Almost everyone who walks into the workshop for the first time asks a version of the same question, usually within the first ten minutes and usually quietly. Am I going to be the worst one here?
Nobody asks about the tools. They ask about that.
So this is an attempt to answer it properly, using photographs from a real session rather than pictures of somebody else's workshop. We ran this one on ourselves. Before putting the chopstick class on sale we spent a Saturday morning making a pair, partly to time it honestly and partly because we wanted to find out where people would get stuck.
The room
We are in Ras Al Khor, Industrial Area 3, which is not where people expect to find a class. It is a working carpentry workshop rather than a studio built for photographs. Timber sits in racks along the walls, sorted by species. There is a chalkboard. The benches are heavy and scarred, because they get used.
The first thing most people notice is the smell. Cut wood has a particular sweetness that changes with the species, and it hangs in the air long after the machines stop.
Nobody hands you a tool first
A session starts with everyone standing around a single bench watching one person work. Not a slideshow. Somebody picks up a plane, sets it, and takes a shaving off a piece of timber so you can hear what a good cut sounds like compared with a bad one.
This part takes longer than people expect and it is the part that decides how the rest of the morning goes. Woodworking is mostly about reading the timber before you cut it. Grain runs in a direction. Plane against it and the surface tears out in small ugly patches that no amount of sanding fully hides. Plane with it and the shaving comes off in one continuous curl.
You can be told this in a sentence. You only understand it when you have done it wrong once.
The jig
For the chopstick session we use a jig we made in the workshop. It is a length of hardwood with a tapered channel cut into it, and it is labelled in marker pen because it lives on a shelf with about thirty other jigs that all look similar.
The jig is the answer to a problem that sounds trivial and is not. A pair of chopsticks has to match. Two sticks, tapered evenly along their whole length, close enough in weight and thickness that they feel like a pair rather than two objects that happen to be near each other. Doing that freehand takes years of practice. Doing it in a jig takes a morning.
This is worth saying because a lot of people assume woodworking skill means doing everything by eye. Most of the craft is the opposite. It is building the thing that lets you repeat a cut accurately, then using it.
The first pass
You put a square blank in the channel and run the plane along it. The jig controls the angle, so what you are learning is pressure and rhythm rather than accuracy.
Almost everybody presses too hard for the first few minutes. The plane digs, the shaving stops, and the instinct is to push harder, which makes it worse. Then at some point it clicks, the tool starts cutting instead of scraping, and the sound changes. People usually look up when that happens.
Between passes you mark out. Square, pencil, a line where the taper should start. It looks like the least interesting part of the process and it is the part that separates a decent piece from a rough one.
What it is actually like
Quieter than you would think, in stretches. There is a point about forty minutes in when the talking stops because everybody is concentrating.
And then it is not quiet at all, because somebody has produced a shaving a metre long and wants everyone to see it.
To answer the original question honestly: somebody is always slower than the others, and it stops mattering after about twenty minutes. The work is absorbing enough that people forget to compare. In a group of ten there is usually one person who has done this before, several who have not touched a hand tool since school, and at least one who came because somebody else booked it.
What you leave with
A pair of chopsticks, oiled, that you made. They will not be perfect. One will probably be slightly heavier than the other and you will know exactly which one and why.
Below is a pair from our own bench, made over considerably longer than two hours. It is not what you walk out with on your first morning. It is the shape a class piece is working towards, and it is a fair picture of where the technique goes if you keep going.
If you want to try it
The chopstick class runs on Saturday mornings, 11:30 to 13:30, up to ten people. Everything is provided and no experience is needed.
If chopsticks are not the draw, the hand tools trial class covers the same ground with a simpler project, and the woodturning trial class puts you on a lathe instead of a bench. All of them are two hours. All of them are designed for people who have never done this before.
You can see the full list on the classes page. And if you are still wondering whether you will be the worst one in the room, you will not be, and by the time you find out you will not care.
