Making Wooden Furniture with Traditional Joinery

Building your own furniture adds a sense of meaningfulness to the decor in your home. But to be able to build a solid yet timeless piece of furniture, having a strong grasp of joinery techniques is essential. Designer and maker Sandy Buchanan creates bespoke wooden furniture with sustainably-sourced fallen timber, which has been featured in the London Art Biennale and Wildlife Artist of the Year.

In this online course, he teaches you the fundamentals of traditional joinery and how to use these techniques to create a minimal and contemporary stool that will last for generations. Learn to create furniture from a renowned maker with a distinctively handmade and artisanal feel.

Meet Sandy Buchanan, a British furniture maker, sculptor, and your teacher for this course. He shares his creative journey in which he made an escape from the corporate world to become a self-employed artisan. Hear about the influences that have shaped his designs and his philosophy.

Get a brief introduction to the types of joinery techniques you’ll use throughout the course, before seeing the various tools needed. Sandy then talks you through selecting and sizing the timber for your final project.

Learn how to mark out, cut, and fit the mortice and tenon joints, before doing the same with the bridle joints. Once the joinery is completed, Sandy shows you how to prepare your drawbores, before gluing the frame in easy-to-manage stages. When it’s dry, see how to level the stool by cutting the legs to length.

Then it’ll be time for the final sand, before applying your finish. The last step will be attaching the seat top and trying it out. Wrap up the course by learning how to adapt the design to creating other furniture, and how to produce your own dowels in your workshop.