storybook tale I’d pictured…she jumped up and down, and said that she couldn’t yet say yes. She wasn’t ready. I took back the box, replaced the ring and lid, and we continued on our errand, completely deflated and not knowing what to do next.
Ugh. Her family knew of my plans to propose. So there we were, in snowy Connecticut, with her family, for the entire long weekend. Catherine told me very soon after the whole back-of-the-barn episode to ask her again. But still, it was a difficult day. Thanksgiving dinner…difficult. Next day…difficult. But we got through it. Friday night, out for dinner at the local pizza joint with Catherine’s parents and crazy uncle Frank, we were sitting across from each other. We’d put in our order, and it seemed like a good time…again. So I reached into the pocket of my jacket, pulled out the rose and plunked it down on the table in front of her. She was much more excited this time, but insisted that we go outside for at least the semblance of privacy. So there, outside of Angelina’s pizza restaurant, with her family watching from the table and the restaurant full of soccer moms wondering what was going on, I proposed again, and she said YES.
We revel in this story a bit, because it tells the story of our life together. The fairy tale version didn’t pan out because life just isn’t that way. Our life together is imperfect, difficult, sometimes messy, probably never exactly what we had pictured. And that’s why it is so darn good…because it’s REAL.
So that’s the story of our box, and about the beginning of our life together. I got a call a few months ago from a Russian guy who was living in Los Angeles. He needed a copper rose box. He was planning to meet his Russian girlfriend in Florence, Italy, and wanted to propose to her on the Ponte Vecchio. He was dashing, she was gorgeous, and the whole thing sounded very glamorous and romantic. I sent him a few pieces of copper and told him where he might buy an engraving tool, so that he could engrave the bottom of their box (I didn’t feel confident that I could engrave Cyrillic letters). He returned the engraved piece to me and I used it for the bottom of the rose. We heard from him a few weeks later…she had said, “Yes,” the first time he asked, there on the bridge. I’m glad it worked out that way for them…that’s their story, and I was really happy to be a part of it.
Everyone has their own story…that’s what makes each so unique and so great. 
Staircase Handrails
Ever heard of the Tchefuncte River? That’s pronounced “chuh-funk-tuh,” for those of you, like my wife, who are not from around these parts. The Tchefuncte passes through Tangipahoa, Washington, and St. Tammany Parishes before emptying into Lake Ponchartrain, across from New Orleans. It hits Madisonville about two miles north of the lake. Madisonville is one of the prettiest little river communities we have ever seen. Quaint, historic, marine…a great spot for enjoying a meal outside or an evening stroll. Through our visits there, we learned that the maritime museum there hosts a wooden boat festival every year. Cool place…clearly appealing to my client and his family who decided to build their dream home there.
I had done some handrail work in this client’s previous home several years ago, and was glad that he called on me again to do some work in this new house. The ground level has a very open floor plan, with a staircase that serves as a focal point for the entire living space. They needed something that would be equal to the grandeur of the space, without outweighing with it. My client’s decorating style is definitely eclectic…they’ve done a great job mixing some of their traditional pieces and elements with some more contemporary, modern ones. They asked me to build them a custom handrail for this main staircase, and we decided on stainless steel for its simplicity, cleanness, and cool tone. The home doesn’t have a noticeably nautical theme, but hints of this seemed right, given the setting. So we came up with a very simple design…straight lines, utilitarian design, that fit this perfectly. My favorite part of the design process was coming up with a strong bracket that would fix the rails to the staircase AND look good…not too fancy or too heavy.
Executing this plan was an undertaking. I made each of the elements by hand from stainless steel stock…bored the threading to accommodate the screws that would hold the whole thing together, figured out angles that would round corners and meet codes appropriately, while not compromising the geometry of the whole thing. I was really happy with the result, as were my clients. The handrail is satisfyingly substantial, but still has an airiness to it that seems to cool you down as soon as you walk in and view it.
Copper Cuff Bracelets
The copper bracelets. Another part of our story. My wife and I had just met, and had just begun our long-shot, long-distance, cross-cultural relationship. She was in Chicago, I was in Mississippi (now you know what I mean by cross-cultural). She was planning a quick trip to Minneapolis to attend the wedding of one of her dearest friends, and got the idea that she’d like to have me along. So even though she had already RSVP’d solo for the wedding, she called and asked her friend if she could bring this guy she’d just met only a few weeks before. Her friend told her she’d love to have me come if, in her words, he (I) was going to “be around for a while.” This may have been the first time my wife knew, and acknowledged, that I would, indeed, be around for a while!
In preparing for the wedding, my wife bought a new dress, but didn’t have quite the right jewelry to wear with it. So she turned to me, her new boyfriend/hero, and asked me to make something for her. The dress was sable, the sandals were strappy, and the bracelet would be copper. I got to work. She gives me a hard time about never doing anything simply, and this may have been one of the first glimpses she had into the way I do things, or over-do things. I made about 40 copper cuff bracelets. 
