\Misha Collins, Friday, March 2, 2018. In the
February/March 2018Ā issue of American Craft Magazine.//
āAnyway, weāre excited to share this side of you. Can you tell us how you started working with your hands, where that passion came from?ā
āLike most kids, I liked making things with my hands, and my mother helped facilitate this when I was pretty young. But I followed that impulse to anĀ apprentice-level devotion. I would seek out woodworkers when I was 10 or 11, going into shops and learning how to use a lathe or ā just asking. I grew up in western Massachusetts, and by the time I got into high school I was fully into this ā just talking to people and learning things from them in person. A lot of western Massachusetts farmers spend their days by themselves with nobody to talk to, and they were thrilled to have somebody show up and want to learn about their solar wood-drying kiln or whatever. So at an early age I discovered that people were interested in teaching kids things, and I took advantage of that.
Then in high school, I needed a job, so I started doing some manual labor. Our next-door neighbor was a guy named Phil Watson, and he was a colonial style post-and-beam builder. Thatās construction where you use mortise and tenon, you do joinery with timbers, posts, and beams to build the houseās frame. The first big thing that I built by myself was a barn. It was really cool, because I started with a chain saw, cutting down the trees in a wooded area that needed to be cleared. I milled every post and beam myself, and cut all of the mortises and tenons with a mallet and a chisel. I still have the mallet that I used in that process ā itās from the late 1800s. Phil, who was my mentor then, told me that you want to get a really old mallet, because the woods they were using to make tools with 100 years ago were old-growth, and that wood is much harder and tighter-grained, so it lasts a lot longer. And itās true: Itās 100 years old, and it still works great.
I built that barn on my motherās property. Our house had burned down, so with the insurance proceeds, we built that and a huge post-and-beam structure that Phil was the builder on. That was a really crazy building. We didnāt know if it would come together until the end, because he had all of the designs in his head, not on paper. It was a tetradecahedron, a 14-sided structure.
Then in college I started doing a little bit of furniture building. Thereās a bed downstairs that I made as a gift for my girlfriend at the time, wife now. That, and a bench ā thereās maple and cherry in both of those. The cherry was from a log we found on our property. The maple was from a big limb of a sugar maple that blew down. I milled that branch up and dried the wood, and then built these two pieces of furniture and a few other things. I love that, taking it from its rawest form ā the limb of the tree ā all the way through to something finished. It feels like you know the material personally, and then the personal connection to the finished product is much stronger.ā
Read the entire article here:
https://craftcouncil.org/magazine/article/builder-baker-angel-maker
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