About Us
Marilyn and Al
Marilyn and I have been working together making our wood products since 1997. I started Fine Edge Woodworking in 1982, months after graduating from Amherst College, and we met later that year in the funky old Worcester, MA factory building where I had my first shop, and Marilyn a weaving studio.
We moved out to Colrain, in the hills just west of the Connecticut River in 1988, renovating an old barn into a studio/apartment (not to be confused with a studio apartment), and building our house a couple years later .
We sold our work almost exclusively wholesale through galleries from the dawn of time until 2002, when we built this web site. Now we sell direct to customers all over the Unites States of America, and beyond. Our specialties are spectacular jewelry boxes, end grain cutting boards, small decorative boxes, and increasingly, custom boxes of all kinds.
Al and Marilyn
I'm a self-taught woodworker, after getting bit with the bug during my years at Amherst College. Marilyn is the more visually creative of the two of us, and most of our designs result from a back and forth refinement, with Marilyn playing the role of image generator, and with me editing, and figuring out how to do them.
Our work is best known for its precise, painstaking craftsmanship, and for its ambitious exploration of geometric pattern. Prior to selling over the web, our jewelry boxes and cutting boards were sold in over 200 galleries across America, including the Smithsonian museum shop, and the museum shop at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Even after 30 years of making my livelihood exclusively through woodworking I have enormous love and enthusiasm for my work. Making beautiful objects of wood has not come naturally for me, so every new achievement is still a thrill.
Here's the south side of the shop, showing the greenhouse we built in 1993, and the photovoltaic panels we had installed in 2010. The greenhouse provides much of the shop's heat load, and the photo-voltaics generate about 70% of our total electrical use, both shop and domestic. On sunny days we have one of very few solar powered CNC routers anywhere in the world!
When not working in the shop (I still work way too much!!) I might be found running or biking the hilly roads of Franklin County, playing Irish music on my concertina, or (and not as often as she'd like) helping Marilyn (when she's not in her studio) in our extensive gardens.
Like many rural craftspeople, our work life and all the other details of our economic life merge into one great big creative enterprise.
As the market changes, and economic winds shift, keeping our business running is like keeping an old truck on the road for another year.
Marilyn's Silk Scarves
Marilyn is a reluctant woodworker, generally afraid of the cutting tools, but by far the more visually creative of us. She can suggest possibilities in a few minutes off the top of her head that would require me hours of research for less interesting images.
She does all the packing and shipping work, and much of the finishing work, and knows her way around the belt sander and orbital sander.
Still, she'd usually rather be working upstairs in her fiber studio, where for many years she produced woven work, and the past couple years has been making dyed silk scarves through a variety of traditional and innovative techniques.
She sells these annually, along with our full woodworking line, at the November Crafts of Colrain open studio tour.
Concertinas
This is an anglo concertina made by the Button Box, R. Morse and Co, of Amherst Ma. I do the woodworking on these instruments, everything except for the fretwork, which is laser-cut. Excellent quality concertinas were made in numbers in London from the mid 1800's until WWII. Concertinas experienced a revival in the seventies and demand for excellent quality instruments has since far outstripped supply. The Button Box instruments are the best quality concertinas made on a production scale (they've sold over 1000 in the last 15 years or so ) since the 30's, and the most serious concertina building effort ever this side of the Atlantic. I also play the anglo concertina myself, at various "sessions" around the Pioneer Valley, and I'm very proud to be involved in their production. Follow this link to the Button Box web site. Or visit Concertina.net, for lots more on these historic, but very much alive musical instruments.
Sustainability; abundance
Living on the land in New England requires grappling with startling seasonal contrasts. Both the super abundance of spring and summer, and the intense sparseness of midwinter demand attention in different ways. We sometimes get caught up worrying about scarcity, yet the truth is the warm part of the year provides us with an almost embarrassing abundance. In late summer, the blueberry bushes and peach trees are laden with fruit, and the katydids call fills the humid evening air. I'll have abandoned the shop in late afternoon, and left the windows wide open for the short night to pull the dust collector's heat out into the moonlight. The sweet dewy mornings are so full of promise that nothing I can create in the shop can measure up, and so it can be hard to resist the urge to just hop on my bicycle and breathe deeply, as if I myself could photosynthesize.
Winter
Winter is the time for me to spend long hours in the shop, only forcing myself out for a late afternoon run to stretch tightened muscles and spirit. Winter is why I make more elaborate boxes from koa than the Hawaiian woodworkers, why our species has traded nakedness for business suits and proliferated laboratories to study and improve everything from plant varieties, to adhesives, to weapons of war. Come January, the freezer full of berries is not enough to remind me of summer's abundance, and Marilyn and I will sit down and sketch ideas for new products with the urgency of wartime codebreakers.
We love visiting California friends and relations, and we even once continued on one February to Hawaii (the first time we played hooky from the big wholesale craft fair!); but New England's pendulous cycles of abundance and scarcity are deep in my blood and in what must pass as my intelligence. Her cycles infuse the way I make sense of my life, and create meaning and meaningful work.
Hawaiian Bouquet Jewelry Box
Since koa has such bold and variable figure, it's especially important to match grain, and select wood carefully. My koa boxes are often made by re-sawing a piece long enough for one short side and one long side, and so I get a perfect grain match all the way around, with two book-matched corners, and two simple continuations of the grain. Pictured is a book-matched corner.
$975.00-incl. shipping