They all had different designs…different shaping, etching, hammering, decorative add-ons. True to her personality, she chose one that was among the simplest to be hers. The rest went into a box. We went to Minneapolis together, got lost all over the city (so many lakes!), and attended the wedding (perfect setting in which to fall more deeply in love). The plan was for Catherine to fly back to Chicago and for me to continue on to northern Minnesota to look after some family property there. Catherine missed her flight (on purpose?) and ended up getting in the rental car and spending many more days in far-flung parts of Minnesota with me. By the end of that time, our plans for life together were pretty much a done deal (especially as far as I was concerned!)
Several years and two kids later, we happened upon the box. A good friend here in Natchez owns a fabulous jewelry gallery. We showed her the copper cuff bracelets, and she was interested in selling them in her shop. She chose the ones she liked the best…check out her website to see which are still available (www.mschon.com).
Catherine always says that my work and my life are all of a piece…this story is just an example of that. A small project played a part in an event that became a turning point in our relationship and in our lives. Seems to happen a lot.
Copper Stock Pot
Last fall I made a custom iron pot rack for a client in St. Louis (that’s another day’s entry). He told me about a special, hand-made, copper stockpot he wanted replicated, but said he wasn’t ready to go ahead with it at the time. Several months after installing the pot rack, I got a call from his fiancée…he had also told her about the pot, and she commissioned me to make it for him as a wedding gift.
Their wedding was yesterday. They exchanged gifts in the morning, and he called me around noon to tell me how pleased he was with this thoughtful and beautiful gift. He had told me back in the fall about how he had wanted this stock pot for years, but had yet to find someone who could make it for him. He had seen the original at the home of a friend in California. A copper artisan in Tasmania had made that one, and, as the story goes, had also made copper pots for the Queen of England. A talented man, no doubt! But he had retired, and despite my client’s attempts to draw him back to his work, just felt he did not have one more piece in him. My client enjoys cooking, but more than that, he values beautiful and unique work. He had been thrilled with the pot rack, and I felt confident that he would love this piece as well.
The design of my client’s pot rack had been original. He gave me some guidelines and specifications, and I took it from there. But the copper stock pot was different. He had provided me with photographs when we first made contact last fall, and he wanted just what was pictured. What I ended up making was very true to his ideal, but I did make a couple of modifications that I felt improved the aesthetics and functioning of the pot. I increased the dome of the lid, and widened the distance between the handles and the pot (this second modification was done with my client in mind…he’s a very tall man, with large hands). As one can see in the pictures here, the style is very traditional. The materials I used are brass, copper, stainless steel, tin, and wood. It is 17″ tall, including the lid. The pot is 12″ in diameter, and weighs 37 pounds (several more than my three-year-old son!) The bottom of the pot is 1/4″ thick copper and the outside is .042″ thick, 36 oz. copper.
The process I used to make this copper pot included welding, brazing (welding with brass), hammering, metal spinning, and tinning. First, I cut out a circle for the bottom. Then I rolled a piece of copper for the outside of the pot. The roller is a hand-driven, mechanical tool. Definitely worked up a sweat! Next I TIG welded the sides to the bottom. Copper necessitates TIG, because of the nature of the material. Then I made a band of copper for the lip and welded it on. Then I took a break.
Back to work…cut pieces of stainless steel for the handles of the pot. I then shaped, ground and milled these to achieve the look I wanted. They still needed some tweaking (per my wife), so I worked until she was satisfied. Then I bent and rolled some coppper and milled some more brass barstock to make the bracket that would hold the handles. The design of this part of the pot is very unique. The handles are part of an assembly that clamps on to the pot. The user can adjust the height of the handles by loosening them and changing their height. One benefit of this design is that it leaves the pot with more structural integrity, because the handles are not riveted to it directly. I am not sure if form follows function or vice-versa in the original design, but I can say that the bracket and handle assembly gives the whole piece a great dose of character and interest. Next I fashioned the handles. I’m honestly not sure what sort of wood I used…it was something I’d had in stock for a quite a while. It came with a bundle of mahogany, so I’m fairly sure it’s an exotic, tropical wood. It was very dense and difficult to saw, and smelled very, very earthy. I oiled it to bring out its richness and depth. Beautiful.
Almost done! I tinned the inside of the stock pot to make it food-safe. I did this by placing powdered tin in the pot, then heating it from the bottom to turn the tin to liquid, and swirling it around inside to coat evenly. (An aside…early in our marriage, my wife decided we should have a rule about spending…if either of us wanted to spend $50 or more, we should consult the other. One day I came home from the hardware store with an outdoor fish fryer. She was obviously upset that I appeared to have broken “our” rule, so I was pleased to tell her that I had paid only $49.99 for it! She didn’t think that was funny. Anyway…this is the very same outdoor stove I now use to tin pots and other pieces…now what can she say about that?!?)
Once thecopper pot was tinned, all that was left to do was polish, polish, polish (and to take a picture of our little girl sitting in it…she’s on the tiny side). I am hoping that my client and his new bride do not keep such a high shine on it. My hope is that they will use this pot every day to cook their food, nourish their children, and commemorate the promises they made to each other on the day when one gave the other a fine, fine gift.
