Single, twice divorced, and fifty-six, Alice Porembski is about the happiest and most contented furniture maker/designer I've interviewed, and also one of the best.

As a teacher at the Kansas City Art Institute, April Pugh works in the school's Central Shop, where students can drop in to receive help on any project that incorporates woodworking. "Whether they're ceramic students or fiber art students or sculpture students, whatever they need to design we help them build it," April said. "It really covers the whole range of art work."

Three years ago, Barb decided to commit herself to woodworking when she sold the bookstore she owned for 20 years and fully equipped her shop. She now works part time for a bus tour company, which gives her enough time to immerse herself in woodworking.

Over the years, Beth Ireland has made quite a name for herself in the field of woodworking as a cabinetmaker, furniture maker, architectural turner, spiral stair maven, lathe artist and woodworking instructor and lecturer. How does she do it all?

Forty years ago, halfway around the world, Brenda Behrens had a rather auspicious start to her woodworking career. While her then-husband was stationed at the U.S. Naval Air Facility in Atsugi, Japan, Behrens spent several days each week taking woodworking classes with a handful of other Navy wives.

Caprice Glaser utilizes her wide-ranging artistic talents to create large wood murals

"For me, carving loses the world," explained Cathy Krumrei when describing her woodworking hobby niche. "When I start to carve, I don't think of anything around me except the wood."

I must admit that what first piqued my interest was Christine Coffman's disarmingly simple description of her wood carving career. "I've been carving for 44 years, since I was 12," she summed up in one short line.

This expert turner takes heavy, unsightly chunks of ancient burl and manages to create exquisitely turned woodworking masterpieces. 

As a young girl, Cindy Vargas was a dance student who dreamed of one day becoming a dancer or choreographer. While she pursued dance into her early 20s, Vargas has since found a different -- albeit unusual -- way to express her creative passion of movement and music: furniture making.

Most woodworkers start small, perhaps building a jewelry box, and in a sense Connie Slagle started that way, too. She built one for her mother, with the help of a neighbor, when she was six years old. After that, woodworking pretty much disappeared from h

As Executive Vice President of Creative and co-owner of Good Advertising in Memphis, Tennessee, Ellen Cox has to satisfy her oftentimes very demanding clients on a daily basis. Away from the office she takes refuge in her workshop, where she specializes in making sculptural wood pieces, primarily small boxes that have unusual twists and turns.

There is probably a genetic predisposition to woodworking in Jane. Her introduction to woodworking happened during her earliest years in South Africa, where her grandfather had a large woodworking shop in which he made his own furniture.

It could be said of Janel Jacobson that she sees things in a very small way. For one thing, she looks for the world that many of us pass by without seeing: The leaf curled in on itself, the tiny frog clinging to a twig, the tree cricket flattened against a day lily.

"When I was in high school in Massachusetts, girls could not take shop," Janet Collins told me. "Besides, that's where all the bad kids were put; the boys who were troublemakers were put in shop."

As a working single mother with a teenaged son, Jennifer Shirley already has a lot to juggle. As everyone knows, juggling takes balance and, after all, what is more balanced than a lathe?

Making the cards was both labor-intensive and costly. In short, too much so for the price the cards could fetch. In the meantime, she had landed her first real client who bought both note cards and business cards – meaning that Jo was now doing both wholesale and custom orders simultaneously.

Johanna Johanson's beautiful work shows that she takes her own advice - to strive for excellence - to heart.

Judy Caldwell is the quintessential born artist. These days, she just happens to express her art in woodcarving, but long before she picked up chisels, she showed her true colors in two dimensions.

Judy Threet's website, Threet Guitars, proudly boasts "From my hands to yours," and truer words were never written. Judy is the quintessential Neanderthal woodworker, one who eschews most tooling for the joys of crafting one-of-a-kind guitars by hand.

After retiring from a full career as a state trooper, you'd think Kay Pomroy would have already given enough of her life to protecting and helping others. Instead, she now finds herself giving both her time and money to help others, this time through woodworking via an effort called "The Reaching Down Project."

Kim Kelzer's woodworking pieces, everything from kitschy lamps to full kitchens, are anything but mundane and present furniture in a seriously lighthearted manner.

For her very first venture in woodworking, Layne Halliday built an entire house, complete with exotic wood parquet floors and filled with furniture in a variety of styles. Not only that; she did it all without stepping outside her home.

A post office employee and a pharmacist decide to start a woodworking business together... If that sounds like the setup of a joke, it's not. It's actually what Leslie Ravey and Jo Alcalde did when they formed their company - AR Images - in 1993.

When I first saw a copy of Lois Keneer Ventura's Building Beautiful Boxes with Your Bandsaw book, I was instantly intrigued. To grasp the idea of devoting all your woodworking hours to one type of project, while still being able to make each piece an individual work of art, I simply had to ask, "Why bandsawn boxes?"

Meg Romero says she has “always loved to build things.” She spent much of her television-less childhood in the 1970s poring over the 1937 Popular Science book The Cyclopedia of Things to Make , made “the famous three-plank bench” when she was 16 or 17, and was a member of the 1977 seventh grade class which offered, for the first time in her district, woodshop to girls and sewing to boys.

As anybody who has been involved in woodworking for a period of time can tell you, part of what makes it so enjoyable is that it has so many forms. Raven Tekwe's particular form of woodworking my not sound as familiar, but it makes a grand noise. Raven makes drums.

Roseanne Somerson is known for her stunningly creative designs as well as the practical aspect of her woodworking. Read more ...

One of Jones' favorite pieces is a scroll saw lamp, which features an intricate nature design. She entered the lamp in the Rockler Woodworking and Hardware 5th Annual Woodworking Contest, winning top honors in the Scroll Saw/Intarsia category.

Steff Rocknak is as complex as the figures she carves out of wood. She's a visiting philosophy professor at Connecticut College in New London, CT (her specialties are analytic philosophy, thehistory of philosophy and epistemology). She's a talented artist who is searching for ways to bridge her creative imagination and her knowledge. She's also a woodcarver with a penchant for taking on interesting projects.

You may not have heard of Sylvie Rosenthal yet, but you will. At age 23, she's already getting national attention for her creative woodworking & most recently at the Furniture Society conference in Madison.

To say Teresa K. Jenkins has lived an interesting, varied life would be a huge understatement. A Hollywood scriptwriter would be impressed with her story. . .

It's hard to say whether or not the Women's Woodworking Guild of Colorado would even exist today if it had not been for the 86 balustrades that Pamela Philpott-Jones needed to turn for a staircase in her family's finely crafted fixer-upper.

These two "chicks" combine creative designs and quality woodworking for quite the successful operation.