We woodworkers, if you haven’t noticed, are an obsessive bunch, tuned in to a frequency few other people can hear, looking for things few other people care to notice. We get so involved, so wrapped up in a project that it’s not only difficult to stand back, it’s dang near impossible to see the forest.

We are too close, of course. After several weeks or months of work on a piece, it becomes a part of our landscape. Our eyes can see nothing else. So it is very difficult to look past our failures or perceived failures and see how lovely a thing we have wrought. Instead, we focus our attentions on what we missed. What we could have done so much better.

Three decades ago, a local craft school here in Portland held a get-together for woodworkers. We emerged from the gloom of our shops to blink and peer at each other. Our bearded countenances looked back, and we managed to speak and say: “You, too?”

One of the exhibitors was a guy from Montana named Steve Voorheis. When I finished raving about his fabulous piece in  the show, a wonderfully sculpted mahogany armoire, he asked me, in a conspiratorial tone, to come down to the gallery. He took me up to the 6-ft.-tall piece and said, “Look at those dovetails. I cut them all on the wrong side of the line. There are patches for each joint.”

I was astonished. Here he was admitting his mistakes, and showing me his skillful fixes. And here I was, with my supposedly critical woodworker’s eye, and I never saw them. I was so busy drinking in the rest of the piece that I didn’t see, and now didn’t care, that he had screwed up. I was more impressed by his ability to recover and to fix and to move on.

Few people have the skill you woodworkers have, to build things with your hands and with machines. Few people have the patience, the knowledge, the determination, and the obsession to build the furniture that you do, and for that matter, make the mistakes that you do. So when you goof, just step away from the project, Sir or Madam. Step away and no one will get hurt. It’s never so bad that it cannot be fixed. And few will notice what you see as a mistake.