Custom Hand Made Wrought Iron Pot Rack
I installed a custom, iron pot rack for a homeowner in St. Louis several months ago. He and his fiancé were in the midst of remodeling their home. Their style was very traditional, and they needed a piece in their kitchen that would anchor the room as well as provide a needed function…getting all the pots safely but accessibly stowed!
My client and I spent hours on the phone discussing the design for this rack. He had some particular specs it needed to meet, and was concerned that the aesthetic he was after would not get lost in doing so. I incorporated arches and rosettes to tie it into other design features in the kitchen. The rack’s perimeter was to match the footprint of the kitchen’s island, so I made a compound arch on the front side…it went up as well as out. This guy is quite tall, and planned to hang quite a few pots of different dimensions from the rack, so I compounded the front arch to give him some head room. He wanted the rack to hang from the ceiling at points where he had some existing recessed lights, which weren’t quite centered. This necessitated some interesting engineering, to get such a large and heavy rack to hang straight.
This was probably the largest pot rack I have ever made. I used iron for the outer sides, stainless steel for the inner grid, and copper and brass for accents. I made stainless steel turnbuckles to use to hang it from the ceiling. I really liked how this very functional feature also added to the rack’s aesthetic and character (without deviating from the client’s very traditional style). The rack also had sixteen light fixtures to provide upward and downward lighting. All the sockets were lined with copper, so they cast an amber light which really warmed up the whole kitchen.
I always fashion my pot racks with a separate piece just inside the perimeter. This provides a place to hang pots without scratching the outer, visible surface. Pots can be hung from this inner perimeter or from the grid that fits inside of the rack. All of the sides were wrought from 1/2”steel. All the corner pieces were hand-made. I made the rosettes on my metal lathe, and then incorporated them into the four corner pieces I made for the rack. Each of the corner pieces holds a light box. Eight others hang from the perimeter, and the rest I attached to the inner grid. The light fixtures had a unique thumbscrew catch that held a copper retaining ring, holding the glass in place. The grid was made from stainless steel flatbar, then cut with notches so they will fit together.
Once the rack was completely assembled, I used a beeswax and oil finish on the outer sides. This gave it a very old-fashioned, yet clean and organic look…an almost translucent black. It gave the metal a beauty that was really subtle, but really striking at the same time. The final step was the electrical wiring on the lights.
This piece presented me with several challenges as I constructed it. These caused some delays, and because we were to deliver it to St. Louis on the way to visit my wife’s friends in northern Minnesota on some particular dates, I had to pull a few all-nighters in getting it done. I don’t think I slept at all the night before we left home. But the satisfaction was immense for me when I saw how pleased my client was with the results of my work. He loves the piece, and values it as a centerpiece in his home. We stopped in St. Louis on our way up AND back on our mid-western tour, parking our Airstream in the driveway of the new owner of this beautiful pot rack. It was great to get to know him and his family a bit on our journey, and just made the joy of finished work even sweeter.
Mahogany and Copper Urn
Two weeks ago I made a casket for a friend. Last week I made an urn…kind of makes me wonder if someone’s trying to tell me something! Anyway, I want to write about this handmade urn because it was a very personal project. I grew up with a girl named Stephanie. She and her parents had long since moved out of state, but we’ve stayed in touch, and have visited when we’ve had the opportunity to do so. She called me last week to say her dad had died very suddenly. She called again the next day (Thursday) to say that the service would be Saturday, and could I make a custom urn and ship it to her in time for it to be there? I got to work.
The guy who does a fair amount of the woodworking around here always makes fun of me for saving all the scraps of wood left from larger projects. But I am so glad that I have! I found a beautiful piece of mahogany down in the shop…just the right dimensions. To simplify things (I had less than a day to get this in the mail), I decided to hollow out the block and turn it to look like it had a lid that would open from the top. The bottom would be plugged with a small square of wood once the ashes had been placed inside. I had some ideas in mind for the shape, and turned the mahogany urn on my lathe. Steve was a faithful Christian, and I knew it would mean a lot to his family for the urn to bear a cross. I fashioned a small copper cross by hand, hammered it, and affixed it to the urn. On the faux lid, I placed a handmade knob of iron and copper.
Back when Stephanie and I were kids, her parents owned a restaurant across the highway from my house. It’s still there, and it’s quite an unusual building. It would be quite offensive in many parts of the country, but around here, people flock to eat their lunch and drink their sweet tea at “Mammy’s Cupboard”…in the shape of, you guessed it, a Black mammy. That’s another discussion…back to Steve…
Being friends with Stephanie, I would often hang out at her parents’ restaurant. I was, let’s put it this way…an irascible kid, and her dad, in his very, very compassionate and good-natured way, would often lecture me under a cedar tree in the yard of the restaurant. I had lost my dad as a younger boy, so I don’t think I really minded. I actually kind of liked it. So when I got a call, thirty years later, to make Steve’s urn, I went across the highway, hacked a cedar branch from that old tree (hope the current restaurant owner didn’t mind), and used the wood for the small plug in the bottom of the urn. Just a little something, a symbol of my own remembrance of this man who was such a fine father to his son and daughters, his grandchildren, and to me.
The mahogany urn made it there on time. Steve’s ashes are now inside of it. I was honored to help his family lay him to rest.