Selected as a Gardens Illustrated  Recommended Read Hand-Built Outdoor Furniture covers twenty step-by-step, fully illustrated projects with hundreds of clear and easy-to-follow photographs. Finished pieces include simple items include a trellis, a flower box, and a plant stand and more complicated projects include a chaise lounge, a sectional with built-in storage, and a slat bench. Katie Jackson's projects are simple, clean, and timeless and work well within a wide variety of styles. Hand-Built Outdoor Furniture is the perfect primer for people new to woodworking, DIYers, and homeowners looking for a simple and affordable to decorate their space. “If you want to build your own outdoor furniture, but have zero to little woodworking experience, this books I for you.” — Library Journal “For people already attuned to woodworking, this book has great project ideas. For people interested in picking up a woodworking hobby, this book gives the tools and basic knowledge to learn new skills. . . . a very satisfying do-it-yourself guide with tasteful and varied projects.” — Washington Gardener   “The craft of woodworking. . . . remains one of the most satisfying creative outlets. . . . Try your hand at it with Hand-Built Outdoor Furniture by Katie Jackson, who shows us that with a few basic tools and a weekend, anyone can build a beautiful wood project for their outdoor space.” — The Florida Times-Union “Will inspire you to break out the miter saw, drill, and sander. With an appealing mix of contemporary and traditional-style projects.” — Digging Build a stylish backyard oasis! Whether you just have a couple hours or an entire weekend, woodwork artist Katie Jackson will show you how to create gorgeous, contemporary furniture for your outdoor space. Start off small with shaker pegboard shelves and stair-step planter boxes and work your way up to creating a complete chaise sectional and rolling coffee table. With minimal investment, standard tools, and readily-available materials from your local lumberyard, you can outfit your yard with 20 one-of-a-kind projects that  are better than anything you could buy. Katie Jackson is a designer and builder of simple furniture using renewable and reclaimed materials. After graduating from Bennington College, she trained as a cabinetmaker at New England School or Architectural Woodworking. She attended a Woodworking Teacher’s Educational Program at Girls At Work, Inc., specializing in empowering at-risk girls with wood shop skills. Jackson headed the woodworking program at Camp Onaway for Girls for four summers, then teamed up with Lilah Crews-Pless to launch a design-build collaboration out of TechShop San Francisco and TechShop Menlow Park. She now builds at New England Society of Innovation and Technology (NESIT) Hackerspace. Learn more at katiejacksonwoodworks.com. Ellen Blackmar is a professional photographer specializing in architectural, wedding, and protrait photography. She alsp creates personal work using large-format film and nine-teenth-centry-style cameras. She completed her undergradutate degree at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and has also atteneded programs a Thode Islande Shool of Deisng and The Center for Alternative Photopgraphy in New York. More of her work can be viewed at ellenrosephotgraphy.com. Preface With a few basic tools and a weekend, you can build a beautiful piece of furniture out of wood for your outdoor space. In my experience, woodworking is mostly about problem solving. How can I make this more structurally stable? How should I correct this mistake? Everyone solves problems differently, and over the course of my woodworking career building furniture alongside other builders and teaching young woodworkers, I’ve enjoyed seeing a multitude of ways to cut a board or calculate a measurement. In my woodworking classes, I provide an example of a project I’ve built, such as the flower box on page—a student favorite—and ask the students to figure out their own process to build it. The projects I provide have no specific measurements and no written instructions, but once they study the pieces, the students can easily see how they are constructed and re-create the projects to their own desired measurements and personal flourishes. My students often use interesting and innovative ways to get to the same end point. I learn a lot from them, and I often notice a trend: once given a basic understanding of how to use woodworking tools and machines, many of the younger students are thrilled to be given the chance to solve problems through their own creativity, while many of the older students, especially adults, request help every step of the way and keep asking what to do next. Nonetheless, the intrepid younger students and the cautious older students, when given the same instruction on tool use and the same amount of time, all seem to produce the same caliber of high-quality woodworking. Perhaps this is because as we get ol