Our Third Workshop — Books, a Full Bench

This one filled the studio more than the last two combined. Wayne led a third round of the hand-carved book, and this time four guests came through the door together, turning what's usually a quiet corner of the shop into a full bench of elbows and shavings.

The lesson still starts in the same place — knife grip, reading the grain, letting the blade do the work instead of fighting it — but a group this size finds its own rhythm fast. Someone is always a step ahead of you and a step behind someone else, and that turned out to be its own kind of teaching. Guests leaned over each other's blocks between cuts, comparing how far along a spine or a page edge had come.

Before anyone touched a knife, there was pencil work — sketching the shape of a page onto the block, deciding where a spine would sit, where a corner would round off. It's the part that looks the least like carving and matters the most; every cut afterward just clears the path the pencil already drew.

By the end, four new books had come off four different blocks of the same wood, and nobody's looked quite like anybody else's. The photos afterward tell the rest of it — mugs raised, pieces held up to the light, a studio that stayed loud a little longer than usual. Three workshops in, we're starting to believe this is just what Saturdays look like now.