52 Woodworking Weeks: 2025 Year in Review

One way in which I am unlike a consumer software product is that I recap my years only once they are over, rather than in the first week of December. We are three weeks into the new year, so it’s time. Welcome to my 2025 Woodworking Wrapped.

Note: I recalled what I did this year by scrolling through my camera roll. That means this post is full of photos and too long to fit in a single email. You can read it in its entirety in the browser.

The first wood-related image of the year is fitting, in that it captures a specific era that ended in 2025: The Dining Room Workbench Era.

My first project of the year was to finish up these mini sawhorses. They are based on my teacher Jay Van Arsdale’s sawhorse design.

I use the mini sawhorses frequently. And unlike most other schemes I’ve devised to keep lessons learned top of mind, a little note on them I wrote after splitting the upright in a mad dash to finish the project is something I actually look at and consider regularly. The note has not eradicated my “summit fever” tendencies, but it helps.

A small shelf to hold cleaning products beneath the kitchen sink. I cut the curves with a coping saw. Very fun.

I took a class about frames and panels at Crucible to bolster my machine confidence. It worked!

I’ve been taking Japanese Joinery classes at Laney College since fall 2023. My fourth semester began in the spring of 2025. We made this “housed bridle snakehead” joint drawn on the board in our first class meeting.

This stool, which is made of walnut and has rails with tenons that go over/under to bypass each other through the legs, is my favorite thing I’ve made out of wood so far.

It took me the all of February. It was slow-going because I was still in my dining room. Still not using machines. Ripping the 8/4 walnut was cardiovascular work and figuring out the layout for the bypassing tenons was cognitive work.

I made a classic Japanese toolbox out of western red cedar. I used Andrew Hunter’s Fine Woodworking article as a jumping off point.

I have two hampers from Yamazaki Home. Love ‘em. They are the perfect size, organize lights and darks, and are easy to carry.

But after a few years, the velcro that holds the bag to the steel frame started to give out. I took the bags to a tailor and had new velcro sewn on, which helped a bit but still failed when the bag was near full. I emailed Yamazaki to see if they would sell me a replacement bag, they said no.

So I did some research, came across snaps as a solution, ordered a grommet hole cutter punch and snap fastener kit, and was off to the races.

An unexpected side effect of woodworking has been the feeling of agency it has given me in relation to the material world. I have built things and that gives me confidence to try and understand how things are built (and thus to at least entertain the possibility of repair).

It’s possible that no project has brought me more enduring pleasure than these hamper snaps. Every time I lug a load of laundry and the snaps hold it all together without any trace of strain, I feel pride and gratitude.

I took a weeklong tool set-up class with Yann Giguère of Mokuchi Woodworking in Ashland, Oregon. The skills we learned were familiar from my classes at Laney. It was really wonderful, though, to hear them described in a different way. My depth of understanding increased significantly.

In May, I moved out of my dining room and into a studio space in Emeryville. The draw was twofold: Being able to spread out a bit more and leave projects in process without compromising the livability of my apartment was one.

The other was easy access to woodworking machinery. My studio space’s wood shop has a planer, jointer, table saw, and bandsaw (plus a bunch of other things, but those are the big ones for me).

I spent much of May getting set up. I made a table for sharpening and a shelf for storage but not much else.

I made the first of what would become three poplar shoe shelves, which I wrote about here.

I also started the very blog upon which your eyes currently rest. My inaugural post was about a tiny cherry box.

In classic “new blog energy” form, I actually wrote a post for everything I finished in July: drawer dividers, saw till, milling. There’s nothing like starting something and finishing it same day, sometimes a small project is just what the doc ordered.

I made my brother and his wife this box for their wedding rings. The walnut is from a tree that grew on the farm where they got married. There were a lot of firsts for me in this project — installing hinges, most notably. I got lucky that it turned out as well as it did.

Started back up for the Laney fall semester. I use this little trolley to transport my tools and materials around town.

I did two sessions of the Crucible’s woodworking CREATE lab, which offers access to their well-equipped shop and an instructor who can answer questions. It was a perfect bridge from “using machines under supervision in class” to “thrown into the deep end with table saw and nowhere to turn but YouTube.”

Learned this splice joint. Satisfying and puzzle-like.

Wrote a post about this one. It has continued to serve me well.

Angles really freak me out. I want to work with that fear in 2026.

I still haven’t finished these… But according to my camera roll I cut out all of the mortises for the feet in October.

This was the first project wherein I set this big piece of cherry on my mini sawhorses to use as a bench for chopping mortises. I just sit on the piece of wood to hold it down (versus fiddling with a clamp, etc.).

I attended my first Kez USA national event. I just flipped through my notes and my eyes landed on “reverent irreverence” which I think is a fragment of something Mike Laine said in his talk. That sort of sums up the feeling of the weekend.

The marquee event of the weekend is a competition for who can pull the best shaving. Mine came in at 31 microns. Not a winning thickness but I was just pleased to be in the game at all.

Used a dado stack and finished the final shoe shelf in one day. Previous installments that I did by hand took…longer than a day. Full post about the shoe shelves here.

Acquired the wood for three counter height stools. They will be based on the criss-cross design that I built in earlier in the year.

Had been meaning to make one of these all year. Finally got it done. Is there any better feeling than one’s items having a home?

My dog stayed with her best friend, Ruby, over the holidays…I wanted to create some item to thank Ruby’s owners and landed on these bandanas. A highly satisfying diversion. I want to do a LOT more sewing in the year to come.

I started on a Christmas gift for my grandmother, a walnut pencil box, with just enough time to spare before heading home for the holidays. Then I was struck down by a cold and thus did not, in fact, have enough time.

I would have preferred to have it finished for Christmas morning instead of mailing it a few weeks later, but alas.

I drove down to San Carlos to cop a rip blade and a crosscut blade for the table saw at my studio space. The dull and chipped combo blade everyone shares was no longer cutting it for me ;) This was a fitting way to spend my final woodworking hours of 2025, as it was a year of increasing my machine confidence.

Happy 2026 to all.