About Our Substacks

What Are They? And How to Subscribe

Since 2022, we have written three substacks that cover specialized parts of the craft and our work. What's a substack? It's a simple blog/newsletter that focuses on one topic. When you subscribe, you get an email of the complete text in your inbox. No ads or clicking through.

We offer both free and paid subscriptions to our substacks. About one-third of our entries are free for all subscribers. Paid subscribers get access to all the new entries, plus the ability to read the hundreds of entries we've archived there. The monthly fee is minimal – $5/month or less.

Here are details on our three substacks:

The American Peasant by Christopher Schwarz

I started writing this substack in 2022 while writing a book with the same name as this blog. Each entry documented some small step in the process. Rough drafts. Early designs. Rabbit holes galore on anything from the edge geometry on a race knife to the spells encrypted on Hungarian shepherd’s coffers. Plus beauty tips.

With the book “American Peasant” complete (download it for free here), this substack became a full-on experiment in woodworking journalism and a challenge to the idea that high-style furniture is the best furniture.

Most woodworking journalism is as dry as a popcorn fart. It’s either Tab A into Slot B stuff, or solemn sermons on the craft as a means to self-actualization. F&^% that. Making good furniture is hard. It drains you. It makes you wonder why you ever took up the tools in the first place and didn’t become a lawyer like your father told you to.

But the craft can change your life. Plus the lives of the people who use your stuff.
If you want to see how I do it, how we somehow make it all work – and you don’t mind stories about hallucinogens and possums – you might like “The American Peasant.”

Never Sponsored by Megan Fitzpatrick & Christopher Schwarz

“Never Sponsored” is written by me, Christopher Schwarz, and my shop-mate Megan Fitzpatrick. We're both practicing furniture makers, writers and teachers. We’ve worked together for more than 20 years and have used thousands of different tools in shops all over the world.

But that’s not why you should trust us.

Here’s the rub: We have never in our lives taken sponsorship money from a tool manufacturer. We've never been part of an affiliate program. We have bought all of our tools with our own damn money. In short, we are Never Sponsored.

When a tool works well, we’re thrilled and want to tell you about it. And when a tool we buy is a piece of crap, we want to tell you about that, too.

Try us out with a free subscription. About one-third of our posts are completely free – no strings attached.

The Anarchist's Apprentice by Kale Vogt and the LAP staff.

A guy walks into a bakery…many times. Months on, an employee finally asks, “Aren’t you that guy who makes chairs?” Christopher Schwarz hands them a copy of “The Stick Chair Book.” The bakery employee falls in – with stick chairs. So, Christopher invites the bakery employee, Kale Vogt, to build a chair with him in our shop after Kale is off work. They do, and fall deeply in love with all things woodworking – not just chairs.

Then serendipity steps in.

We needed a part-time person in the shop to help us record videos and the like, and a part-time person in the LAP warehouse. Enter Kale, our newest employee. (Apologies to the bakery for stealing them.) Kale is learning woodworking on the job, both by watching while shooting video, and one-on-one training from Chris (with a bit of help from Megan Fitzpatrick) in the shop. And Kale is a natural. So, we’re entering a more formal training scheme. Here, you’ll read the journals of both Kale and Chris as they embark on this training journey.