The President's Corner - February 2012

We are off to a fast start this new year! Fred Ford and his crew have begun work on the 2012 Toys For Tots project, scrounging wood and looking for good deals on wood & parts. Jeff Leimberger is doing a great job,  lining up presenters for 2013 and has commitments from 2 nationally known speakers. While there is “many a slip between the cup and the lip”, and these guys are really difficult to pin down, I am confident that he will get them scheduled. That puts us way ahead of where we were this time last year.

I know you all keep reading this in my monthly message and I want to explain that this project is so important to so many that I want to keep reminding everyone of the great need. Please consider what you can give to the T4T project to keep it afloat in the future. Donations can be kept confidential. Hugh Fish or any Board member will be happy to accept your gift. I encourage all of you who have not participated so far to get involved this year. It takes very little time and the rewards are great.

As you know, at each meeting I try to recognize someone who is particularly valuable to the club. This past meeting I spoke about  Diane Philyaw.  She can’t often attend our regular meetings because of health and so many new members may not have had a chance to meet her. She is a past president and past board member and currently our Newsletter editor and Facebook person. She is one of the movers and shakers in the T4T effort each year. Her workshops turn out the largest volume of toys every year. Take a look at the newsletter sometime and think about the effort which goes into gathering all the articles and arranging them and then adding all the extras. By the way, she also fixes the mistakes we authors make every month. She is also responsible for our having a new webmaster. We were discussing the need for someone with the time and knowledge necessary to do that job at a board meeting when she left the room for a few minutes. She came back with a new member and webmaster, her husband Roger.

Roger Philyaw has been diligently working on making our website more inviting and informative and to shut down the old website as soon as we can get some information transferred to the new site. Please be sure you are checking only the new site for things concerning TWA like our calendar and newsletters. Also, from the new website, you can access our new Facebook page.

We  started this year off with a particularly good program. Matt Hobbs covered how to make drawers and fit them to a carcass. I don’t know about your experiences, but I have had drawers come out as parallelograms, twisted, too loose, and otherwise wrong. Most of the time I have been able to “fix” them, but they were never “right.” It sure would be nice if I could make them fit correctly the first time, at least most of the time.

This month we will continue with Mark Todd talking about how he works with clients to design their furniture and leading us through construction of a typical piece in his workshop. He will discuss his use of jigs to ensure repeatability in his standard lines and then show us his finishing techniques that lead to customers running their hands over his furniture time after time.

 

My last item for this month is that we are asking members to invite a guest you think would enjoy our club to visit and join. We aren’t suggesting a hard sell, but if you know someone who might enjoy it, please invite them to a meeting. To that end, we will have flyers available for you to give to your prospective guests.

Hope to see many faces in February!

President: Allan Campbell