Long Island Woodworking Show coming to Cradle of Aviation Museum

For Long Island woodworkers, repurposing trees can be relaxing as they prune them into art.

"You learn to have patience," says Bob Lerner, 66, of Farmingdale,  who makes pens and other objects out of wood. "Wood can have a mind of its own, so you have to be able to come up with solutions along the way. We call them ‘design opportunities.’ ”

The Long Island Woodworkers’ 26th annual show will highlight such craftsmanship from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sept. 7-8 at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Uniondale. Kids can take home free toys made by club members, who donate their skills to nonprofits, including building training equipment for Canine Companions in Medford. Hobbyists will demonstrate techniques and sell their pieces, from reproductions of historic furniture to paintings made with wood.

Here are some creative Long Islanders you'll meet at this year's show:

The tugboat that could 

For 35 years at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Rolf Beuttenmuller built "unusual devices" as a technician when physicists wanted something that hadn’t been invented.

The Bellport Village retiree finds the same thrills in woodworking, with a key difference — a project can take hours, not weeks and months.

"I needed something that I could start and see the end result," says Beuttenmuller, 76, who remembered having his father’s old saws and started woodworking four years ago. "For some of the smaller projects, I could go down to the basement and come up later in the evening and have something that would be complete."

He specializes in intarsia, which usually involves using the scroll saw, a small pedal-operated or electric saw, to shape pieces of wood that are fitted seamlessly to form a three-dimensional image. Design guides can be bought for intarsia, but the artistry comes from picking wood of the right color and cutting it at the right angle. Hence, the grain matches the desired look and detailing the pieces until they look realistic, like a tree or another object.

"It challenged an artistic side of me that I didn’t know I had," the woodworker says.

One of the pieces Beuttenmuller is most proud of is "The North Fork Homestead," a 15-inch replica of a painting showing a beached tugboat. The dark green trees are of ironwood, the clothing is of yellow heartwood, the tugboat is of blue pine that turned gray from a long-gone beetle infestation and the beach is of sycamore. It was 50 hours of work.

"It’s endless what you can create," Beuttenmuller says. "It’s almost therapeutic."

A gift to treasure

Jean and Eddie Piotrowski have been a woodworking couple for two decades. She started as a crafter selling painted ornaments and other wood creations.

She favors "drawing with fire," or pyrography, the use of hot pens to burn patterns and shading into the wood. "I like that it’s stress-free and doesn’t have to be perfect," says Jean Piotrowski, 68, of Smithtown, an administrator in a medical office.

An early piece shows an orange koi fish and water lily pads dwelling inside a bowl, the outlines and shading showing different degrees of burn and charring. In a favorite piece that took about eight hours, she used the burn pen to stipple the entire surface of a vase as the background for flowers, with delicate burn dots and strokes for stamens and pollen.

In the couple’s workshop, the smell of cherry, walnut and other woods wafts from the smoke curling out of her pens while her husband, Eddie, focuses on turning wood into pens and bowls.

Making a pen takes him a little more than half an hour from exotic woods like purple heart and others from found wood — the joke among woodworkers is they start searching when they hear a chain saw in the neighborhood.

When Eddie gives away a pen, the recipient treasures it, he says: "If it’s made with the hand, it comes from the heart."

The voyage of a wooden kayak 

Mitch Friedman has built boat models, had a boat captain’s license, been a bay constable and also a draftsman for a marine engineering firm, so it felt natural to make boats, a journey decades in the making.

He first assembles the vessel in his mind, aided by boat kits and blueprints: "I read someplace that one hour of contemplation is worth three hours of work," he says.

After more than a day of measuring and rechecking before cutting, he puts together the "ribs" to shape the frame. He steams wood strips, which makes them more bendable, glues the pieces together and coats the wood surface with a transparent epoxy cloth. It takes three months.

"Nothing is square," says Friedman, 77, of Port Washington, who made his first boat about 30 years ago. "Everything is a curve, then another curve and another curve. I find it very sensual."

His vessels are not just wood to him but a deep dive into history, an analysis of old designs vs. new and past life. Two of his kayaks have pieces of teak removed from his sailboat Shiloh during renovations, a boat he and his wife, Susan Dobish, took all around the Northeast before they sold it a few years ago.

"I had this boat 36 years," Friedman says. "You go places in it, you live on it and it’s very spiritual to have a boat you love."